Be Thankful You Don't Work For Scranton
 

I live in Pennsylvania and the city of Scranton isn't very far away. The mayor just dropped every city worker's paycheck to minimum wage in the name of fiscal responsibility. What an incredibly fucked up thing to do to working class people. Can you imagine going from $450 to $170 a week without warning?

We should have an option to drop every single elected official's salary down to minimum wage, as that's what they truly deserve.


http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/...140229063.html

As the phone company used to say.... at least you still HAVE a job.

Now bend over, spread em, and take it like a champ.

:2 cents:

All this guy has managed to do is cost the city more money because, as it states in that article, the lawsuits are now coming so the city is going to have to defend itself and could end up getting hit for damages.

Since when has "politics" been about saving money in any capacity?

:helpme

Very true. This guy is using the workers of the city in an effort to make a political statement. The article even says that the guy claims all of this could have been avoided if the city had just used the budget he proposed. So since he didn't get his way he is pissed and has decided to play politics and take it out on everyone else.

Why do public employees make twice the pay for doing half the job in the first place?

If 90% of those useless lazy fucks had to find a free market job, they'd have no benefits, no insurance, no pension, and would be making barely minimum wage.

Its worse in Canada. Once you get a government job here, you - and the next ten generations of your family - are set for life. Insane benefits. Insane pensions. You don't even have to actually work.

I think more governments should just pull a Reagan and fire everybody. Do not renew their contracts. Shit, for everybody who now holds a taxpayer supported job, there are fifty (random number - probably higher) people willing to kill a kitten to fill the vacant slot. Cops, Paramedics, Firemen and trained military personal are needed and should be paid well. Everyone else? Expendable and easily replaced.

You get a government job because you know somebody. You do not get a government job because you are qualified to do it.

When the city has $5k left in the bank, there is not much left you can do. People are going to hurt for awhile.

A few years back there was a big shake up in the town I live in. It is a small town and like most towns when the recession hit the town felt the pain. There was a big budget fight and it was clear some people were going to have to be cut from the city payroll. The City Administrator wanted to fire a couple of cops and a fireman. It was then found out that there were three different people on the city payroll that all made more than $50K per year and full benefits and they didn't even have a defined job. They were friends of the administrator's and he "created" jobs for them and was now trying to protect them.

Eventually the city council voted to fire the administrator and along with him those three people and three others that worked in city hall. They also fired the city planner and his "assistant" and hired a part time person to do that job. There has been no interruption of service, no complains of bad services. The city has gone on working fine as if those people never existed. Total they trimmed close to $500K from the city budget with those people.

Like you say, once you get into the system, baring a major incident, you can be there forever so long as you keep your head down and appear to be busy and you can ride gravy train for years and nobody ever questions it because the government is not a business that needs to make a profit so nobody cares where or how the money is spent.

I want to meet Dwight Shrute!

They would make more with unemployment.

They all still make more than me.

So fuck them.

:1orglaugh

Call Joe Biden. He will loan them the money to pay those folks. Isn't that his hometown after all.

Guess he was supposed to write bad checks?

Never, just so you have something to complain about 3,000 times a day.

Yeah, that's exactly what we need, more people out of work. That oughta boost the economy. It is the cops, fireman and paramedics who's pay got cut. Everybody's pay got cut.

Joe Biden is from Delaware.



Scranton... who knows. There ain't shit up there besides coal mines (if they're even open anymore) landfills and abandoned textile mills, so no wonder they're broke. Another great example of what outsourcing has done for America. But, hey, as long as you can buy your shit ten cents cheaper at Walmart, who cares?

Didn't they just open a casino up there in Mt. Airy not too long ago? How's that place doing?

Damn, that's insane! But I bet the upper management didn't take a hit.

My friend works for the city in Philly. They told him if you don't want $8.50/hr, I can find 100 people in an hour that will.

Sad but many shady employers are taking advantage of this economy to screw employees

Anybody ever see that movie "Nothing But Trouble" with Dan Akroyd, Chevy Chase and John Candy? That's what Northeastern Pennsylvania/Scranton reminds me of. The town in that movie. All those rural Pennsylvania towns.

Here ya go. This is pretty funny.

Quote from wikipedia "Biden was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania and lived there for ten years before moving to Delaware."

I knew I had remembered him saying that he was "just a poor boy from Scranton with a dream".

My hometown went through something similar. After laying off police officers and firemen - and closing a fire station - they went to cut the city worker's benefits. I felt bad for them, but frankly they make a lot less money than I do and they have benfits I do not have. They went on strike and the city stuck to their guns; The city brought in an outside company to take out our garbage and somehow the city managed to keep the water on. The city employees quickly folded.

I stand corrected.

He should of just hiked all the taxes to pay the wages. Or borrowed so your kids repay the loan in 20 years time. :Oh crap

Cutting the pay of the management should happen as well, then a guy with the qualifications to flip burgers will become the Finance director!!!!!!!!!!!!! :Oh crap

Anyone got a real answer to the problem?

supposedly the mayor claims he put forth a budget that would have fixed the problem and all of this wouldn't have had to happen. But, it sounds like that budget included tax raises so it was shot down.

In reality you can either raise taxes and spend that money to keep everything. Cut services or do a combination of the two.

Doing a combination of the two is the best. With tax rises being the main way. IMO

Cutting wages of employees is going to hit every local business where those employees spend their money. That will hit the economy in that area very hard. Expect to shops cutting staff, even closing and workers and businesses no longer paying taxes. :upsidedow

Spreading the burden of paying for the services the City Employees provide is the best way. Yet Americans have the illusion that roads get built and maintained, firemen and police get funded, out of thin air. And the money paid out is automatically lost into some mystery void.

It isn't just the government jobs though. Look at the auto makers and what happened there.

Chrysler in Brampton Ontario was filled full of employees that were all family members and friends of family members. It was incestuous the way people there got hired. I had several friends who worked there as summer employees doing simple things like paint inspection and they were making $30+/hr way back in the early 90s. In what reality is it reasonable to pay a 16yr old $30/hr to mark paint flaws on a car with a grease pencil?

Times got tough, nobody wanted to take cuts in pay because they felt they deserved the insane level of pay they were getting to put nuts and bolts on an assembly line, so now whole factories are wiped out and nobody has work. The unions did their members no favours by not educating them about the harsh realities of what was to come. Don't get me wrong, the corporates aren't blameless either, but at the same time they are the ones who 'own' the jobs.

There needs to be a major correction in wages paid for what people do in the western world and a lot of people are going to get hurt. Right now people seem to think they are entitled to the big house, the two cars, the 100" TV and vacations in Vegas. If you have the education of a warehouse worker and the wage of a warehouse worker you need to make do with what you have, not over-extend to what you want.