Opinion: Return of the scrooges

to extend health benefits to more than 2,300 part-time cafeteria workers at an estimated annual cost of $35.5 million. The move came over warnings from staff and Supt. David L. Brewer that no money was budgeted to pay for the benefits.

Part-time food service employees are seeking the same health benefits -- including coverage for their families -- that their full-time counterparts enjoy. Extending these benefits to cafeteria staff who currently work only three hours a day would cost an estimated $40 million a year, according to school board calculations. [...] This is fat that the food service’s too-lean budget simply doesn’t have. If health benefits were extended to these part-time workers, the CFPA estimates it would mean that the per-plate meal budget would be reduced from 85 cents to 49 cents. Making healthy food available for that amount would take a miracle of biblical proportions. So we’d be improving the healthcare of nearly 2,000 part-time workers at the expense of the 500,000 children who eat in public school cafeterias every day.

I would happily pay for universal healthcare just so I never had to read an op-ed like this again. It’s not that Williamson doesn’t have a point, it’s just that this beggar-thy-neighbor attitude is enough to make me retch, and I see it all the time. I don’t get dental coverage, so why should grocery workers? My copay went up last year, so why shouldn’t everyone else’s? I don’t pay for healthcare for my housecleaners, so why should I pay it for school cafeteria workers? Our wretched private healthcare system has turned us into a nation of spiteful and small-minded misanthropes. It’s true that the growing gap between public workers and private workers is a real problem. In the past, there was something of a tradeoff: public sector workers generally got paid less than private sector workers but made up for it with job security and benefits. Today, though, public workers generally get higher salaries and better benefits and more vacation and earlier retirement and more lucrative pension packages compared to comparable private sector workers. And private sector workers are understandably annoyed by this. But their annoyance would be better directed not at the lucky public sector workers, but at the mahogany row executives and conservative politicians who pretend that the only possible use for the mountains of cash generated by decades of economic growth is to give it all to mahogany row executives and the billionaires who contribute to conservative politicians.

Since we don’t have universal health care, every single time a group of individuals seeks health coverage, they’re forced into direct warfare with their immediate colleagues, place of employment, etc. So in this case, cafeteria workers who need coverage are set in opposition to children who need food. It’s a very, very effective method for slowing the expansion of benefits. Every lost battle makes it harder for the next group to win their fight, because it creates yet another set of cafeteria workers or Wal-Mart employees who aren’t getting healthcare, and who are thus competing without those labor costs.

[W]e see workers turning their ire on one another, with the despicable underlying attitude that ‘everyone else only deserve as much as I’ve got and no more.’ We see workers who would rather see other people denied a benefit they don’t have than see as many benefits extended to as many people as possible. And, worse yet, we constantly hear Social Darwinists with great benefits pontificating about how workers in crap jobs with crap benefits are only getting what they deserve—and if they want better, they should work harder. Because it’s just oh-so-easy to say that people deserve what they get once ‘I got mine.’ And once ‘I got mine,’ then it becomes all about protecting ‘me and mine’—and oh what an extraordinary capacity the Social Darwinists have for suffering all manner of indignity being imposed upon others to preserve themselves.

Here we are, the Richest Nation in the World, and children in a major city are being fed a breakfast and lunch for $2.85 a day (what do those children eat, I wonder? Stuff rejected by the dog food factory?), and the cafeteria workers don’t have health benefits. And all this motherbleeper concludes is that the cafeteria workers have some nerve.