First, Let’s Lay Off the Sanctimony About Downsizing
My dad wasn’t the crying kind, at least not around the kids. I remember him breaking down only twice, with the second time being when he was deathly ill. The first time was 30 years earlier, on the day he lost his job. I was 14, he was 41. Seeing him that defeated was in such stunning contrast to the winner I had known all my life that it was as though a stranger had stumbled into the house. For a long time afterward, darkness reigned behind our four walls.
That’s the way 14-year-olds learn lessons. My lesson for that day: Losing your job equals catastrophe.
The catastrophe season may soon be upon us in Orange County, and one wonders how those orchestrating it can do it so blithely.
Most disturbing is how cocksure the voices are in calling for people to lose their jobs. Oh, nobody is standing on street corners openly delighting in it, but when people embrace the “downsizing” of county government, who’s euphemizing who?
When you downsize public employment, you’re sending people to the unemployment lines--people with kids and mortgages, car payments and Visa bills, home repairs and savings accounts. And that’s just the checkbook stuff; it doesn’t address the darkness in the house.
And yet, people just can’t wait to downsize. Ah, the excitement of it all! Their glee is matched only by the ferocity of their rejection of raising taxes to replace the county’s lost revenue. Filled with as much rectitude as the Crusaders setting out to rout the infidels, the no-tax people apparently have no problem in sending county workers home to empty houses to watch TV all day long.
If you check, you’ll find an interesting footnote to all the rah-rah sis-boom-bah stuff about downsizing: none of the people advocating it will lose their jobs. None of them will go home to their kids and spouses and explain that they won’t be going to work the next day.
The Board of Supervisors have picked up the chant of no taxes. How they justify drawing 80 grand a year while abdicating their authority to new administrator William Popejoy is insulting enough. Indeed, with their current level of responsibility, it’s they who ought to be working for free, not Popejoy. But just to pour it on, the board also is willing to cashier whatever number of employees it takes.
“We know it’s painful,” the board says, as if arriving at that state of enlightenment makes doing it acceptable.
Not that anyone cares, but the push for firing people (no more euphemisms!) seems oddly out of sync with the political mantra of the day--namely, personal responsibility. Notice how cries for personal responsibility are most often said by people with two cars to people who take the bus.
As for Mr. Popejoy, he can’t help it that he’s wealthy. I admire that he’s working for free, but he’s wielding an awful lot of clout for someone whose record with financial companies in the 1980s was, on the record, a mixed bag.
The supervisors couldn’t care less about that. They just needed someone to do their dirty work, and county employees knew they could start packing when someone said of Popejoy: “He’ll make the tough decisions.”
I must have a different definition of a tough decision; to me, a tough decision is when you cut your own job, not someone else’s.
Maybe Popejoy will surprise everyone and find a way not to cost the innocents their jobs. There’s an honorable way to downsize, and that is to not replace workers who quit or retire. In addition, privatization likely would absorb some of the effects of layoffs.
But, the board will say, the current crisis doesn’t give us the luxury of time. We have to make the tough decisions now.
Somehow, some way, they’ll muster the political courage not to raise taxes and to rubber-stamp Popejoy’s recommendations. They’ll weep as fired county employees file past.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
I want to keep my money as much as the next guy, but when faced with a choice of paying an extra penny on the dollar for a year or so versus wreaking havoc in hundreds of homes, what’s the choice?
A short-term tax to replenish revenues has the benefit of eventually going away. Unemployment has a habit of sticking around.
It wasn’t surprising that former administrator Ernie Schneider cried when he got the news last week he was being fired. On a personal level, his pain may be no less than others who will get the ax. The difference is that he made $140,000 a year and will get a nice pension. And, at least on paper, he bore some responsibility for the crisis.
For the other working stiffs who aren’t making six figures and who had nothing to do with creating the crisis, they’ll probably cry too.
The Board of Supervisors should be forced to listen to those sounds before they do their deed.
Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.
