SEIU’s response to the Governor’s executive order regarding state employees is so typical and predictable, but I find it thoroughly offensive this time. Usually, I can’t bring myself to emote over their antics, but today I’m fuming.

The business section of today’s Valley Times newspaper gave data to support my gut feeling for several weeks…the East Bay is taking the brunt of the unemployment burdens for the Bay Area, and is in fact, outpacing the state’s monthly unemployment rate by more than 2 to 1. The article by George Avalos states, “During the last 12 months, the Bay Area has lost 31,200 jobs. The East Bay accounted for 72 percent of all the jobs lost in the nine-county region in the last year. That is a stunning reversal from recent years, when the East Bay was the employment engine of the Bay Area economy, sometimes producing more than half the jobs in the Bay Area.”

It’s getting tough in my neighborhood. At every gathering I attend, the conversation always turns to either who has lost their job or who is afraid they will. Families are having a very tough time, and these are hard working people who have put in 60-80 hours a week to help their companies succeed, and meet the needs of their customers.

Then I turn from the Business Section of the paper to the front page where I encounter the remarks of a spokesman of SEIU, representing 235,000 state employees (whose paychecks come from the same taxpayers who are getting laid off left and right) who will keep their jobs, but have to take some reductions in pay. Here is what SEIU had to say, “ We are reviewing our legal options at this time. We definitely think we have grounds for filing an unfair labor charge.”

So let me get this straight…our state is on the verge of running out of money in a few weeks. State employees get to keep their jobs, but have to take 2 days a month off without pay. My friends and neighbors are out of work, but still paying sales and property taxes to the state to fund all these workers. And their union is going to sue the state and cost us even more money??? Are you kidding me??? Are you absolutely serious?!

Somebody help understand this…why is it that being a state employee is supposed to shield you from reality, buffer you against what’s happening in the rest of the world, and entitle you to employment options that aren’t available to the people whose hard-earned tax dollars provide your salary? Maybe I’m just hyper-sensitive to this, because my neck of the woods is really hurting badly in this economy, but I’m truly offended by the prima donna attitude that SEIU has taken. I grew up in a union family, the United Steel Workers of America, but I don’t know if I have ever felt so alienated and insulted by a union as I do right now. My heart goes out to the sacrafices that state employees are about to make along with the rest of us, but the SEIU’s litigious response is a direct affront to taxpayers in the state of California.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 20th, 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.