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By Root 1038 0

run for office—by what they say, not what they do. Because we live in a self-indulgent society. And also because many of us retain vivid memories of the class conflict and abuse of an earlier era when all workers—like today’s migrant workers and coal miners—were victims of callous indifference. We remember the sweat shops, the union-busting goons, the conscripted children slaving fourteen hours a day. We remember Upton Sinclair’s poignant portrait of assembly line cruelty; John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. If you grew up in a working-class home, as I did, your natural instinct is to side with the worker against the boss and robber barons, to draw lines between the people and the privileged few. Government was a friend, labor unions represented the people against management.

Today, government is not always a friend; is often wasteful, rigid, a tax-eating bureaucracy as immune to competition as any business monopoly. Today, public unions don’t necessarily represent the public. Our world is turned upside down. What happens when management (i.e., government) and the public are one? When public unions become powerful special interests, demanding more when taxpayers want to pay less? Why is a falsely labeled budget or union contract not as much a consumer issue as the contents of a jar of baby food? Does the public get what it pays for? Is a union ripoff different from a landlord’s? What happens when ordinary workers become a privileged class—what Milovan Djilas, referring to Communist Party officials, called the “new class”?

New York Is Not Alone

New York suffers an advanced case of self-indulgence. But the disease is contagious. Burton W. Johnson, former fire chief in the nation’s capital, sprained his back at home lifting a carton of CocaCola. He filed for—and won—a $33,250 disability pension. In Washington, D.C., there are four “disabled” for every one regular retirement. In New York City, there are thirteen regular retirements for every one disabled. The Congress of the United States, which enjoys lecturing New York, created D.C.’s tax-free, two-thirds pay disability pension system, which Senator Thomas Eagleton calls “far and away the premier ripoff system in the United States, second to none.” Congress also approved twenty-year military retirement plans, allowing 141,000 retirees to collect pensions and fat federal civilian salaries as well. Of these double-dippers, 161 earn more than the $66,000 paid members of the President’s Cabinet. The head of the Social Security Administration, James B. Cardwell, “retired” in November 1977 to take a $53,000 post in private industry. At the age of fifty-five, this former guardian of the people is also drawing a $24,000 government pension; in ten years, his Social Security checks will come too, though since he was a federal employee only now does Cardwell begin contributing to this system. In 1978, eighteen members of Congress were collecting monthly disability pay from the military, and another fourteen were cashing monthly military pensions or Veterans Administration benefits.

Nassau County cops are not only better paid than New York’s but receive fatter longevity bonuses—$450 after six years, $1,400 after twenty. Actors Equity members collect a $25 “meal penalty” if an afternoon’s shooting exceeds six hours, even by one minute. Members of the New York Newspaper Guild receive triple pay for working holidays. Members of Congress receive free medical treatment, free prescriptions, free annual physical exams, free parking, free books, free plants, free telephone service, free use of members-only swimming pools, gyms, and steam rooms with masseurs; they enjoy bargain basement prices on haircuts and beauty shop care, eat tax-free and inexpensive meals in special dining rooms, pay no Social Security taxes and only $46.14 a month for a $60,000 life insurance policy. Newspaper and railroad union contracts provide for featherbedding—the publishers of New York’s three daily newspapers precipitated a strike in 1978, complaining that their pressman union’s contract forced them to employ