I feel dirty and guilty and we haven’t even had adulterous sex. (Rant: Free Enterprise Nation)

The BBQ Pit
1

Free Enterprise Nation. Have you no shame?

You looked at excessive government spending, and what did you determine?

Teachers and police officers are being paid too much.

NOTHING ELSE??? No other huge money sinks spring out at you? No huge corporate bailouts? Come on. I KNOW Libertarians are against that. I’ve seen them on this very board!

Nope, it’s those darn teachers and cops…not that you have anything against them, oh no, you say so right after complaining that they dare to be paid oh-so-much.

Look, work is not the place for politics (especially as I know my boss reads The Drudge Report daily. And gosh darn it,* I don’t care*! I LIKE my boss. He’s a nice guy!)

So…Free Enterprise Nation…I will take your messages for him even though I disagree with you vehemently. Heck, I will hand them over with a smile even though I find you so distasteful my ear wants to crawl into my head to hide from your oozing, news-caster voice.

But I will not bother my boss for you. No matter how much you pester me. And it’s not because I hate you and what you stand for. (Which I do. You want to cut teachers salaries while at the same time railing against ‘double taxation of corporations as government repression’ )

No. It is NOT because I am a liberal and you are a conservative political action party. YOU ARE NOT BUSINESS RELATED. YOU are who I am paid to keep away from HIM.

Granted, you’ve not yet hit the annoyance level of ‘Right to Work’ (as far as I could tell it meant ‘No right not-to work: Down with unions!’). They had an older lady. Why, she was just another executive assistant, like me! My bestest friend. But would I mind taking a paper message AND then transferring her to voicemail and asking my boss again and again and again when he’d like to meet?

I now have a beeping red light on my phone. A message. Free Enterprise Nation wants me to call him back in his polished, pleasant voice.

I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to ask me if he’s read your letter, and can we set up a meeting? You’ll try to force me to pester him and then call you back with an answer, and when that doesn’t work, what does his schedule look like? And on and on and on. You’ll push. You’ll lunge at me, trying to find weakness. But I have met your kind before and I will parry the fuck right back.

Even if you’ll call so frequently that I’ll have your phone number memorized and will wince instinctively when I see it.

I pit you for making me feel dirty just from talking to you, and guilty (I should give MORE messages to my boss to make up for the fact that I disagree with you so strongly) at the same time.

P.S. And stop calling me!

P.S.2. Your name doesn’t have anything to do with what you stand for. Shame on you for making me think of the Star Trek Enterprise and the hunky Captain Picard when I think of you!

2

So you’re pissed that they wrote a stupid article AND they also keep calling your boss?

Two rants for the price of one, I guess. It got confusing halfway through when I was getting on board with the pitting of the article, and I didn’t shift gears right away to the harassing phone calls.

So why do these fuckers want to talk to your boss?

3

What is Free Enterprise Nation? It sounds like a central African pseudodemocracy or something.

4

Yeah, I’d worried I would be incoherent, sorry about that. :slight_smile:

They want him to join, and to bring the employees of this company with him, to form a united front against (as far as I can tell teacher and police wages - at least that is what I gleen from this article:
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/the-free-enterprise-nation-private-sector-has-had-enough,969190.shtml)

I became frustrated as organizations such as this (‘Right to Work’ being the one before this) are ten times as pushy and so much more demanding than people calling with legitimate business with our company. And they just don’t stop.

5

Free Enterprise Nation:
http://www.thefreeenterprisenation.org/ohmy.aspx

Some of they’re desires are confusing to me, but…they seem to be an organization that would like federal civilian wages brought down. They are upset by bonuses and salary vs the private sector.

I think I reacted so strongly to this particular organization, as I’ve not ranted about the others, as they seem to actually want to make people poorer, and they also want corporations to pay less in taxes. It feels slimy to me. And then I get mad at myself for bringing my politics into the workplace! :wink:

6

Here’s a link to Free Enterprise Nation.

Basically, it’s an effort to create an advocacy group for private sector employees and businesses. I don’t have a problem with the concept of something like that - small businesses are routinely given the shaft by government because they don’t have the lobbying power of large corporations, public employees unions, and the government itself.

I don’t know anything about this particular organization (first I heard of it today), and it may be corrupt, or a smokescreen for some other lobbying, or it may be turning a blind eye to government pork that benefits small business. If so, it should be more consistent.

But in principle, I like it. In this recession, 5.8 million jobs were lost in the private sector - and 238,000 created in the public sector. The gap between private and public sector wages and benefits has been growing dramatically in the last two decades. Job security in the public sector is almost guaranteed, while the private sector finds job stability deteriorating. And yet, the private sector is paying increasingly large taxes and suffering under the burden of increasing regulation at the behest of the public sector.

I hope they turn out to be a fair, reasonable organization and not a shill for special interests.

7

The more I look at my OP I see how poorly laid out it is. This is why I am a lurker…

I had no doubt that this organization (however distasteful it is for me) would be popular with people here. :slight_smile: But when combined with certain tactics… (granted, this is a new organization, and I am heavily pulling from my frustration with 'Right to Work’s many calls) Pressuring the assistant for a non-business issue is not necessarily the reasonable way to obtain your objective.

8

Well, it may or may not be a shill for some shadowy cabal, but whatever it is some of their arguments are really stupid, or at least disingenuous.

Shock. Remind me how many McDonalds’ franchises the federal government operates? Oh, and nice job on leaving out the armed forces with that “civilian” qualifier. Not like they aren’t more than half of all federal employees or anything.

Um… ok?

What the hell does pay in the public sector for federal civilian workers mean? How many federal civilian workers are there in the private sector, exactly? This sounds like some fishy wording.

So… governments took on an additional 300,000 employees in a year and their payrolls went up by under 1%? Good for them!

This is the best part. After three quarters of a page of “government spending is out of control! Governments are wasteful!” it moves on:

So… the wasteful and inefficient governments they hate slash their budgets, and then they complain about budget slashing.

What a bunch of dreck.

9

Looking a little more at their web site, I have to say that there’s a mix of good data and bad data, good issues and bad. If I were a member, I’d push them hard to use better, less misleading statistics.

An example of a ‘good’ issue: Unfunded public sector pension liabilities. For decades, politicians have been taking the easy road when negotiating with public sector unions and employees by granting them ever-increasing health care and retirement benefits - without having the money to pay for it and without setting up financially sound benefit trusts. These benefits are generally much better than what’s available to equivalent employees in the private sector. But when these unfunded liabilities come due, it’s almost certain that the way they’ll be paid for is with higher taxes on everyone. This does not seem remotely fair.

Example of a ‘bad’ issue: The web site claims, as proof of the disparity between public and private employees, that the average salary for public sector employees is 50% greater than for private sector employees. I see this number trumpeted around the right-wing blogosphere all the time, but it’s a meaningless statistic because the job mix in the public sector is not even remotely similar to the job mix of the private sector. The government doesn’t employ a lot of sales clerks and burger flippers, but it does employ a lot of lawyers, teachers, accountants, and other white collar professionals. So you would expect salaries to be higher.

It may be that public sector salaries are too high, but that statistic doesn’t tell you a damned thing about it. The only way to do a proper comparison is to go into specific cities and compare public and private sector wages for the same types of jobs, applying a correction factor for things like benefits and job stability.

My guess is that this group uses the gross statistic because it makes the problem look worse, and that’s dishonest. I remember doing a search for exactly those kinds of salary disparities a few years ago for a post here on the SDMB, and I found that it’s by no means a universal problem. In some places, the public sector makes a lot more for equivalent work, and in other places the private sector does. But that makes these local issues, and this group wants to play at a national level. They should cut the misleading stats.

10

It looks like we simul-posted the same complaint. If two people coming at this from the right and left can instantly spot that bit of statistical legerdemain, it should never have made it onto their web site.

Not really. A federal public sector employee would be someone like an FDA inspector, or an air traffic control operator, or any number of employees of federal agencies. This would be opposed to state or local public sector employees, or federal employees in the military.

Careful not to use the same slanted statistics the organization is using. We know nothing of whether the 1% overall pay increase is good or bad. Statistics in the aggregate like this are meaningless. It could be that the existing employees got big raises, but that the new hires are for lower-paying jobs than the average, and therfore overall average pay only went up 1%. Or it could mean something else. We just don’t know. That’s the problem with gross measures like this.

BTW, a 1% pay increase in the last year is a lot better than most people in the private sector got. Many companies rolled back pay, instituted mandatory furloughs, or at best had a pay freeze for employees this year. The federal government should have at least frozen the pay of all employees for FY2009.

Are you complaining about the grammar, or the redundancy, or the fact that governments are terrible at budget cutting?

There can be no question that some governments are out of control. California is melting down, borrowing money like mad just to keep operations going, but still agreed to ‘only’ a 2.4% pay increase for certain state employees - FAR above the national average.

11

A couple of things you should think about, though:

If public sector salaries are paid for by taxes on private sector salaries, then it’s a zero-sum game, which means it’s incorrect to say they’re lobbying to make people poorer. You could just as easily say that the high public sector salaries are making private sector people poorer, and this organization wants to correct the imbalance and make private sector workers richer. There’s nothing about working for the government that should make a person entitled to higher pay than the market would bear if the government weren’t in the mix.

Also, wanting coporations to pay less tax isn’t a bizarre idea. ‘Corporations’ don’t really pay the tax - their employees and customers do. I think some people have this notion that taxes on corporations are simply taken out of their profits, and that low taxes on corporations means rich owners will pocket more money. This is not the case. The profitability of a corporation is determined by the market and its competitive position vs other corporations. Taxes applied to all corporations are simply passed down to the consumers of the corporation’s products and to some degree to the employees of the corporation.

This is why you can argue that it’s a double taxation - not of the corporation, but of consumers. It’s a sort of a hidden sales tax. There is actually a worldwide trend towards lower corporate taxes because ultimately, the big loser is the export market. If your corporations only sell to people within the country, then hgh corporate taxes apply to all, get passed down to the consumer, and everything works just fine. But now take that corporation and ask it to compete against other corporations in other countries - and suddenly the disparity between the tax on your corporation and the other country’s corporation translates into a big competitive disadvantage for you. So there is now competitive pressure between countries to lower corporate taxes. The U.S. absolutely needs to do this to maintain its manufacturing base and be competitive on the world stage.

And I don’t have much sympathy for your distaste of bringing politics into the workplace if you’re a big union supporter, because unions bring politics into the workplace every day. You oppose ‘right to work’ laws, so you support the idea that you must join a union to work for certain companies. And yet, part of your union dues will be used for political activities, funding of certain candidates and political parties, political advertising, etc. How can you possibly justify that if you won’t tolerate so much as a phone call from another group looking for political support? At least these guys are looking for voluntary support. If I’m a conservative and I want to work for a union shop, I have no choice but to have some of my own money go towards funding a political party I do not support. That’s a real injustice, but it’s the reality for many people working in unions.

12

Boy, this looks scammish!

PERQs : Become A Member And Get Full Access!

I decided to sign my business up, so as to cover my 125 employees, and found that in fact I’d be joining something called “the national business council.” for a thousand bucks a year.
For merely another thousand clams I can even join the board of advisors:

Trouble is, google can’t find me any info on a “national business council” except as relates to Tanzania, or Honduras or the like.
Maybe NBC too is brand spanking new?
I think I’ll take my chances on Newt Gingrich declaring me entrepreneur of the year instead. At least that sounds like it’s on the up and up.

13

Yeah, that kind of sets off my scam-radar as well. I’d proceed with extreme caution before giving these guys any money.

It’s possible it’s legit, though. They may simply be trying to copy the model that some unions have employed where they get all kinds of special perks for union members. But it’s definitely a ‘unique’ model for an advocacy group, so I’d be careful.

14

Justify? Not Tolerate? Bwa?

I did not pick up the phone, hear ‘Right to Work’ and throw away the message.

I dutifully gave the information to my boss. They called repeatedly to try to force the issue with me. I do not mean they only called to leave a message, they placed repeated calls requesting call backs/ wanting updates from me/wanting to know his schedule. (I am not allowed to give his schedule information out.)

Heck, because of my guilt that I wouldn’t treat them fairly being all union loving and liberal, I probably bothered my boss with their info. more than I ever did with those poorly printed mailings from left wing groups.

(I had read the first few paragraphs of your post - you think very differently from me. It’s very interesting to read! I am afraid we probably do not see eye to eye.)

15

I find it hard to believe the Joe grunt government worker makes an average of $60K a year, let alone (what was it in the article…) $119K?

Sounds to me like being told (back many moons ago when I taught) that teachers made over $60K a year (when I was making $20k) or when the local paper quoted my salary as $38K (when I was making $20K) - because they included all benefits INCLUDING employer paid Social security AND, I shit you not, ‘rent’ for my office at the school to the tune of several hundred a month.

Of course, they neglected to mention these things in the article…just that my ‘salary’ was $38K.

I smell a rat.

16

Yes, I must admit I found it very odd to reopen this thread and see that you’d posted more or less the same thing I had thirty seconds later. It was like waking up in bed with Ross Perot and discovering he gave great head.

I doesn’t say average payroll, it says payroll- as in total. It doesn’t matter if the statistic is accurate or not; if it is accurate, then FEN (or whoever wrote this “oh my!” stuff on their behalf) are stupid, because their own statistics disprove their argument.

If the statistic is inaccurate, then hey, they’re using inaccurate statistics. Naughty, naughty.

I’m not complaining about the budget cutting thing at all. I’m just observing that the tone of the first 3/4 of that “article” is that governments are bad because they’re spending too much money!, and the tone of the remaining page is governments are bad because they’re cutting their spending!

17

Missed the edit window, but I feel obliged to point out that this:

…is two separate bullet points on that page.

If you read one, and didn’t read the other, they both seem like good data points for their arguments about public sector pay being too high. It seems it just never occurred to the writer of that page that anybody reading it might be able to process two pieces of information simultaneously.

18

Don’t tell that to my wife, a public elementary school teacher in California. In her school district they had to lay off all the PE, art, music, and science teachers in all the elementary schools because of the terrible budget situation.

19

I do not believe this is true. The percent of taxes paid by corporations is falling. Unless of course you are saying the private sector pays more in taxes than the public sector, which of course is correct because the public sector does not pay taxes.

20

Sam lives in a province where the most experienced nurses are being encouraged to retire early because the Conservatives can’t run the health care system well. He has, in the past, spoke out in favour of the nursing layoffs that heralded in our years of being Advantaged Albertans under those same Conservatives. Why he says public sector jobs are pretty much guaranteed eludes me.