Well that's cool

[draggonlaady]

Everybody's fussed about the budget, of course. But what to do? How about entire groups of gov employees voluntarily waiving their cost of living raises for next year?

Comments

[huashan.livejournal.com]

We had ours unvoluntarily waived for us 3 years ago, and very likely again for next year. No cost of living, no performance, no christmas bonus, just more furlough days.

[draggonlaady.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I hear that's going around. But these folks voted as a union to waive their pre-negotiated raises for the year, which is a little different.

King County is facing some pretty serious cuts in services and personnel right now, so this means several people that are probably not going to be fired that otherwise would have been.

[fr33f0x.livejournal.com]

Very noble self-sacrifice and all, frightfully deserving, but I can never quite shake the feeling that we're just seeing some mean and subtle form of moral extortion: employees have to sacrifice to save other employees (or, more likely, their own slot in the lay-off-lottery), but are those that have really sacrificed correspondingly? banks, and insurance companies, and large corporations seem to be able to make off with huge winnings even in the most direst of times (and when they really screw up, the tax payer is usually there with a saving cheque), but the little folk are persuaded that starving a little more is the only way to save the world...

[draggonlaady.livejournal.com]

I admire a bit of noble self-sacrifice. I didn't see this as a sort of moral extortion. I can see how you wold get that, if you were looking for bad-sides though. Guess I'm with the positive assumptions today.

As for the banks screwing up--well, there's all manner of discussion about the economic benefits and costs long and short term of bailing out banks. I don't know enough to have a meaningful opinion on it. I do know that outright incompetence in a bank pisses me off to no end (feel free to go back through looking for all my ranting about Bank of America). And I am flatly against bailing out large corporations. I understand that the idea behind subsidizing car manufacturers was to prevent massive job loss and a huge jump in local unemployment, but... whaa. They had YEARS of increasing competition with smaller, more efficient companies and they failed to adjust.