Written by: David Norlin
“Oh, by the way, health department workers, if you get sick in January, you won’t be paid.”
Health workers without sick pay. The ultimate irony.
Many of us, insured, uninsured, with or without a family physician, have relied for years on our health department to assure that a base level of healthcare is available, often at lower cost. For that, and for the expert caring they have provided, we owe them a debt—and more importantly, respect.
That’s not what is being meted out by County Commissioners. The disrespect is palpable. Although the sick leave gap is the most ironic, the wipeout of their credit for years of service, with accompanying loss of vacation and sick leave, plus being put on ‘probation,’ is a stick in the eye. A stick in the eye it will take more than a good nurse or doctor to remove.
What should be removed are commissioners, who for some time have demonstrated it is they, not the health department, who deserve ‘probationary status.’ It should be said, they are local folks I have talked with and so can you. That’s a plus.
But talk seems to make little dent on the commissioners themselves. Were it not for the damage they inflict, they could be forgiven as mere automatons in service of an ideology.
What ideology? Cheap-Labor Conservativism. Cheap-Labor Conservatives would never, no, never, vote to raise your taxes or your mill levy. Unless they have to.
But you have to ask what they are doing for–or more exactly, to—working folks.
Cheap-labor conservatives don’t like social spending or preserving our “safety net”. Why. Because when you’re underpaid or unemployed and desperate, corporations (or in this case, the county) can pay you whatever they feel like – which is inevitably as cheap as they can make it. You see, Cheap-Labor Conservatives want you “over a barrel” and in a position to “work cheap or starve.” Although the Commissioners kept the remaining health workers at the same salaries, those workers are now at the mercy of Cheap-Labor Conservative bosses who have already done away with important benefits. Not exactly an incentive to stay, selflessly devoted to preserving our health.
No, those high-dollar incentives only apply to the CEO/management salaries we ‘must’ pay to ‘more efficient’ corporations. You know, like the CEO’s and mid-management of the three insurance companies now cutting back on help for the disabled under Brownback’s Kan’tcare program. One of whom (United) just offered terms so damaging that Salina’s hospital won’t accept their policies.
Or the companies like Boeing we try to pay off (“attract”) by using our taxpayer dollars to subsidize their staying in, or coming back to, Kansas. Unless Missouri offers them more of their tax dollars, as the Missouri legislature just did.
This way, the bosses are in charge. They can pat themselves on the back for being ‘fiscally conservative,’ while ignoring workers’ public health and taxpayers’ financial health. Everything hangs on a purse string, and a loosely-tied one at that.
At a national level, these Cheap-Labor Conservatives have their own media empire. Some prominent CLC’s hang out on their own shows, on their own network, funded by their own fellow CLC’s. Why, some have even run for President of the United States.
They dress up their anti-people campaigns with trappings of respectability and ‘morality,’ hoping the smoke-screen will work. One, for example, Mike Huckabee, is a guitar-playing pseudo-minister who dropped out of seminary after a year to help disseminate half-truths in “Christian” broadcasting.
Our County Commissioners are entertaining. But damaging. Now magnify that to a national level.
Is it only the bright spotlight that moved our local Chamber to bring us fox-hound enlightenment, rumored at an “undisclosed by contract” $50,000-plus? Perhaps the $176,000 they get from our city taxpayer dollars helped with the bill. And still, they ask you to contribute $50 -$75 a pop, should you choose to subject yourself to Huckabee histrionics.
There are good people at the Chamber. The goal of a vital economy is one we all share. And, I don’t blame the Chamber for wanting an entertaining name. I just wonder if such a choice, by the Chamber or by County Commissioners, reflects an enslavement to Cheap-Labor Conservative ideology.
If so, we all pay for it in the end.
Just ask the employees at the Saline County (Public) Health Department.
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