You went to work for the
City every day for thirty-seven years. You worked in the heat of summer, the
bitter cold of winter, and every weather condition in between. Co-workers who
were grizzled veterans when you started your career have long since passed
away. Mayors and city councils have come and gone, some good, some corrupt and
incompetent. Very few people now can remember when the City was flush with tax
revenues, though abandoned office buildings, empty houses, and ghost factories
speak of a more prosperous past. Your everyday reality for the better part of
two decades has been cutbacks and reductions, layoffs and unpaid furloughs.
Through it all, you kept reporting for duty, doing more with less when that
became the new mantra. As the budget cuts slashed through the thin layer of fat
and down to the bone, you watched the quality of services decline. No surprise,
of course. Equipment designed to last twenty years was prodded and coaxed to
last for 30 or 35; one worker now did the work of two, even three. Maintenance
for the City’s infrastructure was deferred, deferred, deferred. Raises for you
and your co-workers were also put on hold until some date in the future when
the City was back on firm ground, when the pendulum swung and better times
returned; next year, or the year after.
You saw the For Lease signs
appear downtown, a few to begin with, one corner of a familiar block, but
before long the disease spread and became an epidemic of entire blocks; plywood
covered many windows. Broken streetlamps remained broken, potholes went
unrepaired. Trash service became sporadic. Homeless people slept in doorways
and on abandoned bus-stop benches. Still, you held on, this was your home, after
all, and watching it die a slow death was painful. Although the politicians
down at City Hall talked endlessly of attracting new businesses and sparking a
renaissance with this or that initiative, it never came to pass. More and more
people threw in the towel, packed their worldly possessions and set out for the
suburbs or Florida or North Carolina or Texas; a trickle became a flood. It
seemed like the only people left were those without the means to escape. You
considered it, but your job and home and pension and memories were all here, in
this declining city. Your fate and its fate were joined, for better or worse.
Local political bosses and
Chamber of Commerce types laid some of the blame for what had happened to the
City on the federal government’s doorstep, but they also blamed workers and
their unions for setting the bar on wages too high for too long, and they made
it seem as if paying a worker a middle-class wage was not only ridiculous from
a business point of view, but morally wrong. Everyone talked in the language of
the market now, nobody talked about justice or fairness.
Your turn to call it a
career finally came. You were an old timer now; a survivor, and your co-workers
said you were lucky to be getting out before it all went to hell. You put in
your years, contributed to your pension, and it would almost be enough to live
on if you were frugal and nothing went horribly wrong; the pension was your
right, secured by your service to the City and guaranteed by the laws of the
state. Nobody could take it away.
You were five years into
retirement when the City declared bankruptcy. Once so proud, the City leaders
were forced to kneel before an appointed Emergency Manager who was handed
unprecedented authority to restructure the City’s financial obligations in
whatever manner he saw fit. No clumsy, tangled democratic pretensions would get
in his way. The Emergency Manager proclaimed that he was not bound by promises
made in the past; the City was destitute and desperate and promises carried no
weight. The pension you sweated for – and contributed to -- was fair game.
What got under your skin,
beside the gross injustice, the broken promise, was how the power brokers
hinted that the City’s collapse was somehow your own fault, as if, for each of
those thirty-seven years, you had taken more than you gave in return. As if you
were the greedy one. That you upheld your end of the bargain meant nothing to
them; your pension was a liability on a balance sheet, an abstract number, and
an obligation to settle for pennies on the dollar. You, and others like you,
had ceased to matter.
No comments:
Post a Comment