Responsibility

or how to be a good employee

They are congress, they are the cabinet, they are SCOTUS and other judges. They are, in one collective word, the government.

Mostly, though, they are employees.

We pay their salaries, we finance their perquisites, of which there are many--including an inflated and non-proportional retirement. The only way we have of firing them is with our vote, which they--along with their boss--are intent on manhandling into submission in ways that will benefit some of them. Never us. Never the employers. Them.

Oddly enough, the ones they choose to represent at their jobs--yes, I said choose--are the upper echelon of the employers. The billionaires. The CEOs. The two percent. The lobbyists. Their boss.

Even at the local level, they choose to honor the wishes of people they like, people who aren’t squeaky wheels, people who give them carte blanche with the city and county coffers, people who’ve never punched a clock or needed the services of a food pantry because they couldn’t both eat and pay the light bill on their two-paycheck income. I can’t argue it much because they are indeed elected, and while I no longer believe overmuch in the legitimacy of federal or state elections, I have full faith in local ones. Far from making it difficult to vote, they make it as easy as they can and I appreciate that.

It must be admitted here that although I do have that full faith I just mentioned, voting where I live literally never goes the way I want it to. It never changes, and while many people are unhappy with how it goes, they either don’t vote at all or they are perfectly willing to cut off their noses to spite their faces. Judging by social media, I would conclude that they’re terrified to pull the other proverbial lever in case someone finds out about it.

But even then, the elected representatives are there to represent the city and the county, not only the people who voted for them. A local official recently referred to her constituency as the “silent majority” in our county. I wonder, if they are silent, how she knows what they want. That’s a mystery I’m working on. I’ll let you know how it comes out.

Back to the federal government, though, I will say, as an angry and frustrated private citizen, that they also represent their sizable and noisy sycophancy. The ones in addition to the ones I already named, I mean. They are often seen on golf courses and at extravagant events where the cost of a plate would buy school lunches for every kid in our school and then some.

As a postal worker for 30 years, I’m pretty insistent we worked for the people whose mail we handled, but in truth we worked for the government. For the party that was and still is intent on privatizing the USPS, for whatever entity decided on postmaster generals who were intent on privatizing us. We handled acres of campaign mail that had to receive special treatment.

Many people told us, often from a position of towering rage, that they “paid our salaries.” They suggested we hurry up because their time was valuable while presumably ours was not. The ones who said this were often the ones who asked or demanded that we backdate their tax returns if they were sending them out on April 16. We didn’t do it.

We were unionized. We made decent money. We had good vacation time, good insurance, and a nice retirement we paid a lot into. We had had sick leave that we earned. It’s been a while, but as I recall, we got 13 days a year. We saved it up if we could. If we didn’t have enough for a long illness, we could go on leave without pay or, I think, there were short-term and long-term disability options if necessary. I believe those things could be denied us at the behest of our employers.

Those were the days.

The thing is, though, we either had to go to work or, if we could not, we had to be in some kind of status where the employers knew where we were and why were were unable to work. We couldn’t not show up for 142 days because we were depressed. Not that we didn’t get depressed. Not that none of us ever had to go on disability for that reason. We couldn’t just go into the hospital for weeks, either, especially if we decided to break contact with our employers until it was convenient for us. Not that there wasn’t some kind of pay status available, but we couldn’t just not show up at work w/o any explanation or documentation to our employers. Lots of explanation. Lots of documentation.

Ahem. When it comes to government, I will say again that government officials are employees. While they may enjoy celebrity status, as far as we employers are concerned, they’re just people who need to go to work. When they are there, they need to do their job. For us. Also for their private sycophancies, but we come first.

Because we do indeed pay their salaries. Oh, did I already say that? Well, fine, I’m saying it again. I am fiscally inept. I couldn’t do these jobs I want them to do. But I was a government worker of sorts, too. Like the ones in the first paragraph, I was an employee of the taxpayers even though we were supposed to be self-supporting by charging for our service.

We served the other 98 percent more than the top two. While it was true we had to give special treatment sometimes, it was never at the top of the list—it was a necessary evil. We sold money orders to immigrants for them to pay their bills with and never asked if they were legal or not. We smiled at their babies and handed out suckers. We accepted passport applications and took the pictures without caring at all what color the customer was or what gender they were or who they loved. We didn’t ask their religion or if they had one. We didn’t care what their politics were, although it was often easy to tell.

It seems easy to me as I write this. Jobs are never perfect. Sometimes they come with a whole lot of crap built into their operating systems. Sometimes you work with people who make things more difficult. Sometimes you work for people who do the same thing.

But when you’ve chosen to be an employee, some of that goes with the territory. If it’s your employees’ money you’re spending, you need to be careful how you spend it. If a lot of them are driving beaters to work because that’s all they can afford, you don’t need to buy BMWs or high-dollar anything on their dime. You don’t need a helipad in your backyard or trips given by lobbyists or to play 36 holes of golf and refer to it as work.

You need to do your job, to be responsible, to be accountable to the people you work for, to tell the truth. You need to go to work.