Mayor Read to Employees: Sorry-Not Sorry

In case you missed some of the developments in the 'Burgh's hot mic scandal over the holidays, here's the latest:

The mayor said some horrendously anti-labor things and then pulled an even more outrageous sorry-not sorry:

First obviously...I have to begin with an apology.  Some of the workers who listened to that thought that somehow I didn’t respect their value and contribution to the city and nothing could be farther from the truth.  As a matter of fact further in that conversation I said we really need have to create better ladders for our entry level workers to be able to move up and get promoted within the system and we need to work on creating those opportunities for them to advance and hire  more from within.

So, what the mayor is saying here is, he's sorry...that his employees are not bright enough to detect his nuanced appreciation for his workers and are too feeble minded to appreciate his thoughtful crafting of a merit-based pay system between the lines where he was bashing his own garbage workers.

Really though, the mayor said these things, and Mike Kelly, supposedly our most progressive city councilor, nodded in agreement:

"That guy on the back of the garbage truck, is he really getting more productive? Probably not," Read said.

"If anything, he is probably getting less productive over time. We have a system that just rewards people in a way that is completely uncorrelated with what they give back to the city."

People pay a lot of attention to the first garbage worker line above--and rightly so--but not enough to next, which reads more like Andrew Carnegie in the 1870's than a democratic mayor in tune with the economic realities for labor in 21st century capitalist society.  

Think of the millions of jobs in this country that inherently don't increase in productivity over time (eg, much of the service sector, a huge swath of the economy)--and think of the millions more that jobs do, but are overseen by bosses which attribute these gains more to their technological innovation than anyone else. Are all these employees not deserving of good benefits and automatic cost of living increases to stay ahead of the same inflationary forces with which the city is dealing? Taken to its logical conclusion, the mayor's statement is the antithesis of every social welfare program fought for over generations by progressives.

Then there is the difficulty of calculating productivity for white collar jobs...which is somewhat of a tangent, but I bring up simply to ask: How productive has our mayor been? What does one pay a more-destructive-than-productive mayor?

I get it, the city is in a fiscal crisis. Times are tough. But times are tough for the city's workers too, and they are real people..they are our neighbors--isn't this city small enough for us to not lose sight of that fact?

We're supposedly a Bernie city, right? Well, Bernie wouldn't be caught dead saying what our mayor said, even in the midst of fiscal trouble. He'd look to do battle elsewhere--perhaps, for starters, with the "fat cats" in our city that hurt the city's bottom line by getting their property tax assessments reduced just by threatening legal action (on which, more in future posts; in fact, the whole point of this blog is to point out where local progressives should do battle). 

In sum then, one is anti-progressive when they say this: 

We have a system that just rewards people in a way that is completely uncorrelated with what they give back to the city.

And one is progressive when they say this:

We have a system that just rewards corporations and large developers in a way that is completely uncorrelated with what they give back to the city and its people.