From the Right

/

Politics

Don't cry for government workers during shutdown

Ruben Navarrette Jr. on

SAN DIEGO -- No mas! I can't take any more sob stories about government workers going without paychecks during a shutdown that just passed the 30-day mark.

The preferred media spin is that 800,000 federal workers are held hostage by political gridlock.

Wrong. These people are not hostages. They're volunteers. No one forced them to work for the federal government. My problem isn't with the workers. It's with the false narrative.

"It looks like a breadline out of the Depression, people standing out waiting in the cold to get their soup or sandwich," said Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va.

Really? In the Great Depression, the nation's unemployment rate hit an all-time high in 1933 -- 24.9 percent. Today, it's 3.9 percent.

You're right, Senator. It's the same thing.

 

News footage showed a protester marching in front of a building in Manhattan holding a sign, stamped with a union label, that read: "We want to work!"

I thought to myself: Then why aren't you working? If you did more of what some of your colleagues are doing -- substitute teaching, driving for Uber, doing temp jobs, etc. -- and less marching, you'd be better off.

I'm 51, and I've been working since I was 13. My grandmother owned a clothing store, and I pitched in on Sunday mornings. I also worked as a busboy and took orders in a restaurant owned by a family friend before I was old enough to get a driver's permit. During my college years, I stacked 40-lb. boxes of fruit in a packing house and later worked for a federal judge -- and had about a dozen jobs in between.

Where I grew up in the farmland of Central California, work is sacred. My Mexican-born grandfather picked fruit, and he showed up to the fields a half-hour early -- out of gratitude for the work. Back home, people have two or three jobs. Decades before anyone talked about a "side hustle," the folks I grew up with lined up extra work on nights and weekends -- just to make ends meet.

...continued

swipe to next page

 

 

Comics

Adam Zyglis Tom Stiglich Steve Kelley RJ Matson Lee Judge Mike Peters