Opinion: We need to stop vilifying public employees in N.J.

By Barry Chalofsky

I was a public employee for 35 years! I didn’t dream of working for the state when I was a child, but as a result of various career twists and turns, I ended up being a public employee for much of my working life.

Most of my career as a public employee at the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection was exciting and rewarding. I had the opportunity to develop and implement many programs to protect our environment. Like most public employees, I believed that my efforts were meant to help the public and, in my case, to help the planet.

However, things changed after the recession in 2008. Since that time, there appears to be a concerted effort to vilify public employees – teachers; police officers; local, county, state and federal employees. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because the civil service system protects many public employees from being fired, or because there are rarely layoffs in the public sector, or the false perception that public employees are lazy and inefficient. While there have always been people who don’t like public employees, the trend, particularly on the part of certain politicians, as well as the Tea Party, has grown worse. At the federal level, sequestration and the budget crisis are only making the situation more dire. Since agencies cannot hire replacement employees, they are forced to cut services. If the budget is not resolved, the federal employees could be facing massive layoffs.

What I can say is that most public employees, who are also our neighbors and friends, are just as dedicated and efficient as everybody else. They are rarely motivated by money, since salaries are generally lower in the public sector, particularly for upper-level professionals (although benefits are usually better than in the private sector). Most are genuinely motivated by a desire to help – whether it’s protecting the environment, protecting people’s safety, helping our children learn, providing unemployment compensation or other social services, or making sure the trash is picked up.

Yes, there are bad apples — people who take advantage of the system by padding their pensions or by abusing sick leave, for example. Some don’t work hard or take too much time off. Yet I would argue that those same kinds of employees exist in the private sector — from the bottom to the top. While civil service jobs provide workers protection from political patronage, it also sometimes shields the bad worker. But that does not justify castigating all public employees, just as Bernie Madoff’s swindle does not imply that all financial advisors are bad.

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