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by braythwayt 2114 days ago
It's amazing how much leverage an employer has when they have the legal right to simply fire everyone, and there is no recourse for the employees because the employer is the federal government itself.

https://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/05/reagan-fires-11-00...

2 comments

Or Mozilla
For people who won't click, here are some salient facts:

this air traffic controller strike occurred in 1981

In 1955, Congress had made such strikes punishable by fines or a one-year jail term

a law the U.S. Supreme Court upheld in 1971

You don't like it? Then don't take the job. Take a job where you do have the ability to go out on strike.

When you simply cater to union-protected municipal employees, you wind up with the following, discussed on HN twice in the last day:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24350022

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24342828

We found truck drivers loaded up with $262,898; city painters making $270,190; firefighters earning $316,306; and plumbing supervisors cleaning up $348,291 every year. One deputy sheriff earned $574,595 last year – including $315,896 in overtime

All paid for by tax dollars.

As a Canadian, I'm horrified—HORRIFIED!—by the legal theft called "taxation."

Those pampered government employees up here with their unions and pensions and benefits. It's awful. All they do is make our country work. If only we could get rid of them all and let private enterprise take over.

Think of how much better our country would be if we scrapped public transit and let Uber and Lyft take over everything.

Likewise, we could get rid of our ridiculously terrible public health care and adopt a sane model where the market provides. After all, markets mean efficiencies, that's why Americans pay less for healthcare, and get better outcomes than socialist hell-holes like Canada and Germany and the Nordics.

If taxation is theft, we should not only be able to fire people who are paid with our taxes, we should be able to jail them as accessories to the crime, and make them stay there until they pay back every ill-gotten cent.

I have spoken.

The highest-paid public employee in most states is a football coach.