Jindal’s Job Hypocrisy Hurts Louisiana
by Allison Padgett | September 21, 2012
We hear it from politicians all the time: jobs are priority number one. Then something strange happens. Instead of creating more jobs and helping working families climb out of the recession, they destroy middle class jobs that already exist in the public sector.
In Louisiana, Gov. Bobby Jindal has taken a page out of this hypocrisy playbook. During his last re-election campaign he touted his job creation efforts and promised more in his next term. Yet state government – in which Jindal serves as chief executive - has eliminated a staggering 4,500 jobs since 2008, according to a recent article in The Times-Picayune.
And just this week, even Jindal's Republican allies in the legislature were shocked when he announced the closure of the C. Paul Phelps Correctional Center – destroying 250 more jobs in a rural community. He rammed through these plans without consulting local leaders, much less the hardworking men and women who will now be losing their livelihoods.
“Do the nurses and correctional officers who get laid off have any less trouble paying their mortgage than their neighbor who got laid off from the factory?” asks Paul Wilson, a correctional officer for more than 20 years at Avoyelles Correctional Center and president of AFSCME Local 3803 (Council 17). “Our jobs don’t count to politicians like Jindal, yet our communities suffer all the same.”
So why doesn’t Bobby Jindal care if a laid off corrections officer can’t pay his mortgage? It has to do with his desire to privatize more public services and pay back his wealthy campaign donors. During this year’s legislative session, Jindal campaigned relentlessly to privatize and sell prisons to profit-hungry corporations like Corrections Corporation of American (CCA) and GEO Group. Where he was unsuccessful, he simply closed three state prisons and shrugged at the resulting job losses.
The facility Wilson works at was forced to take on 200 inmates from one of the closed prisons, increasing the amount of offenders in each tier and dorm without the same increase in staff. And in a prison environment, overcrowding and inadequate staffing can mean the difference between life and death.
The choices politicians make on behalf of their corporate donors hurt all of us. A recent report found that government job losses are significantly hampering America’s economic recovery.
“In fact, public-sector employment (i.e. federal, state, and local government jobs) declined in 10 of the past 12 months, in sharp contrast to 29 consecutive months of private-sector job growth. Indeed, falling public employment has been among the largest contributors to unemployment in the United States since the end of the Great Recession.”
The impact of public sector job losses reverberates through the entire economy in the same way that private sector job losses do. More people on unemployment means that fewer people have money to buy food, homes and do other spending that drives economic growth.
The jobs hypocrisy doesn’t add up in Louisiana or anywhere else. Jindal and his cronies have doled out $425 million in “job-creating incentives” to corporations at the same time they have destroyed public sector jobs with decent wages and benefits under the banner of budget necessity.
Leonal Hardman, president of AFSCME Council 17, says that at the same time middle class civil service positions are being eliminated, the governor has given more six figure salary jobs to his friends at the top.
“We are trying to help the residents of this state realize that the governor talks fast, but look at what he’s really doing. He’s hurting the middle class. He’s taking away from those who are less fortunate and handing over more to the richest 1%.”
