Out of touch – Letter to The Beach Reporter by Marianne Fong

The following letter to the editor was published in The Beach Reporter newspaper (TBRnews.com) on Thursday, August 11, 2011 in the Letters section. The Beach Reporter has a strict 250-word limit.

Out of touch

Last week’s letter from Neil Snow demonstrates how much government union members and their political supporters are out of touch with the real world where the rest of us work, produce things and pay taxes.

Snow presented ludicrous objections to, and gross misrepresentations of, Michael Robbins’ well-reasoned recommendations to reform El Segundo’s city employee union contracts to keep the city from having a financial catastrophe.

He objected to Mr. Robbins’ recommendation that city employees pay all of their pension “employee contribution,” and at least half the total contribution, which is common in private industry, instead of the city paying the entire “employee contribution” and “employer contribution.” Snow misrepresented that recommendation, claiming that Mr. Robbins wanted to make “employees pay their entire pension.”

Snow is out of touch to expect taxpayers to continue paying all of the government union members’ pension contributions, and to expect that union members should never have to contribute a single dollar into their own pensions.

Further evidence that Snow and the government unions are out of touch with reality is that they oppose Mr. Robbins’ recommendation to “replace seniority-based compensation and job security with performance-based standards.” Rewarding high-quality performance encourages performance improvement. Rewarding years on the job regardless of performance increases the number of poor performers. It is basic human behavior to respond to rewards. Why would anyone oppose compensation and job security based on job performance rather than seniority, unless they are protecting employees who have a poor work ethic and substandard job performance?

Marianne Fong
El Segundo