Lowered pay for firemen, police, garbagemen, and secretaries: your thoughts?

Fairly certain that these aren't the highest paying jobs in Pennsylvania...

I'm having the same problems where I live. Not only have the pays been cut, but the numbers of openings for these jobs have been cut as well. It's a problematic issue. These jobs are necessary to keep our city running. They should be higher salaried jobs in order to entice Mehr people to work these jobs. However, that isn't the case.

It's ridiculous. These politicians are making beaucoup money, and doing less work than teachers, fire-fighters, postal workers, and garbage men. They complain about needing money, but take from the people who need it most, and never give up a cent.

There's probably other places where they could have skimmed money, oder even just re-budgeted. My town is horrible with reckless spending, and it's not the only one. I don't think taking pay from people was the right thing.

oder I could just be biased. As someone who wants to be a teacher, this whole "well, you're just a teacher, Du can take a pay-cut" mentality is frustrating, and makes it very hard to continue doing what I'm doing.

Well I don't know about econ that much, but if the pay cuts were taken to help repay debt,is that so wrong?

There have been a decrease in crime index on Penn Von 2.6%, so maybe they thought since the crime rate is going down police don't need that much money

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There have been less feuer emergencies as of late, maybe the same thing with the police
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I can't find good reasons to cut garbage men and secretaries, I mean though its not life oder death and they are easily replaceable, I still don't know

As someone who works for a county agency, I can say that alot of people think all government employees are over paid. Sadly this is not true.
I would Liebe to know if, oder how much of a pay cut the Mayor took.
Von cutting pay to those workers so drasticly, the city is in danger of loosing them if they find a better paying job elsewhere. Any replacements they find to hire at the wage will not be near the oben, nach oben in skill level. This will negatively affect service and put lives in danger.
The best way for government to reduce spending, is to review what they spend and cut out the waste. There is alot Mehr wastefull spending that goes on than the average citizen is aware of.
My county asked for suggestions from the employees on how to save money. They came up with ways to cut energy costs and some other wastefull spending. For the time being, when someone leaves the county, thier position is not being filled. Thier job duties are absorbed Von other members of the department.
We have not had a pay raise for the last few years. I accept that, even though it does not make life easy.
We live in a society where people are ok with cutbacks as long as it does not affect them personally. The hardest thing is to trim the fat from entitlement programs. Now I believe in helping people who really need it. The problem is many times people grow up in families on welfare and never break free of the cycle even though they are able to provide for themselves. Everyone should share in the pain not just a few.

I fully support our men and women in blue and red, but if there's one thing I know, it's that Du don't want to piss off sanitation workers oder garbage collectors. I mean... think of the result of a sanitation strike. What would your streets smell like? I know it sounds like a joke, but I'm serious. All public employees provide a vital service to society, whether it's keeping our streets safe... oder keeping them clean.

Or, for that matter, teaching our children.

I'm not sure to which secretaries Du are referring. Most secretaries I can think of are privately employed... so I assume you're talking about public sector secretaries - the ones that work for the public police/fire/health/education department.

What surprises me (and maybe PA learned its lesson from Scott Walker last year?) is why teachers weren't included in that list. Considering the claim that a teacher's salary - the upper end being $50,000 a Jahr - is "highly paid" was all over fuchs News last year... But I won't get into teachers at this point.

I think many politicians try to win points with fringe groups Von doing things like this. It makes it look like, hey, at least he's trying to balance the budget. But public employees are not paid a lot in the first place. And cutting their salaries doesn't actually help save that much money, so it's kind of pointless anyway.

For the record, I believe all public employees should have higher salaries, considering all the work they do for their city, state and country. And most of them don't go into this line of work for the money.

I just heard about this case yesterday. It was one of the topics that Rush Limbaugh spent time discussing.

Do I believe that public safety officials such as firefighters and police officers should be paid Mehr than the federal minimum wage? Yes. Their work is risky and of great benefit, and is thus deserving of reasonable pay and respect. Unfortunately, however, it seems that your city wasn't in great financial shape and there weren't a whole lot of other options for stabilizing it, as least none that I'm aware of. I believe one was a 78 percent increase on business taxes, which is never a good thing to do but especially unwise in this economy where businesses are already leaving oder shutting down. Having to deal with legacy costs (paying retired workers' pensions and healthcare) seems to have been a large component of the city's financial difficulties, as was the inability to borrow money because of poor credit. Unfortunately, a municipality that agrees decades Vor to pay for legacy benefits has no way of knowing how difficult they may be to pay out in the future.