About those federal workers people so love to hate …

Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes a mix of guest commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

I am tired of hearing about the federal workers of this country. They are lazy. They are overpaid. They are incompetent. There is no need for their work. For almost 40 years I have listened to this, and now I have to watch these workers be thrown from their jobs in the middle of the night. Why?

Please meet a federal worker, my husband. He used his Bachelor of Science degree to work for the Department of Defense and then the National Weather Service. He worked jobs that required schedules of six days on and two days off, rotating shifts from midnights to days to evenings, and most holidays were worked. He didn’t get many weekends off, or holidays, but it didn’t matter because we never got to live near family. We moved a lot in support of the work. In our 40-plus years of marriage the closest we have ever lived near family was for the one year when we were within a three-hour drive of my family. Otherwise, family has been anywhere from 1,500 miles to 4,000 miles away.

My husband could have taken a job in the private sector, working as an engineer as most of his friends did, where the paychecks would have been much greater. No, he was determined that his place was working to serve our government. So, for 40-plus years we have watched everyone around us celebrating holidays with family, enjoying weekends with family, and raking in the dollars of the private sector. We have kept our mouths shut when conversations turned to raking over the federal worker. No more!

When others were hunkering down for snowstorms, tornadoes and floods, my husband was at work. When an evacuation notice was given for an oil spill, he was required to stay in harm’s way with the first responders so that they would know wind directions. When the tornado was headed toward his office, he stayed at his desk. When your government was testing chemical weapons, his weather forecasts were life-or-death. He put out forecasts that kept ships at sea safe and planes able to fly safely. Forecasts for avalanche control and forest fires.

Other federal workers make sure it is safe to fly, that the foods you eat are safe, that you have roads to drive on, clean water to drink, air that is safe to breath, medicines that are safe to use, emergency services, the latest in science and technology. They can’t be replaced by private enterprise. The federal government is not a business. It is there to protect and care for its citizens. If it is run as a business, it will not care about its citizens, it will care about those who run the business and pocket the money. The federal government is what protects you from the interests of business. The much-maligned federal workers of this country, the underpaid, understaffed federal workers, put men on the moon, and did it with the low bid. The federal workforce is about 0.6% of the U.S. population. It was 1% in the 1960s and 2% in the 1940s. Today it takes only 5-6% of the entire federal budget. There are about 2.4 million federal workers (not including the military and postal workers). Walmart employs 1.6 million people in the United States. The National Weather Service costs a taxpayer $6 a year.

When you notice things not happening in the federal government — IRS workers not answering calls, Medicare not responding quickly — don’t blame the federal worker. Blame the cuts that have continually been made on the federal workforce. Hard to have up-to-date computers and software when budgets don’t allow it. Hard to staff the phones with a skeleton staff. Those federal workers have been working their backsides off — for you.

Martha Wavrin lives in Henderson, Minn.