Public employees are not the enemy

Jeremy M. Christensen, Las Vegas

Friday, March 11, 2011 | 2:04 a.m.

Attacks are being made on public employees across our nation. These people are your friends, neighbors, relatives, former teachers — the list goes on.

But there are people in our country who want you to believe that public employees are your enemy. They are the same people who wanted you to hate the people they called communists or terrorists.

Some commentators say you should hate public employees because they make more money than you do. They quote articles from newspapers and studies from commissions, but they leave out an important detail: education. For example, according to a story in The New York Times, about 50 percent of public employees have college degrees, compared with 29 percent in the private sector.

On average, jobs that require college degrees pay more. That’s one of the main reasons people invest tens of thousands of dollars and sacrifice years of earnings while going to school.

The average annual wages in 2009 for a worker with a high school diploma was $32,552, a bachelor’s degree was worth $53,300 and a master’s degree was worth $65,364, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Are those commentators who omit such important details trying to distract us from finding out that the richest 1 percent of Americans in net worth own more that the bottom 90 percent of Americans?

I don’t want you to hate the 1 percent though — I just want you to ask them to pay their fair share so that our children do not have to sit in some of the most crowded classrooms in our nation.

The writer is a teacher in the Clark County School District.