September, '98 Labor Party Press

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For an on-the-ground glimpse at the effects of privatization, we talked with Labor Party member Jim Davis, who leads the AFGE local at Robins Air Force Base in Central Georgia.

My local represents forklift operators, aircraft mechanics, planners and schedulers, some engineers, program managers – a whole spectrum of people – at Robins Air Force Base.

What privatization does is jeopardize your job security. For instance, Robins Air Force Base just won a contract to maintain the C-5 aircraft. We competed with Boeing and Lockheed to get that contract, and we won the bid. Well, at the time we had about 400 temporary employees working on this base. And when that job came in, we hired about 300 of them as permanent workers. But we contracted out with a private company to do some of the work on the C-5. And now those other 100 temporary employees – they’ll be laid off. Sometimes it’s people who have worked with you for 10 or 15 years who are left out in the cold.

Privatization also cuts out promotion opportunities for our people. For example, a person who is a parts technician who is making, say, $30,000 a year will often move up into a scheduler job, which might pay about $40,000. But now the Air Force will turn around and contract with someone like Chrysler or Boeing to do the scheduling – and my members lose access to those jobs.

They think that private industry can perform functions without all of the bureaucratic red tape in government. And I agree that there is too much red tape. But private industry, even without their red tape, still does not do the job as cheaply as the federal employees. That’s documented. They know that here, that the contractors are costing them more money.

For instance, they brought in some contract people to work on the C-141s. And those people are producing less per day, per labor hour, than what federal workers produce. Plus, we’re having to pay them more money than if they were permanent federal employees. We have situations where people retire or quit the federal government, and the next day are sitting at the same desk, doing the same job that they were doing when they were a federal employee – only they’re making more money. Yesterday this person here was making $35,000 a year, and now that job has been privatized, and the person is making $50,000.

Privatization is really not designed to save the taxpayer money – that’s just the way they are selling it. Really what privatization is designed to do is to get the government out of the manpower business, and to turn the work over to private industry.

I’ve been to hearings in Washington where the Air Force will tell Congress, ‘We’re going to save you $400 million with this subcontracting.’ And then the Congress person turns to the General Accounting Office person and asks, ‘What do you say?’ And the GAO says, ‘No, in fact, it’s going to cost you more if you subcontract this work.’ And yet they just go ahead and do it anyway.

Privatization is not the only issue for me – it’s workers’ rights that is my major concern. Whether you work for a Fortune 500 company or a mom-and-pop company, it’s about workers’ rights and workers’ dignity. I see a lack of meaningful jobs for Americans.

It was Ken Blaylock [AFGE vice president and former president] who introduced me to the Labor Party. Ken’s union to the bone. He is dedicated to the working person. He was looking for people to make a commitment to the Labor Party, to give that money, to do what we could do to get the Labor Party going – knowing that it was going to take ten or fifteen years possibly before it would become a viable organization. And I was all for that. Good gracious, you put in a little money and a little time, and with the benefit we could all get out of it – count me in.

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