Freeze Your Pay? They’re Trying!

Republican leaders in the House and Senate want to freeze your pay.  Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Tom Coburn (R-OK) offered an amendment last week to the emergency supplemental spending bill that would have frozen your pay in 2011. The very next day, Representative Michele Bachman (R-MN), backed by House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) offered an amendment to freeze your pay during debate over the Defense Authorization Bill.  AFGE defeated both amendments.  But Republican leaders have vowed to try again.

 Don’t Let Them! Contact your lawmakers right now.

The driving force behind the push to freeze your pay and federal jobs is the so-called “Economic Recovery Working Group”–the brainchild of Republican Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA).  They even have a website called “You Cut”:  http://republicanwhip.house.gov/YouCut.  Under the guise of “controlling federal spending,” their real intent is to cut your pay, freeze federal jobs and continue contracting out the jobs that are left.  In the middle of a deep recession when people are struggling to find good jobs and make ends meet, the very idea of freezing pay and jobs just shows how out of touch these lawmakers are.

The idea of freezing federal pay and jobs is an insult to the VA employees who care for our veterans, the corrections officers who keep our communities safe, defense workers who support and supply our troops, Social Security employees who serve retirees and the disabled and all government employees. And, the cap on federal employee jobs is just a thinly veiled effort to outsource and privatize public services.  Representative Cantor and his cronies will argue that we “can’t afford” to give raises to government employees or create government jobs.  That’s ridiculous!  When any worker–public or private–doesn’t have a job or money to spend they’ll cut spending at the supermarket, they won’t buy a car, they won’t buy new clothes for the kids, and consequently other people will lose their jobs and the economic recovery will sputter and die.