A Los Angeles doctor earns a meager $10,000 annually, forcing him to turn to food stamps to feed his family.
An attorney working nearby makes thousands of dollars less than the lawyers he supervises because his salary is paid by a different entity. And, miles away, there labors a library aide who receives no health benefits to pay for her arthritis treatments because she is a part-time employee.
Three victims of a profit-driven company's increasing reliance on temporary employees and novel labor arrangements?
Wrong.
All three people work for Los Angeles County and, like their low-wage counterparts across the country, they are one of local government's dirty little secrets. They also are caught in the middle of a tug of war over American government's role at the end of the 20th century.
Although the vast majority of public employees still hold steady, and at times cushy, jobs--after all, Linda Tripp just got a raise--government agencies from Baltimore to Seattle for years have kept some workers' salaries low and dodged paying their benefits with the agility of a downsizing corporation.
"It's a very, very common pattern," said Dennis Dresang, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin. "Government is supposed to be the model employer, but that runs straight into concerns about finances."
With local coffers flush from the nation's economic expansion, cities and counties across the country are expanding health benefits to cover domestic partners and upping salaries at the urging of labor groups demanding a so-called living wage, usually tied to the amount required to keep a small family off public assistance.
Not only do these laws potentially lead to raises for employees of the hundreds of companies that contract with government, but in some cases they also can boost the pay of public workers who, because of local government's unusual labor arrangements, have been underpaid for years.
But that push, a revival of the old-fashioned notion of government as a progressive employer, has run smack into another vision of government embodied by the cost-cutting legacies of the Reagan revolution.
In Los Angeles County, the situation was worsened by Proposition 13 in the 1970s and a property tax shift to the state 20 years later, which sapped county coffers, coupled with scandals over abuse of the county's pension fund.
Robert Shiell is one of those on the receiving end of that legacy.
