Give Them a Raise!

Folks, I have been in the labor movement for almost 14 years and rarely have I seen a more oppressed group of workers. They are vastly underpaid compared to their peers. They work extremely long hours with no overtime payments. They toil in cramped, noisy worksites with constant chaos all around. Their employers are brutal, never thanking them for good work and always flogging them for more output. Worst of all, when they screw up, their bosses drag their names into the newspapers.

Am I talking about carpenters? I could be, but not in this column. How about construction laborers, roofers, bricklayers, janitors or domestic workers? No, not this time. I’m talking about workers who are, in their own way, almost as exploited: the members of the Montgomery County Council.

OK, I just heard you yell, “Adam must be eating too many bon-bons again!” But please bear with me.

Montgomery County Council Members are paid $89,721 per year. The Council President, an office that rotates annually, is paid $98,693. That’s barely a middle-class income in this county. Just look at our housing costs. As of a year ago, the average price of an existing detached single-family home in Montgomery County was $540,000. If you assume annual property taxes of $3,000, an interest rate of 5.75% and $40,000 down, then 42% of a Council Member’s pre-tax salary would be required to make the monthly payment. So we don’t pay our Council Members enough to allow them to afford a house!

Now look at their peers. D.C. Council Members earned $115,000 each last year. There’s thirteen of them serving just over half the population that our nine Council Members cover. Maryland state legislators start at just over $43,000 for three months of work. And there are even quite a few county government staffers that make more money than their superiors on the Council.

And what do our Council Members get for these crumbs? For starters, they get over a hundred emails a day. (I get about that many, but most of them are scams or porn.) They endure endless meetings with wild-eyed activists. (I can hear my wife laughing.) The particularly unlucky Council Members are hauled into Marc Elrich’s office for long lectures on growth policy.

Want more? How about nasty phone calls at home. And pickets in front of their houses. And just to add insult to injury, voters approved a 2006 ballot measure to designate Council Members as “full-time” without raising their pay.

Now if you’ve ever met these Council Members, you know that they are all smart and capable. All of them could be earning far more in the private sector. Take Valerie Ervin. She has 25 years experience in the labor movement plus five more in local government. Any international union would be on its hands and knees to hire her as a political director for more than twice her council salary. She could be flying out to conferences in Palm Springs and Disney World and eating fist-sized shrimps with U.S. Senators if she wanted. Just think about that the next time you’re yelling at her over a cracked sidewalk! And good luck finding anyone who was smarter or worked harder than the late Marilyn Praisner. If she had stayed at the CIA, Osama bin Laden would be on the business end of a bunker-buster by now.

If ever a group of workers needed a union, this is it. So let’s get organized! Every Council Member should wear a button that says, “Pay me what I’m worth!” (Can you imagine the reaction at town hall meetings?) We’ll set up a picket line outside 100 Maryland Avenue. And maybe we’ll have to call a strike. That will stick it to those miserly residents!

Council Members of MoCo, unite! You have nothing to lose but your Blackberries!

End of Column

(Psst… OK, all the readers have left their computers, people. I held up my end of the deal. Now let’s talk about that pedestrian tunnel project…)