Public workers produce real and necessary value in the public interest

As not only an historian of labor and technology, but also a proud public research university employee, I was dismayed to read this recent article in Vox, “Trump and Musk’s plan for a massive purge of the federal workforce, explained” (https://www.vox.com/politics/397235/musk-opm-fork-road-schedule-f). After following one of the article links, I learned that our federal government is now blithely telling its own labor force “The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.” (https://www.opm.gov/fork/faq)

Thinking about my many colleagues, connections, alumni, and students here on LinkedIn who work in the public sector just as I do, I need to say that I find that statement to be both intentionally insulting and staggeringly ignorant. Civil service professionals who staff and manage the democratically-created agencies and projects of our local, state, and federal government regularly sacrifice higher earnings and career prestige in order to serve the public interest in critical health, safety, education, research, infrastructure, social well-being and security roles. It is crucial that these public agencies and projects exist precisely because the private market, driven by individual consumption choices, short-term profitability opportunities, and the accumulation of personal wealth for owners, consistently fails to provide collaborative and necessary public goods meant to sustain and improve the lives of all.

Over the last century, public funding and public labor provided college to returning war veterans, created the Internet, put the first Americans in space, predicted the last hundred or so Gulf hurricanes, educated most of America's children, kept commerce safely flowing across roads, water, and airways despite repeated economic and environmental crises, and coordinated a vaccine against a global pandemic. Teachers, emergency responders, safety inspectors, infectious disease researchers, global aid workers, social security benefits administrators, crisis diplomats, air traffic controllers, cybersecurity engineers, VA doctors, census workers, public defenders -- none of the success of private individuals, for-profit businesses, and local communities in the modern, technological, global society would be possible without them.

So to my LinkedIn colleagues, connections, alumni, and students in the public sector: Please know that you are not just incredibly “productive"; you are essential. Thank you for all the important work that you do.