The man who wouldn't work (a blast from the past)

I work, and I'm proud of it. I get raked through cess on other blogs over this fact, but it's true.

I'm willing to do most things for $7.25 an hour. But a few jobs I ain't doin'. If people don't like it, that's too bad. I'm a populist, and if I have to show some teeth and stand up for myself, SO BE IT! If you really want to work for minimum wage at one of the rare jobs I wouldn't take, that's your choice. To each their own.

I worked for the library, the phone company, and the Department of the Interior, and rarely complained. So if people think I'm lazy, they can kiss my ass.

If I now make a living from writing, why should anyone wrongly judge me for it? Are we supposed to just do away with books and blogs? Writers don't work for free. And if I had to take some time off once 5 years ago for health problems, there's even less grounds to judge.

I simply feel that after investing a lot of time and money in my college education, I deserve something better than one of the few jobs I won't take. Wouldn't you feel the same way? It might not have been therapeutically correct for me to say so, but at least I was honest.

Now it's the weekend, and I've been suffering a negative food reaction all day, so I thought I'd take it easy today by telling you about a man who (unlike me) didn't work.

This entry is about a guy who got a Conservative Fool Of The Day entry on the old blog on February 15, 2006. The man was a Republican patronage employee for Kentucky's road department.

The man's connections through a Kentucky Republican Party treasurer helped him get a cushy, easy, high-paying patronage job at Kentucky's transportation bureau after Ernie Fletcher took office. The job paid nearly $50,000 a year - which most folks in Kentucky would consider to be living like a king. The man was in his fifties, but this was an exceptionally good salary considering he never even went to college and had little experience in the type of job he was hired for.

Suffice it to say, the chap had an excellent job for someone with so few credentials - but it wasn't good enough for him. As part of his job, the Fletcher appointee had to (gasp!) answer phones. Ooh, torture! While thousands of Kentuckians earn their living through hard physical work and make nowhere near $50,000 a year, this guy cried about having to answer a damn phone!

There's things I didn't want to have to do to make a living, but I grinned and beared it. I had no choice. Most people don't, when push comes to shove. But the guy in this story refused to do his job altogether.

The deputy transportation secretary was furious at this man for refusing to work, and he commented in an interoffice e-mail, "It doesn't bode well for the Cabinet to have someone like that who absolutely refuses to do what he is hired to do." In another e-mail, the sec expressed dismay at not knowing what to do with the employee. Most organizations would just fire him on the spot. But you can't do that with him. You just can't. He's a Republican, so he's special and privileged. So the e-mail suggested that the agency had no choice but to either reassign him or "put him in a corner and we'll ignore him." In other words, the transportation department would pay the lazy clod his full salary to do nothing, because the agency wasn't allowed to fire him.

Yes, a patronage employee refused to work - so the state was going to pay him to do nothing. All at taxpayer expense. Finally his bosses did find him another job - one that was even better than the job he refused to do. So if you're a conservative who refuses to do your job, you get promoted instead of fired. We knew that, because we'd seen it happen before.

All this after Fletcher ran on a platform of ending a corrupt patronage system. Of course, it's not like we ever believed Fletcher in the first place, thanks to earlier right-wing corruption.

Now we know why it's called a spoils system. It's because it benefits people who are spoiled - like the Republican patronage employee in this story.

(Source: http://thinkprogress.org/2005/11/28/fletcher-ethics)