The United States of America has always been one of the greatest places in the world to have a job. There are many different classifications for what constitutes a job. Some people own their own business; some are part of a large corporation; some work for small companies, and some freelance on the side. However, there is another special kind of worker that constitutes the very essence of what defines employment in this country—the public sector employee. We’ve all seem them. At the post office, the DMV, or at your local courthouse—customer service is virtually non-existent. Please don’t ever try to contact these people after 4:30pm or every other Friday. For the majority of these employees, they feel it is their right to have a job in this country no matter how many customers do not ever get the attention they need.
Now, I do not mean to generalize all government workers as unrealistic and clueless to the happenings of the real world; but let’s be honest about how many of these people truly care about the services they are providing more so than the paycheck they are receiving. Are they really in touch with what drives American business and the current economic state? Would we rely on these people to solve the problems concerning the economic job crisis this country is facing? With that being said, let’s examine the past and present presidential cabinets to see which one has the worst ratio of private versus public employment experience. The facts may be alarming to some. The statistics below represent the percentage of each presidential cabinet employee who had previously held private sector employment before joining their respective administrations:
Roosevelt—38%
Taft—40%
Wilson—53%
Harding—49%
Coolidge—48%
Hoover—42%
FDR—50%
Truman—50%
Eisenhower—57%
Kennedy—30%
LBJ—47%
Nixon—53%
Ford—42%
Carter—33%
Reagan—56%
GHWB—51%
Clinton—39%
GWB—55%
Obama—8%
And the winner is…..you guessed it—Obama. That is not a misprint. It is scary to think that we as a country are facing one of the worst economic times in our nation’s history with only 8% of the decision makers having previously worked in the private sector. These are the same people who recently held a “Job Summit” to discuss possible solutions to help us recover from our nation’s current state. The sad yet realistic truth is that we may be in this recession for much longer than the government is leading us to believe
Tags: benefits, civil service, economic, employee, federal employees, government benefits, government employees, Job Summit, private sector, public employees, state employees
