Councilor Yoon's Strange Crusade

We've been a bit puzzled this week at the spectacle of progressive Boston City Councilor Sam Yoon crusading against alleged abuse of sick-day buybacks by numerous city workers.

Sick day and vacation-day buybacks - which involve the City of Boston paying workers a bonus for unused sick and vacation days - are a fairly common perk in unionized public sector jobs, especially among teachers. The idea is that buying back unused sick-days and vacation-days provides an incentive against absenteeism. The buybacks are sometimes a percentage of a day's pay, and sometimes a full day's pay.

But more to the point, the perk is almost always the result of regularly negotiated union contracts - which is certainly the case for Boston public workers. So it's not like the city is being caught off guard by workers taking advantage of contractually-guaranteed benefit. City workers would be fools not to do so.

Now it's probably true that Yoon is continuing to position himself as a budget watchdog, and it's also true that there's not much else Boston City Councilors can do on budget issues - given that the State Legislature has controlled Boston's budget for decades.

However, conservative publications and commentators led by the Boston Herald and the Tax Foundation are taking advantage of the situation to attack public sector unions - claiming that since sick-day buybacks are "virtually unheard of in the private sector" that the perk should apparently be unheard of in the public sector as well.

Open Media Boston believes that all workers deserve all the perks they can get as long as we have to live in a capitalist economy - where the bulk of the profit of their labor goes to corporate interests and the rich. So the issue for us is not why a relatively small group of workers get a perk, it's why all other workers don't also get the perk.

Rather than attack some workers - who in this case are actually working in the public interest rather than for private interests - for getting a decent benefits package because they are collectively organized in labor unions, workers without such benefits (most of whom are un-unionized) need to think seriously about fighting to get the same deal. Instead of siding with bosses on issues like sick-day buybacks, they should think about siding with their fellow workers.

Of course, we understand that there is some corruption in any human system, and Councilor Yoon certainly has a right to look for genuine abuse and patronage in Boston city government. But he should be careful what kind of allies - and what kind of enemies - he chooses to make when doing a bit of grandstanding on what is ultimately a sideshow to real budgetary issues. The most obvious one being how to guarantee that corporations and the rich to pay their fair share of taxes to city, state and federal government; so that government at all levels doesn't have to go begging to meet the real needs of its constituency.

In an America with progressive taxation, city councilors wouldn't have to worry so much about union workers using their contractually-guaranteed benefits. Or how they are going to win their next election by biting the hands that get them votes. We'd encourage Councilor Yoon to mull these facts over as he considers his next move.