5/17/10 Presentation to the NJ Assembly Budget Hearing
I am David Weiner, President of CWA Local 1081, representing the 650 non-managerial employees of the Essex County Division of Welfare. Governor Christie’s proposed budget and 33 bills will effectuate a scale of socio-economic genocide within New Jersey of proportions not witnessed since Dum Diversas, the papal bull issued on June 18, 1452 by Pope Nicholas V that is credited by some with ushering in the West African slave trade.
Mr. Christie cut $5.2 million due to New Jersey After 3, a statewide network of after-school programs that operated in 115 schools and served approximately 12,000 children and their families. Now thousands of school children have been relegated to latch-key status and left to the dangerous devices of the streets, which is particularly problematic within New Jersey’s urban municipalities. Many of these children may very well become the authentic version of the “drug mules” Governor Christie has already so callously called them.
Mr. Christie proposes allowing counties and towns to "opt out" of Civil Service all together and amend the Civil Service layoff law to allow politicians to pick out politically connected workers who are exempted from layoffs by just declaring them to be more senior than others. With the level of political corruption uncovered within New Jersey and prosecuted under his term as U.S. Attorney General, Governor Christie understands as well as anyone the profound propensity for political patronage that his gutting of Civil Service will render.
Women and minorities make up a large percentage of public employees within New Jersey. Through such honorable employment as teaching children, helping children whom have been abused and neglected, serving the disabled and providing public assistance for those most in need, especially in this economic climate, their tenuous toe hold upon a middle class existence while planning and providing for their own children’s destinies will be torn asunder by Governor Christie’s troubling ”tool kit”.
The awful aftermath of Mr. Christie’s evisceration of the public sector in New Jersey will have punishingly profound impact upon all of our state’s residents which will linger for many years to come. It is primarily through the firewall that is our state’s legislature that his incendiary ideological invective may at last be immobilized.