re: #234 austin_blue

Privatize The Profit, Socialize The Costs.

When I was in the AF, the cooks in the alert shack were all AF personnel. A guy could be a cook for twenty years and retire with a pension (well, he would manage other cooks and the kitchen, supplies, sundries, &c later in his career). Now everything is outsourced to private companies.

True story. When the Space Shuttle broke up over Texas and littered the Piney Woods with debris, a Private Company (I think it was Fluor Daniels) was awarded a contract to get people to walk through the National Forest and tag debris. They were paid $75/person/day, plus perdiem. A friend of mine who spoke no Spanish but had a technical background (a field chemist who ran an on-site real time data lab truck at environmental sites) was in a real slow cycle for work and was offered a crew chief position at $35/ hour. What the hell, he thought, $1,400/ wk.

His entire crew was Spanish speaking and almost certainly undocumented, with no OSHA training. They were paid $10/hour. They lived in tents, at night, in February, and literally waked abreast for miles every day looking for pieces parts. For weeks.

I asked him if he learned any Spanish. “Sure”, he said “Culebra means snake and culebra peligroso means dangerous snake. We saw a lot of those. Also little pieces of Shuttle. Tagged them, bagged them, photos and GPS coordinates for each piece. A couple of big chunks we had to call in trucks or ATVs. Those Mexicans were just tireless and worked like dogs on that job. And the Contractor cleared $20,000 a day on my crew of forty. And they had something like 200 crews. That’s $4,000,000 a day for weeks.”

Privatize The Profit And Socialize The Cost. Modern Corporate Welfare.

Just to be fair, many of the search crews were off season wild-land fire crews along with their overhead. They also busted their butts searching for debris.