Ed Ramsey, Public Employee

I wrestle with my own conscience sometimes. Four times in my life, I have been a public employee.

In the summer of 1977, I worked for the Water Department for the city of Grand Forks.

In the fall of 1977, I drove a gravel truck for the road crew in LaMoure County, North Dakota.

In the 1990s I was a custodian and janitor engineer for the Library System in Minneapolis. I was union president for seven years. I left the city after a lawsuit for union retaliation, because the bosses would not promote me.

From 2005 to 2008, I was an operating engineer for North Point Clinic in Minneapolis, a Hennepin County facility. I left before being fired: the County was after me for union activity, and the Teamsters did not support me. I was a militant union steward.

Despite all the ups an downs, I, when a retire will get something of a public employee pension.

If I am so anti-government, how can I justify working for various governmental agencies. Am I rank hypocrite? Perhaps, but that was not my intention.

Mostly I needed a middle class paycheck, and that was my only motive.  I have always suffered from multiple disabilities, very militant union activity, plus the deadly social disability of being an individuator, among groupist public employees (discrimination by joiners against individuals and individualists is a human right that has not yet been recognized, but it is a natural right, and a constitutional right to be protected class in time), so that has made my job history spotty.

Public employee or private employee, I showed up just about every day on time, was honest, and worked hard. The rest is not that important.