The State's "Employment Woes" Go Well Beyond Salaries

James Brooks' September 18 piece in the Alaska Beacon about an $800,000 compensation study aimed at solving the State’s hiring and retention woes reflects a certain level of denial and myopia in the executive branch.

For many employees, the State of Alaska is a toxic environment that systematically treats its workers like infants and criminals who are out to fleece their employer instead of like the adult professionals that they are. Almost weekly, I hear from State employees who are too afraid to comment publicly on the abysmal working conditions they are laboring under. It doesn't help that their current CEO, Governor Mike Dunleavy, considers law and ethics to be loose suggestions at best.

Well beyond salaries, the State needs to do some serious soul searching on its draconian and outdated employment culture. That culture is not the result of any one agency, employee, or manager. Rather, it's an entire system of priorities, norms, and assumptions that have been allowed to develop over decades, with no apparent scrutiny or self-reflection, and that can be dismantled if those in power choose to do so.

For example:

Failure to adequately train management promotes workers who were great at their jobs, but can't manage their former colleagues: a perfect illustration of "the Peter Principle." Hassling employees over petty "infractions" like hot plates in cubicles and $3 cab tips during state travel breeds cynicism, disincentivizes hard work, and hobbles morale. The crippling, glacial bureaucracy in hiring results in the State losing great job candidates who just can't afford to wait around any longer for a decision. Prioritizing quantity over quality of work and a "chain of command" modeled off the military puts the whole workforce at war with itself and with the public. Collective bargaining and the occasional good boss can only go so far in mitigating these problems.

And then there’s just flat breaking the law.

I worked as an Assistant Attorney General in the State Department of Law for 12 years. After being unconstitutionally fired in violation of my free speech rights under both the state and federal constitutions, I embarked on a five year legal battle in federal court to prove it and won. So it's tempting to construe these observations as disgruntlement or sour grapes on my part, and maybe rightly so. But again, I am hardly alone in my experience with State employment. Even while working there, I encountered plenty of these issues. I did my best to ignore them, because I worked with (and for) some great people, and had lots of interesting and rewarding work to do.

In the post-COVID era, though, prospective employees are simply not going to tolerate the type of working environment the State has fostered. It's a seller's market for labor, and the product the executive branch is selling is defective at its core. That’s true no matter the salary or even the benefits, which also have been whittled away. It took working for an employer that openly values my work, compensates me accordingly, and treats me like a grownup to realize I’d been experiencing a form of Stockholm Syndrome during my time with the State.

If the executive branch is trying to break government to prove government is broken, it’s working. Those who suffer most are Alaskans who can't access basic public services from reliable workers, and who simply don't want to live or work here anymore because of it. The fact that other jobs in other sectors might also suck in similar ways isn’t an excuse for the State’s refusal to grow and change.

If the State truly wants to cure its "employment woes," it doesn't need an $800,000 contract to do it. What it needs is a long hard look in the mirror. 

On the Crushing Vulnerability of Parenthood

"You don’t know fear until you have kids.” 

That’s what an aunt told me when my first child was seven weeks old, and we were visiting family in Arizona. “I still worry about my kids, and the oldest is on Social Security!” my grandfather said three years earlier, and shortly before his death at 84.

I’ve known close friends, family, and acquaintances who've lost children to various blows of fate: overdoses, suicide, accident, disease. I’ve read books and articles on grief-what to say and do (speak their names, acknowledge their existence, tell stories, share pictures and memories) and what not to say (avoid "there are no words"). 

The most recent thing I read on this was a piece in the Atlantic by a father who in 2019 lost both his teenage children—around the same age, birth order, age difference, and gender as mine—in a car accident with a drunk driver that both he and his wife survived. I can’t stop thinking about it, and every time I do my heart starts racing and I break into a cold sweat.

“You have to be lucky in this world.”  Another quote, this one from my mother, a practicing psychiatrist and pragmatist. “It’s that simple.” 

My mom grew up as an orphan in foster care and was preoccupied with death during my childhood: The death of her parents, which she spoke of freely and excessively; fear of my death and my dad’s; grim stories from medical school; trips to graveyards. As a result, I came to view death as something inevitable, which of course it is. But I also deeply wanted to believe it was something I could inure myself to in advance, through obsessive magical thinking, which of course it is not.

Having internalized my mom’s vicarious trauma, I used to think her death was the worst thing that could happen to me. The minute my daughter arrived, screaming and looking like a little purple monkey, I knew for a fact I would only really care about two things ever again: predeceasing my kids, and living long enough to see them grow up.

But whether I get to do either of those things is out of my control, and I know it. It’s learning to live with that lack of control and that uncertainty that feels impossible. What do you do with that level of vulnerability? The sheer rawness of the exposure? It’s almost a deterrent to having kids at all. Of course, the irony is you don’t learn that until you do. It is literally the ultimate fuck around and find out.

The closest I've come to as a solution (besides mental healthcare, self-care, and some amorphous prayer-adjacent begging to the universe) is "gratitude practice." I once thought that this was woo-woo bullshit. But I now realize that "practicing gratitude" is actually a good way to re-wire your brain. Every day that my kids go to bed healthy (and at least somewhat happy) is a day I need to be--and am--immeasurably grateful for. Whatever the future holds for my children, for better or worse, reminding myself of that is somehow the closest I get to being able to tolerate the vulnerability of parenthood.

Five Years Later: It’s Finally Over

In December of 2018, I was illegally fired from my job as an Alaska Assistant Attorney General by the Dunleavy administration, three hours after the new governor was sworn into office. I had worked at the Department of Law for 12 years through five administrations (four of them Republican) without incident. I had an impeccable personnel record in which I had been consistently promoted. 

The context of my illegal firing was a "loyalty pledge" scheme concocted by Governor Dunleavy's then chief-of-staff, Tuckerman Babcock, in which the administration asked 1,200 non-unionized state employees to resign and pledge their political loyalty to the administration if they wanted to be rehired. I was also the target of numerous far-right bloggers and agitators in the state because of my social media activism. I knew that my firing violated the First Amendment and the Alaska Constitution's free speech rights. 

The next month, in January of 2019, the ACLU of Alaska filed a lawsuit on my behalf and another separate suit on behalf of two state psychiatrists alleging that these loyalty firings were unconstitutional. In 2021, a federal judge agreed with both me and the psychiatrists, finding in each case, for slightly different reasons, that the firings violated all of our constitutional rights. The psychiatrists shortly thereafter settled their damages against the State for $450,000.

Last month I settled my damages claims for $350,000 and my portion of the money was wired to me today. Because this is public money, I am going to explain exactly where it is going. 

40% of these damages go directly to my attorneys as compensation for their work. I cannot thank my lawyers enough for everything they did for me--the ACLU for filing the complaint; and Mark Choate and his colleagues for stepping in during the pre-trial phase. Adam Hansen, an appellate attorney in Minnesota, and his colleagues did the briefing that resulted in the order saying Dunleavy was liable for constitutional violations. After that, 50% of the damages go to my ex-husband. I got divorced during the course of the last five years. While the end of my marriage is not the State's fault, obviously the strain of the litigation did not help my family life and the law requires this disbursement due to the timing of the violations. Regardless, I am very much OK with this as he absolutely suffered too. After that, 22% of the damages go to the IRS. 

In the end I will net approximately $75,000. I plan to use this money to re-roof my 1963 house that has no useful life left in the roof, paint the outside of the house, and do some overdue renovations. I also just paid off the remainder of my car loan today. 

My case was scheduled to go to trial on damages (liability was established in 2021) in December of 2023. Most civil cases do not go to trial, and this one was no exception. Prior to settling the case, the State deposed me and below are some excerpts from that deposition (which is a public record). This should give you some idea of my general demeanor towards these people after five years. 

The most important thing to me was preservation of the judge's order that the State had violated my constitutional rights. Not for myself, but for all of the State employees that do not belong to unions and who do not relinquish their rights as American citizens simply because they go work for the State. It was very crucial that this order remain in place as a collar on future administrations, and going to trial presented the very real risk that the State would appeal that order, and that it would be overturned on appeal. I could not let that happen so I settled the case.

This lawsuit was pretty much the worst non-death experience of my life and I'm really happy it's over. Most of all I am happy there is a federal court order in place that will theoretically prevent this from ever happening to any state employee again.

I Hate-Watched Four Seasons of Manifest and So Should You!

(This post contains spoilers, but that’s like saying there’s some mold on milk that’s been out on the counter for a week).

I don’t watch much TV as I prefer to spend my limited free time on more erudite pursuits like books and dank memes. But somehow, I got pulled into the show “Manifest” on Netflix, and wow, was it ever bad. 

The premise of the show is serviceable enough: a plane full of people on their way home from Jamaica to NYC lands 5.5 years after it takes off. None of the passengers feel like they lost any time, but their friends and families have assumed they were dead and gone. For the next 40 hours of television—which is supposed to be (and to the viewer very much feels like) 5.5 more years—a cast of no-name actors tries to figure out what the fuck happened. 

What develops is a sort of police procedural meets Lost meets Fringe meets 24 meets the 700 Club Christian propaganda, and it is a whole ass chaotic mess. 

The show is supposedly set in Queens: the lead character (Michaela Stone) and her on-again, off-again fiancé (Jared Vasquez) are both NYPD detectives who look nothing like any NYPD cop I’ve ever seen. And also somehow, none of the characters sound or act like they’re from anywhere within 5,000 miles of the five boroughs, and I would know, having grown up in one and lived in two others during the formative years of my life.

There are so many stupid and ridiculous things about this show it’s hard to know where to start, but let me try. 

For one thing, Jared and Michaela’s special love song is “More Than Words” by Extreme. All of the scientists trying to determine what happened to the plane are somehow both cancer researchers and geologists at the same time. The government is involved (natch), and one of the scientists kills a top CIA operative by inducing anaphylaxis with peanuts. BTW none of this is even relevant to the arc of the plot. 

Ever since the passengers returned from the “glow” as they come to call it, they see and hear “callings” that compel them to do things like rescue drowning surgeons and find kidnapping victims in storage units. Michaela’s brother, Ben, who was also on the plane with his son, Cal, is on a mission to save all the passengers from their “callings” and stop the imminent apocalypse.

In so doing, he retires to his basement where he makes a psychotic chart out of blue tack and string, concludes that “everything is connected”and befriends another high-level government operative who fakes his own death in Cuba. He tries to repair his marriage (his wife, Grace, has a sexy boyfriend now) and get to know his daughter, Olive, who used to be Cal’s twin but is now 5.5 years older.

All the while, the script writers keep having the characters tell you what’s happening because the plot would otherwise be indecipherable. For example, Michaela finds herself a new husband named Zeke in a cave who is suffering from frostbite and says something like “Zeke was resurrected from death just like the passengers were, and we are supposed to find each other! It’s all connected!”

In reality, the only thing that feels connected about this show is the writers’ room and a focus group which together somehow concluded that a mashup of every genre on television injected with not so subtle Christian proselytizing would somehow make for a successful television show.

Sadly for our society, they were right.