To the editor:

With many able-bodied, qualified Alexandrians unemployed since last year, some not taking unemployment pay or welfare or other subsidies and struggling to make ends meet, believe me, just keeping our homes and putting food on the table is a challenge met with great difficulty. Yet I know many other unemployed people who are truly worse off, so they must take taxpayer support just to live and I don’t begrudge  them. Therefore, I don’t understand your decision to feature on your front page an article about whining employed city workers complaining they haven’t gotten “significant raises” or “guaranteed improvements” in their base pay (“Taking care of civil servants,” February 25, 2010). These folks complain about “stagnant pay.” 

Some of us have been laid off from more than one job these last few years as our industries dried up and left town. I would be happy to make a fraction of what I used to make.

It is amazing you interviewed clueless civil “servants” who seem unaware that there are others who would gladly take these whiners’ jobs. There are others who would gladly take half a job. There are others who would gladly take any job.

So please remember who pays these whining civil servants. They live off of us, many of us without jobs who are much worse off than these spoiled servants who don’t seem to notice that their host organism is hurting.

Mary Ann Shelton
Alexandria