Hopes were not high today for this month’s jobs report after the economy appeared to net exactly zero jobs in August. While the numbers beat expectations, the story behind them reveals a pervasive trend in public sector job loss that Republicans seem committed to ignoring.

In August, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the private sector added 17,000 jobs, but the public sector lost the exact same number (those numbers have since been revised). This month, the private sector created 137,000 jobs, but the public sector continued to hemorrhage jobs, losing 34,000. As Matt Yglesias notes, “month after month we see a labor market that’s basically treading water primarily because government employment is shrinking rather than keeping pace with population growth.”

Political Correction charted the plummeting public sector growth next to the steady rise in private sector jobs over the past two years. While the private sector marked a net gain of 1.4 million jobs, budget cuts have eliminated 572,000 government jobs. If governments maintained the same employment rate since 2009, “the economy would have grown by about 2 million jobs”:

This trend of public job depletion puts the Republican jobs agenda in stark contrast with the administration’s approach. President Obama’s American Jobs Act would not only add 1.9 million jobs next year, but makes targeted investments to arrest the trend in layoffs. The plan includes $35 billion in direct state aid infusion that will “prevent up to 280,000 layoffs of teachers, who are — along with cops and firefighters — particularly vulnerable to local government budget shortfalls.”

However, Republicans continue to block Obama’s much-needed plan because, in part, they see public job loss as a positive. As Yglesias points out, “this shrinkage is exactly what conservatives claim to believe will spark growth once they bring the era of Kenyan Anticolonialism to an end.” Buying into the conservative campaign against government workers, Republicans governors like Chris Christie (NJ) and Rick Scott (FL) openly tout laying off thousands of workers as a badge of honor. Scott actually bragged about getting rid of 15,000 jobs in his state. In talking up his draconian budget cuts, Scott admitted that his “biggest cut” is “always people.”

However loud Republicans sing about the shrinking public sector, plummeting public job numbers have failed to deliver on the promise of “private sector magic” — and the economy will continue to suffer for it.

Both the news media and a number of politicians have claimed recently that the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is in “crisis,” and that it is necessary to lay off thousands of workers or reduce service in order to make the post office fiscally stable. And the Post Office itself has proposed laying off as many as 120,000 employees and withdrawing from federal health care plans in order to navigate upcoming fiscal crunches.

It is true that USPS is facing fiscal challenges — it lost nearly $20 billion over the last four years and is at risk of not being able to meet a $5.5 billion mandated payment to the Treasury at the end of this month (which has been put off six weeks thanks to the last continuing resolution in Congress).

But what has been lost in the political debate over the Post Office is why it is losing this money. Major media coverage points to the rise of email or Internet services and the inefficiency of the post model as the major culprits. While these factors may cause some fiscal pain, almost all of the postal service’s losses over the last four years can be traced back to a single, artificial restriction forced onto the Post Office by the Republican-led Congress in 2006.

At the very end of that year, Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 (PAEA). Under PAEA, USPS was forced to “prefund its future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years in an astonishing ten-year time span” — meaning that it had to put aside billions of dollars to pay for the health benefits of employees it hasn’t even hired yet, something “that no other government or private corporation is required to do.”

As consumer advocate Ralph Nader noted, if PAEA was never enacted, USPS would actually be facing a $1.5 billion surplus today:

By June 2011, the USPS saw a total net deficit of $19.5 billion, $12.7 billion of which was borrowed money from Treasury (leaving just $2.3 billion left until the USPS hits its statutory borrowing limit of $15 billion). This $19.5 billion deficit almost exactly matches the $20.95 billion the USPS made in prepayments to the fund for future retiree health care benefits by June 2011. If the prepayments required under PAEA were never enacted into law, the USPS would not have a net deficiency of nearly $20 billion, but instead be in the black by at least $1.5 billion.

In order to remedy this problem, Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-MA) has introduced bipartisan legislation (which has 193 co-sponsors) that would allow the USPS to spend more of its own money to pay down its deficits, including $6.9 billion in pension overpayments or other overpayments that may total as much as $25 billion to $50 billion. These are Post Office funds, not taxpayer dollars.

Meanwhile, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) has been pushing for legislation that would lead to widespread layoffs and break the back of the postal workers’ unions to defuse the “crisis” that Congress created. Yesterday, thousands postal workers and the Americans who value their contributions to our society held hundreds of rallies at congressional offices across the country to support Lynch’s bill and to protest against Issa’s. Here’s are some snapshots of the demonstrations:

It’s up to Congress to act to allow the Post Office to save itself, lest it become a victim of a crisis that Congress itself manufactured.

Earlier this year, Ohio state legislators passed a controversial bill limiting the collective bargaining rights of public employees unions. Included in the SB5 legislation is a provision to eliminate small automatic pay increases for state workers, including teachers, cops, and firefighters.

Ohio Republicans justified the move by arguing that state needed to shrink the size of government and save money in public employee contracts. However, when it comes to the salaries of Republican staffers, Ohio Senate President Tom Niehaus (R) was not nearly as concerned with fiscal discipline.

A new investigation by the preeminent Ohio blog Plunderbund shows that rather than leading by example and asking his own employees to tighten their belts like they did public employees with SB5, Niehaus has been giving major retroactive pay increases to his staff. Those raises were as high as 37 percent:

Plunderbund research reveals that GOP Senate President Tom Niehaus, leader of the brain trust behind a bill to strip benefits from rank and file public employees, and champion of a budget that makes painful cuts to nearly every program in the state, has now committed the ultimate act of hypocrisy. [...]

Now, in the most recent move, quietly, effective with the first paycheck of the new fiscal year, Niehaus has followed the lead of the Governor by rewarding his top staff with enormous taxpayer-funded pay increases. His Chief of Staff, Assistant Chief of Staff, Finance Director and Senate Clerk all received a $15,000 yearly pay increase. The Deputy Finance Directory received a whopping $23,005 increase. [...]

Furthermore, the increases were retroactive, such that on July 16, these same staffers each took home checks containing 26 weeks of back pay at the higher rate, as if their raises had been in place since January. [...]

So, after passing SB5 which eliminates automatic 3% pay increases for state workers, the Senate handed their own staff raises ranging from 12 to 37%.

After SB5 was signed into law, one consequence has been that public workers are retiring in droves in order to avoid the new legislation’s onerous pension reforms.

Still, many in the Buckeye State are fighting back. A major opposition effort emerged, gathering nearly 1.3 million signatures to get a repeal referendum on the November ballot – one million signature more than necessary to hold a vote. A poll in May found 54 percent of Ohioans want to repeal the law, outpacing supporters by 18 points. Even Gov. John Kasich (R) has recognized SB5′s unpopularity and offered to sit down and negotiate the bill with labor organizers in advance of of November’s repeal vote.

Of course, all public employees should receive adequate compensation for the important work they do, not just Republican Senate staffers. For Niehaus to cut firefighter’s pay while giving major raises to his own staff isn’t just unfair; it reeks of hypocrisy.

Today, nearly three-quarters of a million teachers, immigration officials, court workers, and other unionized civil servants in the United Kingdom are on a 24 hour strike. These workers are protesting harsh austerity policies by the right-wing British government that will ask poor and middle class Britons to sacrifice in the form of pension costs and pay cuts, but leave the rich largely untouched. Al Jazeera English interviewed some of the strikers and filed a video report about the action. Watch it:

The reason these workers can protest their government’s policies in this way is because most non-security public sector employees in the country have a robust right to strike. Unfortunately, labor laws in the United States are not nearly as permissive. In fact, according to United States Code: Title 5,7311, U.S. federal employees are actually not permitted to strike against the government:

An individual may not accept or hold a position in the Government of the United States or the government of the District of Columbia if he —
(1) advocates the overthrow of our constitutional form of government;
(2) is a member of an organization that he knows advocates the overthrow of our constitutional form of government;
(3) participates in a strike, or asserts the right to strike, against the Government of the United States or the government of the District of Columbia; or
(4) is a member of an organization of employees of the Government of the United States or of individuals employed by the government of the District of Columbia that he knows asserts the right to strike against the Government of the United States or the government of the District of Columbia.

Additionally, in many parts of the United States, public employees who work for municipalities or states are also prohibited from striking. In states as diverse as Washington, New York, and Wisconsin there is a broad framework of laws that prohibits most strikes by most public employees.

Some British conservatives, fearing the rights that public employee unions have in their country, are already calling for changing the United Kingdom’s strike laws to make it more difficult for workers to exercise their power. It seems they would prefer their workers to be as relatively powerless as their American counterparts.

Earlier this week, despite raucous protests from Main Street New Jerseyans, the New Jersey Senate — thanks to the defection of eight Democrats who sided with the GOP — passed S-2937, a bill Gov. Chris Christie (R) backs that would ask the state’s half a million public employees to pay dramatically more for their health care and pension costs and limit the ability of public employees to negotiate over their health care packages.

Today, the New Jersey Assembly is expected to vote on its version of the bill. Speaking to the New York Times about the bill, Bob Master, who is the political director at the Communications Workers of America, District 1, noted that the bill would perversely ask teachers to pay more than upper-income earners were asked to pay in a tax that was rescinded in 2010:

Bob Master, political director of the Communications Workers of America, District 1, which represents most state workers, points to the inverted math. Under the tax surcharge rescinded in 2010, a couple who made $750,000 would have paid about $4,800 a year, or slightly less than a teacher making $65,000 will be forced to pay in higher health care and pension payments under the new plan.

Indeed, the so-called “millionaire’s tax,” which New Jersey eliminated in 2010, increased taxes for upper-income earners by less than 2 percent, and the number of millionaires in the state actually grew while the tax was in effect. But it now appears that New Jersey is on the path to demand that teachers and other hard-working public workers pay more of their income for health care and pension plans — 5 to 10 percent by some estimates — than the state’s richest had to pay under the now-expired tax.