“We encourage you to use this opportunity to recognize your employees and educate the public about the work state employees are doing to keep our citizens safe, protect our drinking water, provide medical care to the indigent, help abused children, maintain our roads and bridges, and so much more.”
—Gov. Bobby Jindal in last spring’s General Circular No. 2011-008 in which he proclaims May 4, 2011, as “State Employee Recognition Day in Louisiana.”
Louisiana Voice 
I really don’t think he means a single word of it. We are so far down in status that we don’t count at all with our governor and probably not with our politicians either. It’s not going to be as easy to get state employees in the future unless there are absolutely no other jobs available in the area. Even then state employment may be a temporary job only as it has been for many in the past. D.
The state workers are an easy target to single out. Nobody realizes the great work that state employees do until they need something done about a provider of services (health care for instance), that the state has authority over. How many people out there have had a family member mistreated in a health care facility and the state intervened in the incident and brought it to a positive resolution for that citizen? Who do you think provides that sort of intervention? Mr. Jindal? A legislator? The assistant commisioner of insurance? No indeed! That situation is handled by a state employee who is charged with the responsibility of regulating health care facilities, companies that are would be polluters, companies that are licensed and could rip you off while supposedly providing you with a product or service, restaurants, grocery stores, you name it and the state probably has some regulatory authority over that service. Maybe we should stop the regulation, right? Who are you going to call when that trailer park down the road has a stopped up sewage treatment plant and the owners refuse to fix it? When a hospital kills a family member? When you get sick eating in a restaurant because they have tainted food? If you said stop the government regulation and get rid of those lazy state workers, then who will you turn to to keep these things from happening? Somebody has to do the thankless job of seeing about these things or society will de-volve into anarchy. So when you consider the state worker, don’t think of her as a liability, think of her as an asset who is there to help keep the system honest, clean, safe to eat, safe to drive over, safe to use for all the people of this great state.