and others, says surveys during the pandemic have found that anxiety rates for frontline workers are 20 times higher than usual. “I’ve really never seen anything like it,” she said.
Bill Mathis, not one to shy from speaking his mind, jumped into the discussion. He posted about leaving teaching because of the health risks to himself and his girlfriend, Annie, who has lupus, and how his salary made it hard to pay his bills. The good reputation of the schools in Romeo had been part of the draw when Lies, a mechanical engineer, moved with his family to Michigan from California more than five years ago. But he started to worry when the pandemic arrived, and he became a regular presence at the school board meetings thereafter. When Mathis made his case about safety at last August’s online meeting, Lies was unmoved.
“When I first started, there wasn’t such a thing. … It was basically you’ll get over it,” he said. “Unfortunately, because of our profession, we see a lot of bad things.” In fact, in the case of policing, her research has found that more people apply when told the job is challenging. Her research has found that a sense of belonging and feeling supported by a supervisor also helps soothe burnout.“The private sector and the social sectors, like the nonprofits, have co-opted the public service message, and so … are saying, ‘Come change the world,’ right?” Linos said. “So what government may have lost is the monopoly on public service.
Twenty miles to the north, back in Romeo, sixth-grade geography teacher and union leader Sue Ziel recalls starting to feel more resentment from the public when the recession began in 2008. A Gallup poll then found that public approval of unions dropped to a low of 48 percent, compared with 72 percent when the poll began in 1936, though it has been creeping up.
As a veteran with experience on which she could draw, Ziel pushed through but said younger staffers were more likely to struggle with less support in a stressful time, as Mathis did.