Those of us who make the pie are not organized into a group battling the growth of government. We have our own lives to live. We’re just trying to keep enough pie to feed our families. We don’t have time to march against those who want to steal our pie, even while government employee unions tell their members to rally against greedy pie makers, particularly big companies and the so-called “1 percent.”
Many government employee union bosses, though, are the true 1 percent, living off the rest of us. Many union bosses receive salaries and benefits approaching or exceeding half a million dollars. Countless other union officials make generous salaries that are multiple times what their union members make. For example, at the national headquarters of America’s largest labor union, the National Education Association, over half of the employees make over $75,000 in salary a year, and thirty-one employees make over $200,000 in salary a year, not including generous benefit packages.12 It’s good to be a pie eater.
New Tammany Hall
Government employee unions aren’t just bankrupting our economy—they’re also compromising our system of free elections. Unlike the private sector unions that came before them, government employee unions use bought-and-paid-for politicians to help create legislation granting them unending benefits.
Together, government employee unions and their paid-for politicians destroy all semblance of transparent and open government. Want to know what happened to your country? It was bargained away by our elected representatives, who were paid for lock, stock, and barrel by those government employee unions. Government employee unions are the “new Tammany Hall.”13 Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) is even more to the point: “The unions are the most powerful political group in the country today. Their power in politics is unprecedented. And without the unions, the Democrat Party fades away.”14
“People think that the labor movement is a subsidiary of the Democrat Party. They are wrong. Today, the Democrat Party is a subsidiary of the labor movement.”
As a former Labor Department official told us, “People think that the labor movement is a subsidiary of the Democrat Party. They are wrong. Today, the Democrat Party is a subsidiary of the labor movement.” And the power and money in today’s labor movement is centered on the government employee unions. These unions will do anything in their power to elect politicians who will serve their interests: they’ll spend huge amounts on politics, send in political ground troops to get out the vote, flood the airways with negative advertising to destroy their opponents—whatever it takes to win elections. And as government employee unions rise in power, the Democrat Party gets closer to becoming the permanent party in power.
It’s not as though nobody saw this coming. Not so long ago, even liberals agreed that it was illegal and inappropriate to give labor unions the power to act as “exclusive” bargaining agents for government workers against our government.
Even union bosses thought government employee unions were a nonstarter. “It is impossible to bargain collectively with the government,” wrote George Meany, the newly installed chief of the AFL-CIO—the federation of labor unions—in 1955. A few years later, the governing council of the AFL-CIO affirmed that government workers have no right to bargain collectively with the government “beyond the ability to petition Congress—a right available to every citizen.”15
COLLECTIVE BARGAINING AGAINST THE GOVERNMENT
The federal government and forty-three states allow unions to be recognized as the exclusive bargaining agent for some or all government workers. A union will be appointed as the exclusive bargaining representative of a group of workers if the union receives more than half of the votes cast in a union election. Thereafter, the union will have collective, monopoly bargaining power over all workers in the group, even those who voted against the union or didn’t cast their votes, in almost all matters relating to their job.
The union will have the power to negotiate for all these workers against their government employer over working conditions, salary, and benefits (unless set by law), and to represent these workers in grievances against their employer. Whether they join the union or not, all future workers will also be represented by the union without any additional vote being required. Government workers subject to collective bargaining include almost all types of federal, state, and local government workers—office workers, mail carriers, police, firefighters, prison guards, sanitation workers, teachers, university workers, and other government workers.
The point was obvious to everyone at that time: no organization should have special rights to demand government cash for a certain group of Americans. To grant such special rights to one interest group would be to compromise the integrity of our republic.
Money now flows from government employee unions to politicians and back again to the same unions in a never-ending cycle of greed and corruption. Now, virtually all Democrats and even a few Republicans in Congress and legislatures across the country promote legislation giving unions more and more power over our government and its employees. All the while, the politicians know that union money will cycle right back to them in return for their pro-union votes.
“So,” you say, “I get it. The government employee unions spend huge dollars on politics to get favors from government officials—but so does the oil industry, the banks, and nearly every other industry lobby. Why are government employee unions any worse for America than these groups?”
No question about it—crony capitalism is terrible, but crony unionism is far more pernicious. Let’s look at just three major differences between how government employee unions and corporate America operate. First, government employee unions trample the rights of workers by forcing them to pay dues as a condition of their employment and to support political causes that they don’t believe in. As economist Arthur Laffer recently wrote, “Most high-school civics students would agree that no American worker should either be prohibited from joining a union or required to join one as a condition of employment. And no union member—or anyone else for that matter—should be required to contribute to political causes they oppose.”16 Yet, that is exactly what unions do to workers when they forcibly unionize them. Corporations don’t do that, nor are many private sector workers forcibly unionized anymore.
Second, government employee unions imperil our communities by having the power to call essential workers on strike, and doing this even if such strikes are technically illegal, as we will see. If private sector workers are called out on strike by their union, some people may be inconvenienced. If essential public safety workers like policemen or firefighters, or even our unionized border patrol agents for example, go on strike, whether legally or illegally, communities suffer far worse fates.
Third, while corporations may hire lobbyists to represent their interests before our government, at least the corporations actually contribute to the growth of our economy by making products and providing services that make the pie bigger and make America more competitive. When government employee unions lobby our government, they are really just lobbying to make our government bigger, which weighs down our economy as a whole. Unions partner with government officials to grow the size of government, to hire more government employees, and to grant them more compensation. Then, these unions keep our government inefficient by preventing it from reorganizing, streamlining, and privatizing government services, because a more efficient government would mean less union dues revenue. There will be a tipping point when our government gets so big that the last remaining taxpayers in America will no longer be able to support the enormous cost of running our government. And we are rapidly approaching this point.
Private Organizations for Private Benefit
It is important to realize that government employee unions, like all unions, are private organizations. Unions feed off the largesse of government for the benefit of their members and union bosses. Government employee unions get their business directly from our government but are not themselves a part of the government. Unions represent government
employees because that is their business.
Albert Shanker, who served as the head of the American Federation of Teachers from 1974 to 1997, is credited with saying: “When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of schoolchildren.”17 Although it is hotly disputed whether or not he actually said this, the quote hammers home the point that the unions’ sole function is to represent their members, not to work toward goals that may be in our nation’s interest. Unions act in the interest of the unions themselves, not the public good. We must never forget that unions are run for the benefit of union bosses and their members and are not benevolent organizations.
FORCED DUES
Once a union acquires collective bargaining power over a group of workers, the union will try to get as many workers as possible to join the union. Government workers in the federal government and the twenty-three right-to-work states have an actual choice as to whether to join and support the union, including unions that have been appointed to represent them in collective bargaining. But in twenty-seven states, workers can be required to pay union dues and fees whether they actually join the union or not, and they can be fired if they don’t pay them. Unions call the forced fees that nonunion members have to pay “agency fees” or “fair share fees.” Because forced fees are generally set at about the same level as union dues, most workers decide to join the union to avoid pressure from the union officials in their workplace and to get the small amount of insurance coverage that comes with union membership. Unions make the vast majority of their dues income from these forced-dues states.
Rebel States
Twenty-three states are “right-to-work” states, meaning that these states have right-to-work laws that protect most private sector workers against being fired if they don’t join a union or pay dues. Government workers in these states are generally also given right-to-work protections, but not all workers in these states are protected against being forced to pay union dues. For example, airline and railroad employees are not protected by right-to-work laws no matter where they live or work. This is because the federal Railway Labor Act governs these workers and trumps state right-to-work laws.18 So pilots at United and American Airlines, for example, are unionized and are forced to pay union dues even if they live and work in right-to-work states.
In right-to-work states, though, most workers have a choice as to whether or not to financially support a union. Not so in the other states, the “forced dues” states that don’t protect this important right. In forced-dues states, a union that controls a group of workers under a collective bargaining contract can force every last one of those workers to pay union dues or be fired, including state and local government employees.19 And because so many workers are forced to pay union dues in forced-dues states, unions earn most of their dues income in these states.
Just because right-to-work states don’t generate much dues income for unions, it doesn’t mean that unions leave these states alone. The Shadowbosses have long tentacles. Unions spend considerable money, earned in the forced-dues states, to influence politics and policy in the right-to-work states. And government employee unions maintain a web of paid political organizers in every congressional district in America to make sure that their reach covers our entire nation. Unions are far more involved in politics and policy in right-to-work states than most people believe.
Union Tribbles
Government employee unions are always working to expand their membership and to organize new groups of workers. They’re like the tribbles in Star Trek—they seem harmless until they clog up the essential functions of the ship—in this case, our government.
To keep their dues business growing, government employee unions are reaching beyond merely representing government workers. Unions have been working to organize new groups of workers who are not employees of the government or any company but who receive subsidies from the government. In a number of states, government employee unions have already forced parents who care for their disabled children and people who care for their aging parents into unions and made them pay dues. The next step is to expand this organizing model to new groups of Americans—Social Security recipients, disability recipients, veterans, welfare moms, food stamp recipients, and other groups that receive government funds and benefits.20
Think about it—there are 3.5 million civilian employees who work for the federal government, making it the largest single employer in America, and around 17 million people working for our state and local governments.21 The unions are already representing 8.3 million of them. But there are also tens of millions of Americans who receive some benefits or entitlements from the government who could also be unionized with a few tweaks to existing laws. Imagine how much more income unions could generate by representing them as well.
What does all this mean in practical terms? The unbridled growth of crony unionism and government corruption will destroy the United States as we know it. Not just crazy deficits or nutty benefits packages—utter ruin. We’re almost there already.
Bankrupting America
The enormous costs of paying state and local government employees is tearing through state and local budgets. It’s bad in every state in the nation—though, of course, it’s much worse in states with heavily unionized government employees and where unions are permitted to extract forced dues from workers.
HOW MUCH POWER DO UNIONS HAVE IN YOUR STATE?
This Chart Shows How Labor Union Friendly or Taxpayer Friendly Each State Is Based on Its Laws, Regulations, Court Decisions, and Union Density.
Courtesy: F. Vincent Vernuccio, Competitive Enterprise Institute, www.workplacechoice.org
Government employee costs—generous salaries, benefits, and pensions—have grown exponentially and in union controlled states, these costs can’t be reduced without the consent of the unions. Union-negotiated contracts make it nearly impossible for union-controlled states to bring their budgets into line, putting them in a far more precarious financial condition than less unionized states, which have more flexibility to “right-size” as needed.
Not coincidentally, states with the longest and strongest history of government employee unions are also the states with the worst budget crises. Of the ten states with the highest debt per capita in 2010, all of them are heavily unionized and none of them are right-to-work states.22 Congress has even heard testimony that identified government employee unions as a “major contributing factor—perhaps the major contributing factor” to our state and local budgetary crises.23
Why Johnny Can’t Read
Another crisis in America is our failing K–12 education system. The blame for this problem can be laid at the feet of the two teachers unions, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). That’s because the unions negotiate the teachers’ contracts that determine who gets hired, who gets fired, what teachers teach, how they are trained, and ultimately whether American students are competitive with the rest of the world.
Let’s be honest—if you were to imagine an ideal K–12 program for the twenty-first century, would you select a nine-and-a-half-month program that breaks for ten weeks in the summer? Would you choose a 170-to 180-day school year, when America’s competitors have a school year of 220 days or more? Would you need to spend an average of nearly $11,000 a year per school child, not including the cost of school buildings and infrastructure?24 Would you build extensive infrastructure that is only used seven to eight hours a day, for only part of the year?
Our school schedule made sense when we lived according to the agrarian calendar and we needed our kids to help us in the fields during planting and harvest. But now we are competing with China and India and many other nations whose children go to school for more hours a day and more days a year than ours do. We need a school calendar that is optimized for student learning.
There’s something standing in the way of improving the competitiveness of our students—the teachers unions.
The teachers unions control the school calendar, prevent us from paying better teachers more, stop principals from firing bad teachers, and even control what our teachers are allowed to teach our children.
The teachers unions insist that it is your fault that our K–12 system is failing—you, the greedy taxpayer. Of course, they tell us everything would be better if we just spent more money on education. But throwing more money at the problem isn’t really the answer. In fact, Microsoft founder Bill Gates recently admitted to the Wall Street Journal that the $5 billion he spent trying to improve K–12 education in America yielded very few measurable improvements at all.25 And Apple’s immortal entrepreneur Steve Jobs reportedly told President Obama shortly before his death that until the teachers unions can be “broken,” there is “almost no hope for educational reform.”26
But at least we’re getting the best teachers, right? Well, no. Just ask the young middle school teacher who won the “teacher of the year” award at the end of her second year teaching in New Jersey. After she received the award, she was fired. Why fire the teacher of the year? Because union rules dictate that the most recently hired teachers must be laid off first—which is known as “last in, first out.”27 The teachers unions set the rules that dictate that if a school district wants to keep great new teachers, it has to keep all the teachers who were hired before them—regardless of quality or performance. Under virtually all union contracts, school principals can’t lay off their worst performers while keeping their best ones.
Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind Page 2
