For unions, forced-dues contracts are a home run—they get to extract money from your wallet without your permission or say-so. Forced-dues provisions are permitted in twenty-seven states and in union contracts in at least twenty-two states.52 Generally, more than three-quarters of the dues income that government worker unions collect is from forced-dues states. In fact, over half the unions’ total dues income comes from just six states: California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New Jersey.53
So, what services does the union provide you in exchange for your dues? The union gets between you and your employer in matters involving your job. Your union negotiates an employment contract that controls every aspect of your working life—from how much salary you get (where permitted by law) to how early you can retire, from how much vacation you can get every year to how many bathroom breaks you can take every day.54 Union representatives will also handle any complaints that you have against your employer, or your employer may have against you, and on and on. You will not generally deal with your employer on matters concerning your employment—only via the union representative. If you have a fight with your boss, instead of sitting down with your boss directly, you get your union representative, your boss gets his lawyer, and they have a chat.
And the union gets some goodies, too—the government must pay union officials for the time that they spend on union matters—called “official time” or “release time”—and give the union the right to be present physically in your government workplace, to keep other unions out of your workplace, to use your workplace mail system, to keep other unions from using your mail system, and other benefits. It’s a great deal for the union.
When contracts are renegotiated, the members of your union get to decide whether or not to accept the union contract, which is generally coupled with automatic recertification of the union until the next contract is put into place.55 Very few members vote in these matters—very often, less than 10 percent—probably because union members realize that this is just rubber-stamping. And so life goes on, with the union having a virtual lock on a group of workers until the end of time.
So you get a government job forty years after the union was certified in your workplace. You don’t get to decide whether you want this particular union to represent you—or whether you want a union to represent you at all. And you don’t get to decide whether you want to pay union dues. You just get to decide whether you want to take the job—isn’t that just a whole lot simpler?
Official Time
One of the craziest things that our government does is actually pay union officials to work for the union during their paid workday—called “official time” (or “release time”). Union officials and “volunteers” are actually paid for time that they spend at work on union matters. And some government employees can even work on union matters all the time for decades, without performing any actual work for the government, and still get paid their government salary, benefits, and longevity raises.
One of the craziest things that our government does is actually pay union officials to work for the union during their paid workday—called “official time” (or “release time”). Union officials and “volunteers” are actually paid for time that they spend at work on union matters. And some government employees can even work on union matters all the time for decades, without performing any actual work for the government, and still get paid their government salary, benefits, and longevity raises.
Official time is one of those key provisions that unions demand in their collective bargaining agreement with the government. As James Sherk of the Heritage Foundation explains, “Official time is a public subsidy for private matters. If federal employees value their union representation, then they should pay for it with their dues. If they do not value that representation enough to pay for it, taxpayers should not subsidize it.”56 But we do.
The federal government permits official time under federal law, but is not required to keep track of how much it costs taxpayers. But the past few years, they checked on it for chuckles, and found out that federal employees spent over 3 million hours in 2010 on official time, representing over 1,700 man-years of work and costing taxpayers about $137 million.57 Our federal, state, and local governments combined pay for over 23 million hours of official time annually, representing around 13,000 man-years of work and costing taxpayers over $1 billion per year.58 One commentator cleverly noted, “Official time allows union representatives to conduct routine union affairs and file frivolous grievances during working hours. Like an open bar at a wedding, there’s no cost to the guest (the union) but great cumulative cost to the bride’s father (the taxpayers).”59
Monopoly Bargaining over Government Workers
In most private businesses, you bargain for yourself—no group has the monopoly power to bargain for you. If you get an offer to be an insurance broker at a business on Main Street, you will negotiate with the owner of the business over your starting salary, relocation expenses, health insurance contributions, company car, and other benefits. Then, a year after you have taken the job, when a rival firm makes you an offer to jump ship and go work for them, you renegotiate with your original employer for better terms. You’re responsible for setting your working conditions with your employer. Nobody does it for you.
Now, imagine instead that you decide to take that job we have been talking about as a policeman in San Diego. When you are hired for that job, you are given the union-negotiated contract that specifies your pay, benefits, and nearly every aspect of your job. The union is your exclusive bargaining representative in almost all matters involving your job. This is not a service that they perform for you—it is a power that they hold over you. You are not even allowed to speak with your employer about any matter involving your job without the union doing the speaking for you. To the union, you are not an individual but a member of a bargaining unit—a group of employees that are represented by the same union and bound by the same union-negotiated contract. Whether you like it or not, you are part of a collective, a group of people that are dealt with only as a group. The union bargains for all of you as though you’re identical widgets.
Collective Bargaining Burdens
Unions like to talk about the right to collective bargaining, but it is no right. Collective bargaining is what happens to you when your actual right to sell your own labor is taken away from you and given instead to a government employee union.
There is nothing wrong with individual workers deciding that they want to be members of a labor union. Free association is the essence of American republicanism. Workers have the right to join a union, a church, or any lawful assembly, as do all Americans. But with government employee unions, usually an earlier group of workers selected the union and made the choice to unionize. This election may have taken place forty or fifty years ago, but the union still has the power to represent all current and future workers—until the union is decertified, which rarely happens. The unions’ collective bargaining power tramples the worker’s right to sell his own labor.
Current workers didn’t choose to bargain with their employers collectively—the union is already representing them whether they want it to or not. When it comes to employment, your relationship with the employer is supposed to be consensual. The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution bars slavery and involuntary servitude. If you’re being forced to work for a union—which in essence is what happens when you take a job at a unionized employer and are forced to pay union dues—you’re not giving your consent to that relationship. You should not have to pay a middleman at a private organization like a union just to get or keep your government job.
With collective bargaining, the union also inserts itself between the government employer and its employees, and sours the relationship. The union sets up an “us versus them” mind-set by casting its demands as a fight for employees’ “rights” against the employer.60 As a result, employees tend to be more connected to their union than to their employer. The gov
ernment has transferred part of its “boss” function over its own employees to the union, while retaining its full responsibility to pay their salaries.
One of the arguments against privatizing a lot of government functions like the police, jails, and schools is that these functions are too important to be subject to market forces. But if these critical functions shouldn’t be subject to Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the market, they certainly should not be subject to the “iron fist” of the labor unions.
One of the arguments against privatizing a lot of government functions like the police, jails, and schools is that these functions are too important to be subject to market forces. But if these critical functions shouldn’t be subject to Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the market, they certainly should not be subject to the “iron fist” of the labor unions. The market—in contrast to the union—would keep salaries, benefits, and retirement packages for government workers at market norms, would increase productivity, and would improve the fiscal health of our nation significantly.
Good Faith Leads to Bad Bargains
Another important right that the government gives up when it lets the union fox into its hen house is its right to walk away from the table in negotiations with the union. The terms of the collective bargaining agreement compel the government to bargain with the union in good faith.61 So, the government employer cannot walk away from the bargaining table, but must continue bargaining with the union until agreement is reached, or in most cases, face binding arbitration. This means unelected arbitrators can get the final decision on the terms of employment contracts between our government and its employees.
Unlike the government’s own negotiators, the arbitrators make the decision based on what they consider fair, regardless of its cost and how the state will pay for it. This means arbitrators actually have the power to force a state or municipality to raise taxes by granting costly concessions to the unions and government employees.62 As economist Charles Baird explains, “An arbitrator in government-sector labor disputes is unelected but has power unilaterally to determine the size of government payrolls and thus significantly affect state fiscal priorities. Some states have been forced to raise taxes to pay arbitrators’ awards.”63 Baird calls this a form of “taxation without representation.”
Once the arbitrator approves a concession, the state or locality is left to figure out how to pay for it.64 But politicians may not mind arbitration because they can blame the arbitrator for overly generous terms in union contracts, giving politicians political cover against criticism from other constituents.
Strike!
The biggest problem with unionization of government workers is strikes. In theory, organizing workers into labor unions is supposed to promote “labor peace” because there is an organized procedure for workers and employers to work out their differences. In reality, unionizing workers increases the number of work stoppages and strikes, whether legal or illegal. A frequently quoted labor truism is “The only illegal strike is an unsuccessful one.”65 When strikes are successful, the strikers negotiate for amnesty for their illegal strike activity. So, no-strike clauses don’t have the teeth needed to actually prevent strikes.
Strikes are not only a problem for our nation, but also for the workers themselves. Union members don’t have any rights to vote on whether or not their union calls a strike. Unions themselves decide how to call a strike which may include a vote by union members, but may just involve a decision by union officers. And of course, if the union calls a strike, union members lose their pay and receive only “strike pay” from the union, which is generally a lot less, so a prolonged strike can cause members significant financial hardship.66
Strikes are more pernicious when undertaken by government workers than in the private sector. If workers in a toothpaste factory go on strike, using one of President Reagan’s favorite examples, people can just buy a different type of toothpaste. The business owner loses, but the community doesn’t suffer much. But what happens when the police or firefighters in your city go on strike? Other than a few private security firms out there, the government has a monopoly on protecting citizens from crime and fire. If the police or firefighters in your community go on strike—whether their union-negotiated contract permits them to do so or not—who are the citizens in that community going to call?
The power given to the labor unions over government workers is far more ominous for public safety workers than for mere pencil pushers. As one commentator put it, collective bargaining is less of a problem when “the maintenance men of a public zoo are authorized to compel public bargaining than when soldiers, policemen, firefighters, public-school teachers, and garbagemen have such authority.”67
If government workers who provide essential services to our nation are organized and can strike, whether legally or illegally, the community faces a real threat. This is one of the reasons that Congress prohibited collective bargaining over certain national security employees—the FBI, the CIA, and the Secret Service.68 We just can’t have the men and women who are responsible for our national security called off the job for a strike. But as we will see in Chapter 4, the Obama Administration permitted the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to unionize, creating a big chink in our national security armor.69 Other national security employees and civilian military employees have been unionized as well, which could leave our nation defenseless and exposed in case of strikes.
Problems with Right-to-Work States
If you are lucky enough to live in a right-to-work state, you probably don’t think these points really apply to your state. After all, you think, we don’t even have unions in our state.
RIGHT-TO-WORK AND FORCED-UNIONISM STATES
Courtesy: National Right to Work Committee
Wrong. As you will see in nearly every chapter of this book, right-to-work laws protect most workers in your state from the worst union ill—forcing workers to pay union dues to get or keep their job.70 But government employee unions are still operating in every state in America and affecting policy and elections there. Right-to-work laws are good, but we must do better if we are going to defeat the government employee union menace that is plaguing our nation.
Right-to-work laws are a significant step in the right direction. The greatest goal of unions, as we’ve explained, is to increase the number of workers from whom it can forcibly collect dues. Nothing else impacts the bottom line of the unions more than forced-dues collection, so the unions are constantly trying to find new pockets of workers that they can force into this type of economic servitude. If more states passed right-to-work laws and made union membership truly voluntary, union bosses would stop being the Shadowbosses that they are today. It is that simple.
Government workers in right-to-work states do join unions, but far fewer join than in the forced-dues states, where the workers are forced to pay union dues whether they join the union or not.
Right-to-work laws, which are on the books in twenty-three states, protect most workers only against being forced to pay dues to a union—not against being forced to accept representation by a union. Hard as it is to believe, sixteen of the twenty-three right-to-work states can and do permit unions to exercise collective bargaining power over government workers at the state or local level. Collective bargaining gives unions considerable influence over government in these states.
To prevent union control over government workers, states must actually prevent the state government and its localities from giving unions collective bargaining power over workers, as seven states do: Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia. Only these states come close to adequately protecting workers’ rights and, correspondingly, have among the lowest unionization rates of government workers in the nation. But even prohibiting collective bargaining doesn’t prevent the government employee unions from reaching into almost every state and local election, as we’ll show.
RIGHT-TO-WORK STATES THAT FORBID UNION BARG
AINING FOR GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES
Courtesy: National Right to Work Committee
Conclusion
This sad tale began when government employee unions and elected officials realized that they could do more together than apart. With the unions backing them, elected officials didn’t have to eat so many corn dogs and kiss so many babies at so many state fairs. Rather than having to please thousands of voters, politicians found it far easier just to gratify their Shadowbosses, the government employee union officials. And union officials realized that rather than trying to organize all those businesses, they could get the government to let them unionize huge numbers of government employees, more or less with the stroke of a pen. Of course, none of the government officials who sign exorbitant union contracts actually have to pay for them—that is your job as an American taxpayer.
The scam was on.
Not surprisingly, the transformation to union control of our government didn’t happen all at once. There’s an old saying about how to cook a frog. If you put a frog in a pot of boiling water, the frog will jump out. But if you put a frog in a pot of cold water and gradually heat the water, the frog will stay in the pot, trying to adapt until it’s too late and he is cooked.
You, dear taxpayer, are the frog.
Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind Page 5
