Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind

by Mallory Factor

  Washington Monument Syndrome

  Paying back the teachers unions for their support is always a pretty easy political move, because we Americans love our teachers. Another reason that it’s easy to channel money to education and the teachers unions is what journalist Steven Greenhut of the Pacific Research Institute calls the Washington Monument Syndrome.38 This is a trick politicians and unions use to get the public concerned about budget cuts. When faced with cuts, politicians and unions will always suggest that the government will have to ax the very public services that we all most appreciate—as in, “Budget cuts will force us to close the schoolchildren’s favorite tourist destination in our nation’s capital, the Washington Monument!” In this case, it’s the teachers unions telling you that teachers in your local schools are on the budgetary chopping block.

  Of the initial stimulus spending, a whopping $115 billion was earmarked for education spending like the “Edujobs” program. The program is called Edujobs to focus the public on the fact that teachers’ jobs are saved by the program. How did that work? The federal government gave money to the states, supposedly so that states didn’t have to lay off teachers. But money is fungible—all this money didn’t necessarily go to preserve teachers’ jobs. The states basically used this cash to plug holes in their budgets generally and to delay necessary spending cuts—not just to education but to other government services as well. Of course, the discussion is framed in terms of preventing your local teacher from losing her job. The teachers unions are able to put a face—your local teacher’s face—on the budget cuts to get you personally interested. As a result, stimulus spending for education is much more popular with taxpayers than stimulus spending in general. It’s the Washington Monument Syndrome at work.

  From the teachers unions’ perspective, this spending is essential to keeping dues income up. By retaining teachers in forced-dues states, teachers keep paying union dues. If states have to reduce the number of teachers and school workers thanks to the budget crunch, teachers unions get hit.

  While the stimulus didn’t create many education jobs, it does preserve existing government jobs—and in most cases, that means union jobs. The U.S. Department of Education claims that the stimulus created—or, more accurately, retained—367,524 education-related jobs during the 2009–10 school year, which if true would also have preserved at least $165 million in teachers union dues annually.39 One recent Edujobs grant program explicitly states that the grant money can’t generally be used to pay the salaries of outside contractors in schools. Do these jobs matter less to our kids’ education? Probably not, but they matter less to the teachers unions because outside contractors aren’t generally unionized.40

  More recently, Obama has been promoting the American Jobs Act, which is really almost more of a campaign promise than an actual piece of legislation. One part of this Act supposedly will create jobs by spending $593 billion more on propping up state budgets. The proposed legislation was designed, according to the White House, to preserve additional teaching jobs, but it will also preserve almost $50 million in dues income for the national teachers unions.41 As one commentator on the legislation writes, “It pays to have friends in high places.”

  Not only did stimulus spending protect dues income, but Obama sent the teachers unions some more goodies. The AFT Educational Foundation received just under $5 million in stimulus via the Investing in Innovation Fund, which gives grants to applicants—that is, other liberal organizations—with a supposed record of improving student achievement. According to the AFT, the goal was to create “evaluation systems” for the teachers. Because, really who could be better at designing and implementing evaluations of teachers than their unions, right?42

  In his 2012 State of the Union address, Obama continued to fulfill his promises to the teachers unions—this time by asking states to require all students to stay in school through the age of eighteen.43 While this proposal may or may not help our nation’s kids, it also just happens to mean more jobs for teachers and more dues for teachers unions. There are an estimated 1.2 million kids who drop out instead of graduating with their class.44 For each additional year that they are kept in school, 150,000 additional teachers and other school workers would be needed to teach them, resulting in more teachers union members and more dues income once again.45

  The National Education Association thinks that raising the school leaving age is such a great idea, for the union at least, that it has issued a proposal advocating students be required to complete a high school degree or stay in school until twenty-one!46 The evidence is mixed on whether or not raising the age of compulsory schooling actually improves education outcomes.47 But whether “at risk” kids would benefit or not, Obama’s proposal would certainly do two things: raise educational costs further, and increase the number of teachers our nation requires to fulfill this mandate which benefits the teachers unions.

  Card Check and Intimidation

  The unions’ first legislative priority for the Obama Administration was passing card check legislation. Unionizing a workplace currently requires two steps: first, 30 percent of employees must turn in cards asking for a union, and then a secret-ballot election must take place, in which the union wins at least 50 percent of the votes cast.48 In Orwellian fashion, the bill that implements card check was named the Employee Free Choice Act. It would do away with secret-ballot election and allow a union to be certified if the union could get 50 percent of employees to turn in signed cards supporting the union. The unions like card check because the protection of the secret-ballot election would be gone. Instead, winning union elections using worker intimidation would become the name of the game.

  Up until recently, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) recognized that intimidation could corrupt the unionization process. For decades, the NLRB’s standard was that if an election was marred by behavior that prevented an employee from exercising free choice, the election was invalid. But on August 22, 2008, the NLRB oversaw an election for the Communications Workers of America. After the election, some of the employees claimed that threats of physical violence had been made against them by pro-union employees. One of the employees received an anonymous phone call threatening to “get even” with him if he “backstab[bed] us.” Another group of employees heard pro-union employees aggressively threaten them with battery if they “cost us the election.” The NLRB, though, ruled that this behavior wasn’t egregious enough to moot the election.49 It’s hard to imagine what would be egregious enough to moot an election if that kind of intimidation won’t do it.

  Union members understand that the protections of the secret-ballot election protect workers against union thuggery. A Zogby poll showed that 71 percent of union members wanted to keep the secret-ballot law on the books, while just 13 percent wanted to change the law.50 But that didn’t stop the unions and Obama from pushing card check.

  Once he was in the White House, Obama doubled down on card check. He told a closed-door meeting of over a hundred labor executives in 2009, “We will pass the Employee Free Choice Act.”51 Reportedly, Obama also told the unions that he didn’t “buy the argument that providing workers with collective-bargaining rights somehow weakens the economy or worsens the business environment.” This, of course, pleased union officials to no end. “Him putting it on the record in public makes me feel better,” one official stated.52

  Obama has not been able to deliver card check to the unions, and this has been a very sore point for his union supporters. In 2009, Obama couldn’t get his filibuster-proof sixty votes in the Senate to pass the card check—despite having sixty Democrats in the Senate. What happened to the Democrats who didn’t support card check in the Senate? Well, we’ll never know, since the issue never came to a vote, thanks to Majority Leader Harry Reid, who apparently didn’t want unions cracking down on Democrats that voted against it. Several senators did come out against card check, including Ben Nelson (D-NE), Arlen Specter (D-PA), Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), and Thomas Carper (D-DE).
What happened to them? Nelson has already announced he will not run for reelection in 2012; Specter was defeated in a Democrat primary challenge in 2010; Lincoln lost her seat to a Republican in 2010. And Carper is up for reelection in 2012.

  Obamacare and Unions Go Together

  One of the great mysteries of modern politics was the high level of union support for Obamacare. As we’ve discussed, government employee unions generally negotiate for the world’s best health insurance for their members—the famed, wildly expensive Cadillac plans. Some unions even directly profit from this health insurance by negotiating for contracts that force states to purchase health insurance for government workers from union-affiliated insurance companies.53

  Kimberley Strassel explains in the Wall Street Journal that unions often negotiate with states for control of state employees’ health insurance: “In Wisconsin, for instance, the teachers union doesn’t just bargain for more health dollars. It also bargains to require that local school districts buy health insurance for their teachers through the union-affiliated health-insurance plan, called WEA Trust.” This arrangement actually costs the state at least $68 million more than the state’s health-care plan for its other government employees costs, with the excess going directly to the union.54

  The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and other government employee unions spent literally hundreds of millions of dollars promoting Obamacare. The SEIU has focused like a laser on pushing for universal health care, stating that the union “will not stop until every man, woman and child has quality, affordable care they can count on.”55 Why would government employee unions identify large-scale nationalization of our health-care system as a top priority when it is not a critical issue for their members?

  It can’t be just that the unions wanted to help make President Obama’s vision of a national health-care system a reality. There seems to be a more direct reason why unions supported health-care reform. Don Loos, former Labor Department official in the Office of Labor-Management Standards, suggests, “It is clear that Big Labor is banking on the probability that all healthcare workers eventually become federal, state, and municipal healthcare employees” who could then be subject to forced unionization.56 He explains that the SEIU sent a memo to the Obama transition team pointing out that there were 17.6 million health-care jobs currently, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics had projected that the nation would need 3.5 million more health-care workers over the following years. The SEIU memo proposes that stimulus spending be used for training of new health-care professionals with the involvement of unions like the SEIU, and promises the SEIU’s involvement in reforming health care in 2009.57 Loos explains that the SEIU and other unions were involved in health-care reform to pave the way for greater unionization of health-care workers. He notes, “ObamaCare is an SEIU and AFSCME membership ‘net’ designed to eventually capture 21 million forced-dues paying government workers as all healthcare workers eventually become federal, state, and municipal healthcare employees.”58

  By having the government take over health care, the SEIU plans to get a greater hold over our nation’s health-care workers. With Obamacare, most health-care workers would receive government funding and be subject to greater government regulation. As a result, more health-care workers could potentially be treated as “government employees” and be unionized.

  Looking to our neighbor to the north, Canada shows us that national health care yields more unionized health-care workers. Canada has national health care, and “as a result 60 percent of Canadian health care workers and a stunning 80 percent of nurses belong to unions—more than quadruple the levels in America,” notes labor economist James Sherk.59

  Unions support national health care in America because, quite simply, it is good business for them. Unionizing all the health-care workers involved in implementing Obamacare could generate as much as $19 billion per year in forced union dues, but even unionizing a portion of these workers would significantly improve the unions’ bottom line.60 Obamacare could allow unions to potentially earn more in additional dues income than the gross domestic product of whole countries, like Paraguay, Iceland, and Jamaica!

  This was the unions’ agenda all along. The SEIU made a grab for organizing all health-care workers as early as 2007 when it consolidated all its over 1 million health-care members into SEIU Health Care, and claimed that its union would “guarantee a voice at work” for all health-care workers nationwide—not just its members. Its 2008 brochure shares its plan: “SEIU’s health care profile—and power—will only continue to grow. And after we elect a pro-worker president and stronger pro-worker majorities in Congress, we will take all our energy, ideas, organizing strength, grassroots lobbying and political muscle, and make it happen.”61 SEIU also publically admitted its goals for national health care, which included creating “demand for SEIU-provided services” and crafting a health care “crisis” to convince Americans that we needed Obamacare.62 Once the other unions bought in to these goals themselves, Obamacare became nearly inevitable.

  Unions Win with Obamacare

  In Obamacare, the government employee unions got exactly what they were looking for: massive growth of the federal and state bureaucracies, creating millions of potential new union members. But they still had a problem. What about their own members, whose Cadillac health-care plans would now be taxed? That is what the meeting of the Shadowbosses at the beginning of this book was all about—the unions bringing their demands to the President as a condition for their support for Obamacare.

  In Obamacare, the government employee unions got exactly what they were looking for: massive growth of the federal and state bureaucracies, creating millions of potential new union members. But they still had a problem. What about their own members, whose Cadillac health-care plans would now be taxed?

  Faced with Shadowboss resistance to Obamacare, Obama acceded to union demands. He delayed a tax on Cadillac plans until 2018, giving the unions more time to find a legislative solution to the problem.63 Obama also granted “lucky golden ticket recipients” waivers from the most onerous provisions of Obamacare, according to columnist Michelle Malkin.64 Over half of the Obamacare waiver beneficiaries were union members—way out of proportion, considering just 13 percent of American workers are represented by unions. But the unions weren’t the only ones getting special treatment—nearly 20 percent of all waivers took place in the home district of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.65

  There were extra goodies for Obama’s union pals in the Obamacare legislation. A quiet Obamacare program called the Early Retiree Reinsurance Program grants $5 billion to employers to provide “gap” health insurance to cover employees who retire before their Medicare coverage begins. An Investor’s Business Daily editorial explained, “The little-noticed ObamaCare program was supposed to encourage companies to continue offering this benefit until 2014—when ObamaCare fully kicks in and will solve everything—by reimbursing companies for a chunk of their retiree health costs.”66

  What happened? Well, the unions were at the front of the line to apply for that federal cash. Pretty soon, the government had to shut down applications to the program because unions were flooding them. In the end, “10 of the top 12 recipients are either unions or public employee groups.”67 Investor’s Business Daily concluded that “this ObamaCare money is really being used mainly to pay off unions and governments that would have provided these benefits anyway.” The UAW Retiree Medical Trust alone netted over $220 million from this program, and several other unions got their piece as well before the program was closed to new applicants. The fire hose of cash from government to unions is hooked up, and the fire hydrant has been left wide open.

  National Security Unions

  In addition to receiving specific paybacks in the stimulus and Obamacare legislation, government employee unions have given President Obama a far broader directive. It is to help the unions to increase their cont
rol over America’s national security employees. Take, for example, the unionization of Homeland Security’s Transportation Security Administration (TSA) undertaken by the Obama Administration.

  The 1978 Civil Service Reform Act explicitly bars monopoly bargaining over CIA, FBI, National Security Agency (NSA), and Secret Service employees; subsequent Executive Orders have extended this prohibition to many national-security-related federal agencies. George W. Bush used his discretion under the 2003 Homeland Security Act to ban union monopoly bargaining over federal airport baggage screeners employed by the TSA. In February 2011, however, President Obama’s TSA Administrator John Pistole gave the unions collective bargaining power over airport screeners. At the same time, Obama moved to end a successful program that had allowed airports to privatize airport screening using strict federal security standards with substantial training and oversight, thus requiring more government, unionized screeners.68

  What was Pistole’s justification for this extension of union power over our airport security? Pistole explained that giving unions collective bargaining power over TSA workers would “ensure that a union’s role would help to reinforce consistency and accountability across security operations at all airports.”69 Perhaps he was thinking about the fact that unionizing TSA would immediately bring up to $18 million in dues into union coffers annually.70