A Nation of Moochers (18 page)

Governor Walker’s proposal would have required them to contribute 5.8 percent of their salaries toward those pensions, as well as 12.6 percent of the cost of their increasingly expensive health care premiums. Even with the additional health care costs, government workers would be paying less than half of the national average for health insurance.
*
Taxpayers had been contributing $1 billion a year on employee health insurance, while Wisconsin’s pampered public employees paid a mere $64 million.
⁴⁷

The union’s dramatic backlash exposed not only the gap between the benefits of the public and private sectors, but also the depth of the sense of entitlement among well-heeled public employees who had drunk deep from the cup of victimism. In some respects, Madison may have represented the first Greece-like moocher rebellion.

Break Out the Violins

Among the many tales of woe that appeared in the media in the wake of the Wisconsin protests was the melancholy tale of two public schoolteachers from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, who put in their retirement papers in the wake of the union reforms.

“Not only am I losing salary and benefits and facing a bigger work load, but now they are taking away my rights,” a 56-year-old elementary schoolteacher named Mary Herricks told
The Wall Street Journal.
“Retirement was supposed to be something happy. I’m so sad.”
⁴⁸

But a quick search of online databases takes some of the edge off the gloom. Ms. Herricks earned a salary of $68,423. The paper noted that even though she was retiring at 56, she would be able to collect “nearly her former salary” in pension benefits. It got better. Her husband, the local head of the teachers’ union, was also retiring from a position that paid him $75,916 a year; between the two of them, they made more than $140,000 a year. When generous fringe benefits are added in, the couple earned more than $190,000 in salary and benefits.

Nor would their decision to retire pinch very much at all. Both of them will receive taxpayer-funded health insurance until they turn 65, as well as a payment worth about $600 per year of service, which would amount to about $43,000 on top of their pensions. They will also be able to earn additional income by working as substitute teachers. “Given that pensions are off-limits to certain taxes,” noted the
Journal,
“Mr. Herricks says they will bring home close to what they did before.” Few, if any, private-sector employees in Wisconsin would be able to say the same.

All About the “Rights”

As the battle over the two Americas escalated in Wisconsin, union leaders executed a tactical pivot, insisting that the uproar was not really about money at all, but rather about “rights.” Walker’s proposal included sharply curtailing the ability of government unions to bargain for anything other than wages and eliminated both mandatory union membership and the automatic deduction of union dues from public-employee paychecks. Some of the government unions said they would agree to the increased pension and health care contributions, but insisted they be able to retain all of their collective bargaining rights. Protestors claimed that those “rights” to bargain were fundamental civil rights. This was, of course, errant nonsense.

There is no “right” to collective bargaining. Most federal employees are not permitted to collectively bargain either for wages or for benefits—and have never been allowed to do so, under either Republican or Democratic presidents.

In fact, the concept of government unions is of quite recent provenance. No less a giant of progressivism than Franklin Delano Roosevelt had opposed the idea of public-employee unions. “The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service,” wrote FDR. “I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place” in the public sector. “[A] strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to obstruct the operations of government until their demands are satisfied. Such action looking toward the paralysis of government by those who have sworn to support it is unthinkable and intolerable.” Even labor boss George Meany, the president of the AFL-CIO, turned a doubtful eye on the idea of public-employee unions. “The main function of American trade unions is collective bargaining,” he wrote in 1955. “It is impossible to bargain collectively with the government.”
⁴⁹

Even today, government workers are allowed to collectively bargain in only roughly half the states, while others sharply limit who is allowed to come to the bargaining table. Indiana, Texas, and North Carolina do not permit public-employee bargaining at all.
⁵⁰
“At last report,” quipped columnist Jeff Jacoby, “democracy, fundamental rights, and freedom were doing just fine in all of them.”

In practice, collective bargaining is less about rights than about power, as over time governments have ceded more and more authority and benefits to unions. In Madison, for example, in the voluminous teachers’ contract, the list of items subject to collective bargaining included everything from the size of bulletin boards to lighting, noise, chairs, footrests, adjustable terminals and keyboards, wall coverings and carpets, and room temperature. Even starting cars during cold weather was subject to collective bargaining. So great was the clout of the teachers’ union that they were able to insist that school districts throughout the state make deals with the
union’s own insurance company
to purchase health insurance, even though it often cost far more than comparable policies.
⁵¹

After years of collective bargaining and growing union power, state and local government in Wisconsin were rife with stories of bloated salaries and benefits. The highest paid municipal employee in Madison, for example, was a bus driver who pulled down a salary of $159,258 in 2009. That total included more than $109,000 in overtime that he was required to be paid through the union contract. More than a dozen state prison guards also made more than $100,000 in 2009, using generous overtime provisions that their union had negotiated with the state. In a practice known as “sick leave stacking,” guards were able to call in sick for one shift, but show up for the next shift and be paid time and a half. As Walker’s office later noted, “This results in the officer receiving 2.5 times his or her rate of pay, while still only working 8 hours.”
*

Riding the collective bargaining gravy train, some Wisconsin teachers were able to get a full year’s salary for just thirty days of actual work. In Green Bay, for example, the teachers’ union contract created an “emeritus program,” under which teachers were paid a full year’s salary—in addition to their already generous pension—for showing up just thirty days over a three-year period.
⁵²
Madison’s teachers had an even sweeter deal, since they had collectively bargained for an “emeritus program” that paid retirees nearly $10,000 a year on top of their pensions. Unlike the Green Bay deal, Madison teachers were not required to show up for a single day of work to receive the benefit.

In another school district teachers enjoyed a staggering ninety paid sick days a year. Because the school year in Wisconsin was 180 days long, this meant that they could be paid a full year’s salary for just ninety days of work.
⁵³
In Milwaukee, the teachers’ union was able to get the district to pay health care premiums for retirees, a benefit that in 2016 will cost $4.9 billion, four times the Milwaukee school system’s entire current annual budget.
⁵⁴

Life’s Blood

Ultimately, the ferocity of the union backlash can be explained simply: It was not about rights. It was not even about the bloated salaries and benefits. It was about power and the threat posed to that power by proposals to end forced union membership and the automatic collection of dues. The power of labor rests increasingly on the power of public-sector unions, and the mother’s milk of their power and political influence is their access to millions of dollars of mandatory, government-collected union dues.

For the unions and their political allies there is no threat more dire than the prospect of letting government workers voluntarily choose whether they will fund the union’s coffers. In that respect the story of Indiana governor Mitch Daniels is telling. Daniels wasted little time in cutting off the power of the government unions, eliminating their right to collective bargaining on his second day in office.

“On the second day, we discontinued it and I held my breath,” Daniels recalled. “And we didn’t have a Madison at all. I often say the only two things that happened were, one, we got the freedom to change things in a major way and, two, 95% of the employees, once it was their free choice, quit paying the dues to the union.”
⁵⁵
Since 2005, the number of state employees in Indiana has dropped from 35,000 to 28,700.

When Daniels became governor, 16,408 government workers paid dues to the public-employee unions. Six years later, just 1,490 did.

Part Four

BAILOUT MADNESS