Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind (17 page)

Another stimulus program gave the AFL-CIO Working for America Institute just under $1 million. The Working for America Institute is dedicated to creating “relationships in which workers obtain higher skills and better pay, employers become more successful and communities become better places in which to live and work.” We all want that, don’t we? What does the Institute
actually do
for a million dollars in stimulus? It will “provide technical assistance and support to labor leaders.”
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In other words, it’s a big slush fund for the AFL-CIO. Another AFL-CIO related union that received extensive stimulus funds was the Communications Workers of America. This union received nearly $4 million to “provide training to individuals in the automotive and auto-related communities across Ohio which have been impacted by recent automotive related restructurings.”
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This sounds great until you
realize that it was unions like those affiliated with the AFL-CIO that bankrupted the automobile companies in the first place.

The stimulus package and phantom green jobs programs were just the beginning of a strong Obama-union alliance during Obama’s first term. Obama gave the unions another enormous payback when he recommended that major government projects use unionized labor.

As the
Wall Street Journal
noted, “There’s almost a direct correlation these days between the Obama Administration’s complaints about ‘special interests’ and its own fealty to such interests. Consider its latest decree that federal contractors must be union shops.”
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The
Journal
was referencing Executive Order No. 13,502, which President Obama issued during his first weeks as President. The Order encourages federal agencies to enter into Project Labor Agreements, or PLAs, with labor unions on projects of more than $25 million. As the
Journal
noted, “Only 15% of the nation’s construction workers are unionized, so from now on the other 85% will have to forgo federal work for having exercised their right to not join a union.” In contrast, the Bush Administration had preserved open competition for work on federal construction projects by expressly prohibiting PLAs.
³³

By favoring unionized workers, PLAs restrict competition and drive up the costs of construction projects about 10 to 20 percent—great for unions, but terrible for taxpayers.
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And even though one of the major arguments in favor of PLAs is that they prevent work stoppages and strikes, studies have shown that PLAs don’t prevent these costly events.
³⁵
Even though their contracts forbid them to engage in work stoppages and strikes, some workers engaged under PLAs still do use
these practices as a bargaining tool in negotiations for new contracts. In fact, construction on several of the new World Trade Center buildings and other New York City building projects has been delayed by unionized construction workers engaged under a PLA using work stoppages to bargain for new agreements.
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President Obama, however, recently confirmed his support for PLAs for federal projects and we can expect him to mandate greater use of PLAs by the federal government during a second term.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.

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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.

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.
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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.
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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.”
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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?