Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind (2 page)
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Authors: Mallory Factor
Tags: #Political Science, #Political Science / Labor & Industrial Relations, #Labor & Industrial Relations
In private companies with unionized workers, management and unions negotiate at arm’s length against each other over workers’ wages, working conditions, and benefits. The party on each side of the negotiating table is beholden to its own master. Management represents the owners or stockholders of the company, and the union represents the workers. But in a certain way, the managers, owners, union, and workers all share similar goals—making sure that the company stays in business.
When a unionized business grows and thrives, there is more profit to share and more workers to hire, leading to more union members and more union dues. With American businesses facing intense competition, many union officials realize that if their demands are too great, businesses will lose out to competitors and have to shutter their doors.
But in many cases, the unions demand too much, and as a result, unionized businesses are less competitive and go out of business. The percentage of private sector workers in labor unions has been declining since the 1950s, both because unionized businesses have been failing and because workers in new businesses don’t choose to unionize. Basically, private sector unions have been driving themselves out of business for sixty years.
Government employee unions are a totally different animal. Government employee unions use politics as the central plank of their business plans—unlike private sector unions, which have far less need for politics to maintain their bottom line.
Today, government employee unions, including many hybrid private sector–government employee unions like the United Steelworkers and the Teamsters, represent 37 percent of all government workers. These unions represent over 8.3 million government workers: federal government workers in Washington, state workers in our state capitals, and municipal workers in our cities. Unions represent almost every type of government worker including postal carriers, federal border control agents, Treasury Department workers, public school teachers, university professors and graduate student teaching assistants at public universities, secretaries in city hall, police, firefighters, prison guards, to name just a few types. Government is a growth area for unions, compared with the private sector. There are now
twice
as many government post office workers represented by labor unions as union members in the entire domestic auto industry.
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Government employee unions use politics to elect their own bosses—the government officials, like mayors and governors, who will be the actual bosses of the union members. And unions get to fire bosses who don’t perform for them.
Government employee unions use politics to elect their own bosses—the government officials, like mayors and governors, who will be the actual bosses of the union members. And unions get to fire bosses who don’t perform for them. How does that work? The unions use political spending to help pro-union politicians get elected to
office. These politicians become government officials who make decisions about union contracts and legislators who pass laws important to unions. And, if these politicians don’t support the unions’ agenda, the unions throw them out and elect other politicians in their place. Government employee unions are great at getting their allies reelected and punishing at the polls any politicians who fight their power.
In theory, when unions negotiate contracts for their members, unions sit on one side of the bargaining table, and government officials representing the taxpayers sit on the other side of the bargaining table. In reality, though, the government officials on the other side of the table may be beholden to the same unions against which they are negotiating. Unions effectively end up sitting on both sides of the negotiating table. The only party not represented at the table is you, the American taxpayer.
“In the private sector, the capitalist knows that when he negotiates with the union, if he gives away the store, he loses his shirt,” writes
Washington Post
columnist Charles Krauthammer. In contrast, in the government sector, “the politicians who approve any deal have none of their own money at stake.” It’s the “perfect cozy setup” for politicians, he explains; the more a politician favors the union, the more the union will favor him for reelection.
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The system is perfect for union bosses, great for pro-union politicians, also, but terrible for taxpayers.
But isn’t that essentially bribing government officials to take your view in negotiations—and isn’t it illegal? You would think so. But then you have to consider who makes the laws and who benefits from union political spending—the answer in both cases is government officials. Remember, when the fox is guarding the hen house, it’s not illegal to eat the hens. For example, insider trading on financial information is illegal on Wall Street, but until just this year, insider trading on political information by members of Congress was perfectly legal.
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If legal bribery benefits government officials, is it really any surprise that it is legal?
Legal bribery is just part of the “unholy alliance between unions and the Democratic Party,” explains Fox News host Sean Hannity. “Unions give hundreds of millions [of] dollars, help elect Democrats, they get sweetheart deals that have to be paid for down the road.”
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Don’t these sweetheart deals that government officials give the unions cost a
bundle? Sure, but here’s the beauty of being a government worker: you don’t have to care. Outrageous concessions to the unions don’t drive the government out of business and make you lose your job, like they do in the private sector. The government will
always
be in business. Unwieldy union contracts just make the government immensely bigger and more expensive—and more burdensome to the taxpayers.
Union membership among workers in American business—the private sector—has declined dramatically from a high of 35 percent of private sector workers in the 1950s to its current low of less than 7 percent. Faced with this declining market for their services, the unions of yesteryear found a new market—government workers. United Auto Workers represents auto workers of course, but it also represents more than fifty thousand government workers including firefighters, zookeepers, and academic workers at public universities like the University of California. Teamsters represents truckers, but the union also represents over two hundred thousand government workers including police officers, parole officers, public works employees, school bus drivers, and transit workers. United Steelworkers represents steel and aluminum workers, but it also represents government employees including university professors, health-care workers, and law enforcement workers. Government is the driver for the future growth for unions—and unions drive future growth of our government.
Government employee unions have figured out that in America today, there are just two groups of people: the “net taxpayers” and the “net tax receivers.” You’re probably in the first category. You, the taxpayer, are the kind of person who has a productive job. Maybe you are a member of a private sector union. But in any case, you make our nation’s “pie.”
While you are working hard making pie, government employee unions are busy taking pie and redistributing it to themselves and government employees.
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They eat the pie that you make. And they’re not the only ones. More than 50 percent of the American population now receives more from the government than they pay in, and the percentage of these “net tax receivers” is growing every day. Net tax receivers naturally tend to favor the growth of government because they benefit from it; taxpayers tend to oppose it because it costs them when government grows. Our nation doesn’t have much of a problem when a small percentage of people in our nation are net tax receivers; the problem arises when the percentage of people who draw their support from government, including government employees, is so high that it imperils our nation’s economic growth. That is where we are heading.
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.
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It’s good to be a pie eater.
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.”
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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.”
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“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.”
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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.”
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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.