Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind (36 page)

Government employee unions and politicians have been working on growing our government for decades. The growth of our government may be in the unions’ interest, but it endangers us as a nation. Growing government hurts all the taxpayers—the people who make our nation’s pie. The losers include private sector union members who are also pie makers and don’t share the same interest in growing our government as government employee union members.

Government employee unions dug us a deep hole, threw us in, and pushed us back down when we tried to climb out. Now, they are handing us a shovel and telling us to dig deeper. Our government can no longer reform, streamline, and improve itself because government employee unions stand in the way. From our schools to our skies,
government employee unions hold our nation back from all the greatness that we could achieve and drag our nation closer and closer to the abyss.

For far too long, Americans have been blind and deaf to the threat of the government employee unions. The level of control that these Shadowbosses now exert over the lives of everyday Americans is increasing and approaching the absurd.

Just ask eighty-six-year-old Pennsylvania volunteer crossing guard Warren Eschenbach. When a nearby school built an area for parents to pick up their children from school near his house, Eschenbach, trying to be a good citizen, volunteered to control traffic.
¹
He had retired a few years before from a crossing guard position at another school and wanted to protect the schoolchildren in his own neighborhood.

But then a local union representative for AFSCME heard about this helpful citizen. AFSCME then insisted that Eschenbach be canned—from a
volunteer position
—because he was “undermining the union” and that he be replaced with a $12.65-an-hour unionized, dues-paying crossing guard.
²

The elementary school principal couldn’t believe it: “Here we have a community member who’s giving back to the community and offering something to the children to keep them safe and so I just view it as a good thing and I’m not sure why someone would find fault with that but obviously somebody has.” Somebody did—a government employee union official. And when the city denied the union’s formal grievance, the union threatened to take the case to arbitration.
³

Of course unions would find fault with Eschenbach—he’s showing that there are people who are willing to actually work for free for the good of their community—to volunteer. And we don’t mean
volunteer
in the union sense of the word, as in getting a stipend, meal, and T-shirt for “volunteering” at a get-out-the-vote phone bank for a few hours.

The Manhattan Institute’s
City Journal
recently broke a story about how parents volunteering in their children’s schools to help in the library or answer phones were being challenged by the teachers
unions, who claimed that the parents were taking jobs that should have been performed by union workers.
⁴
In America today, it starts to seem almost logical to ask: why should parents be able to volunteer at their kids’ schools, when we can hire dues-paying union members to do the work instead?

Or ask seventeen-year-old Eagle Scout Kevin Anderson, also of Pennsylvania. This hardworking teenager voluntarily cleared a walking trail in his local park, not realizing that the local SEIU affiliate would threaten to file a grievance against him for doing work that could have been done by a dues-paying union member. Only after the story broke nationwide did the SEIU back down.
⁵

These crazy stories aren’t the exception; they’re becoming the rule in America today. And unless we fight back, government employee unions will bankrupt our country, morally and financially, and destroy our nation’s future.

Our future
does
hang in the balance, and still the government employee unions press for every advantage, ignoring the looming fact that the walls will soon come tumbling down upon us.

The lasting legacy of our government employee unions is the corruption of our political system. Once unions shifted to representing government employees, they became intensely political because their growth depended on the largesse of government. As we have seen, these unions use money and manpower to elect government officials. These government officials pass legislation enshrining pro-union measures and negotiate favorable contracts with the unions that helped elect them. The unions then earn more forced-dues income as a result—which they redeploy to reelect pro-union politicians. It is a perfect cycle of corruption because the only people in a position to end the cycle actually get a piece of the graft and don’t want to stop the flow of free money.

We must always keep in mind that government employee unions are private entities; their business is maximizing dues income. Generating more benefits for the workers already in the union is a secondary
priority. That means that they won’t make deals allowing the government to reward better workers. They won’t make deals that benefit their members if it means that the unions make less cash. The union’s interests always come first. The workers’ interests come second. And the taxpayers’ interests come a distant last place.

The Shadowbosses need taxpayers for one important thing: our tax dollars pay for our ever-expanding government. The government employee unions create no wealth; they merely feed from the public trough. Although government jobs seem to be where it’s at in America today, we can’t all go to work for the government. If we do, our nation will be a lot like the former Soviet Union—everybody will have a job, but nobody will have a potato.

Many government employees make more than private sector workers; they get better benefits; they get better retirement packages. While it’s great to be a government employee these days, at least in comparison to a private sector worker, government employee union bosses have taken important rights away from government employees, too.

Few workers ever had the opportunity to vote for or against their union. It was just there when they got there, and it will likely be there forever, thanks to laws favoring the establishment of unions. And once workers are represented by a union, the workers lose their rights to sell their own labor and to petition their government employer on their own behalf.

Union bosses trade top jobs among themselves and take the cream off the top. And they do it on the backs of America’s workers, who are often denied a real voice in union governance. These same workers have to pay substantial union dues, generally without their consent. “Taxation without representation” was the rallying cry of the American revolutionaries. Today, union members should think about beginning their revolution to reclaim their right to control their own labor, to be free from coercive forced-dues obligations, and to speak with their own voice.

Not only do we pay for these unions, we also have to worry about what happens when they strike. We have seen that making strikes illegal for critical public safety workers doesn’t mean that strikes don’t happen. According to one union boss, it just means that the strikes will be
more
effective because illegal strikes are more alarming to ordinary citizens. And government employee strikes are far more dangerous than private sector strikes—surely if the functions of government are too vital to be transferred to the private sector, they’re too important to be handed over to the Shadowbosses. Police unions have gone on strike and allowed crime to go unpoliced; firefighting unions have gone on strike and committed arson in order to make their point. Tacit acceptance of union violence isn’t just for old-time private sector union thugs like Jimmy Hoffa—it’s for government employee union bosses like James Hoffa Jr. And, unbelievably, the Supreme Court itself has all but declared that kneecapping can be legal if in the pursuit of a legitimate union interest.
⁶
Apparently, your right to swing your fist
doesn’t
end where my nose begins—at least not if you’ve got your union card in your fist.

The possibility of unions striking led even FDR to denounce the notion of government employee unions. But it didn’t stop his ideological heirs from expanding unionism into the government sector. FDR knew that union support was crucial to his election efforts; his political heirs knew that government employee union support could pave a path to permanent majority status for Democrats.

Government employee unions know what a fantastic deal they have, and so they spend vast sums of money to keep pro-union politicians in power. These unions create massive political organizations that work hand in glove with the vast left-wing conspiracy, sometimes called the Shadow Democrat Party.

This process resulted in 2008 in the election of the unions’ ally, Barack Obama, a man with deep experience with the SEIU, AFSCME, and the rest of the government employee union movement, but no experience with the challenges of business or actually making the pie. He promptly signed a stimulus bill that handed out millions in grants to his union supporters. He rammed through Obamacare, which renders millions more health-care workers ripe for unionization, all while
issuing waivers for union members so they could keep their own insurance plans. He sanctioned unionizing national security workers. He appointed union officials to the National Labor Relations Board and much, much more. And he’s not done yet.

The reelection of President Obama would be the greatest victory in American history for the Shadowbosses. If the first term was a disaster for American taxpayers, a second term will push America over the edge.

Our children, who are our nation’s future, are literally playing the lottery to determine whether they will receive a decent education. The teachers unions are keeping our school system disastrously bad, because the current system works fine for the unions. The teachers unions won’t allow bad teachers to be fired. The teachers unions insist on arbitrary standards for pay, like years at the desk and degrees achieved, and won’t allow teachers to be paid for merit and performance. Worst of all, the teachers unions indoctrinate our students with a leftist agenda, creating new unionists in the process.

Greater unionization leads to greater decline. The stats bear this out: the states that have the most heavily unionized government workforce are the states most in debt. These states also have the highest tax burden. Meanwhile, these states are losing the capacity to fix themselves, thanks to union contracts that include arbitration clauses—making political disputes into legal ones, and letting arbitrators rather than legislatures decide whether taxes ought to be raised.

For all these reasons, taxpayers are fleeing the Union states and running to the Free states, reshaping the demographic map of the country. But the unions are powerful in the Free states, too, and we will all pay the price when the Union states go belly-up and the federal government bails them out.

Make no mistake—the government employee unions have bigger plans still. They’re already pushing into new areas, achieving forced unionization of people who are paid through government programs but who don’t even work for the government, like care providers. By extension, if you receive government funds in connection with your work, you may soon find that a union can be appointed to represent you. And if government employee unions are able to expand their model to Social Security recipients, veterans, welfare recipients, and other people who receive government benefits, these unions will lobby for
increases to social spending and entitlement programs. And that will pretty much be the end of America as we know it. We’re not there yet, but we’re close.

There is good news, however: America is fighting back. The battle has begun in states across our nation, where good politicians have decided to stop letting union bosses hold the future hostage. But the government employee unions won’t go down without a fight. In Ohio, unions were able to roll back a major pro-taxpayer bill. In Wisconsin, unions pushed for the recall of Governor Scott Walker to punish him for reforming collective bargaining of government workers in that state, but lost the recall election. But in Indiana, unions have encountered a big setback and lost their power to forcibly collect dues there. In February 2012, Indiana became our nation’s twenty-third right-to-work state, returning to workers in that state their right to decide whether or not to support a union financially.

This is the great battle of our time. It is a battle for the heart and soul of our country. It’s not merely a question of fiscal responsibility. It’s a question of freedom. Will taxpayers have the freedom to control their political process, or will the Shadowbosses usurp that power? Will workers control their own labor, or will they be forced to give away their rights simply in order to work? How will we fight the next government employee union power grab—when unions try to continue to expand their power over our nation’s workers? What will happen when there are not enough hardworking Americans willing to keep making the pie and just too many pie eaters?