Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind (4 page)

They’ve found their frontier—it’s our government.
²⁹
In this book, you’ll learn how unions now hold power over our government workers at the federal, state, and local levels. You’ll learn how these unions are destroying our rule of law and free elections, you’ll find out why Obama is the perfect partner for government employee unions, and you’ll learn how the teachers unions control America’s classrooms in all fifty states. You’ll discover what it’s like to be a member of a government employee union—what the union does
for you
and what it does
to you
. You’ll also learn why government employee unions spend so much of their dues income on politics and about the corruption and coercion within the unions themselves. You’ll find out what’s coming next—how their ultimate goal is to make
you
a member of a government employee union, with or without your permission, and how they intend to stop any politicians or groups that oppose them.

You may recall the philosopher’s stone, the elusive substance that was believed by the ancients to be able to turn metal into gold. For the labor unions, it’s no myth: government employee unions are the philosopher’s stone, turning government employees into gold for the labor union movement. All they have to do is continue to mobilize the net “pie” recipients to support their agenda and elect their candidates.

For the past half century, they’ve been winning. Unions’ power and privilege has always ratcheted up, never down—“toward greater union power, never less.”
³⁰

Our job is to reverse that pattern.

As President Ronald Reagan wrote in 1985, “Someone must
stand up
to those who say, ‘Here’s the key, there’s the Treasury, just take as many of those hard-earned tax dollars as you want.’ ”
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If there has ever been a time in our history to stand up for the American taxpayer against government employee unions, it is now.

Let’s get started.

T
ODAY, we’re the frog. Government employee unions are the scorpions. If we allow them to stay on our backs much longer, they will sting us and we will all drown. And, like the trusting frog, we’re letting them.

Government employee unions should be expected to do what these unions do—demand more and more from our government until they bankrupt our nation and us. And our job is to refuse them. It is up to
us to save our poor nation from the scorpion’s sting that we all know is coming in the middle of the river.

Two generations ago, there were public-minded government servants. Most government employees took real pride in their work. Their common goal was to build and staff a government that served the people well.

Before government employee unions came on the scene, government employees understood that service meant sacrifice in terms of pay. Sure, you wouldn’t get rich working a government job, but you’d have a lifetime job with a good pension at the end, and you’d get to make a difference. Working for the government was a privilege, and you were really working for your fellow citizens. But now far fewer government employees approach their jobs as a privilege to serve. What changed?

Labor unions came along, unionized many government employees, and drastically increased what a government employee could expect to receive in pay and benefits. Now most forms of “public service” are more profitable than working in the private sector. The government employee unions also trained government employees to demand ever higher pay and never-ending benefits, all funded by their fellow citizens.
¹

To be clear, we shouldn’t begrudge individual government employees for what they get in pay and benefits from the government. As we wrote this book, we even thought more than a few times that we should go out and apply for government jobs ourselves. We understand that government workers don’t make the system, they just benefit from it. But make no mistake, the culture of “public service” has changed from a focus on giving back to a focus on getting. And through their incessant focus on extracting more from the employer, unions have encouraged government workers to consider their jobs as an entitlement, not a privilege.

Many Americans, including Tea Party supporters, are angered by the decline of true public service. According to Tea Party advocate Donna Wiesner Keene, “Tea Party members are loyal tax-paying citizens, but their anger begins with the lack of value received for
taxes—the transformation of government worker from asset to liability, of the people’s government to the union’s government.”
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With this crucial change, government employee unions have been able to unite all net tax receivers into a huge special interest group that is focused on growing the government. Net tax receivers are those Americans whose income comes from the government one way or another—as salary, welfare benefits, and subsidies. Don’t government employees pay taxes? Of course they do. But it isn’t close to the amount they receive in salary and benefits—and, after all, they’re really just paying back tax dollars they already received from you. They give the government a cut of the pie they just took from your stove. This doesn’t make government employees bad people, and many government workers surely give good service in exchange for their salary. But whether government workers work hard for their money or not, it doesn’t change the fact that they are dependent on government to earn their living and are paid with taxpayer dollars.

This mammoth special interest group of net tax receivers is represented by the Democrat Party. Whether individual net tax receivers are liberal or conservative, it is the Democrat Party that supports their personal interests in keeping government large and growing it bigger.

On the other side is a dwindling group of people who actually pay the taxes that keep the other group afloat. How much longer are taxpayers going to be able to support the weight of net tax receivers?

Once unions organized government workers, the earlier pay gap between government and private sector workers closed. Then, the gap expanded in the other direction. Government service is now far more lucrative than private sector work ever has been or probably ever will be. If you get a government job, you can be set for the rest of your life—above market salary, great health benefits, and virtually unlimited job security while you are working, followed by early retirement and a generous and steady guaranteed pension until your death.

The smartest among you who didn’t know this before reading this book will put the book down right now and go apply for a government job. Michelle Obama, our First Lady, says: “Don’t go into corporate
America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need, and we’re encouraging our young people to do that.”
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Michelle Obama captures the message that we are all given about government service—that America needs more government workers to serve our nation. But is it really true anymore? How much “service” does our nation really need? And are we paying our government employees too much?

Economists have shown that government workers are overpaid compared with private sector workers, but it still remains a much debated question. Unions and some liberals argue that government employees still are not paid enough because they are so much more “qualified” than private sector workers.

Federal government workers averaged over
twice
the salary and benefits that an average private sector worker makes. Federal government employees average a stunning $126,141 annually in salary and benefits.
⁴
And how many federal government workers do you think make more than $100,000 in salary alone, before overtime and benefits? Ten thousand? Twenty thousand? Fifty thousand? No, actually there were 459,016 federal workers making more than $100,000 in salary alone,
over one in five of all federal civil service workers
.
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We can’t possibly need that many highly paid government workers to run our federal government, even if they are über-qualified.

One of the best detailed comparisons of full-time federal government workers and private-sector workers was undertaken by James Sherk of the Heritage Foundation. His report shows that federal workers earn an average of 22 percent more in cash salary than a comparable private sector worker, controlling for the major factors like age, education, race, and location.
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Pile on all the other retirement, health, and other benefits federal workers receive and you have a huge gap between federal government and private workers. Federal workers receive total compensation of “30 percent to 40 percent… above and beyond their observable skills,” Sherk found.
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Other reports have shown that federal government workers at the low end of the pay scale experience the greatest premium over private sector workers.
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Chris Edwards of the
Cato Institute shows that state and local government workers made on average 34 percent more in salary and 70 percent more in benefits than private sector workers.
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With that knowledge, why would anyone want to make the sacrifice required to work in the private sector?

And then there is the job security that comes with being a government worker. Ronald Reagan once stated, “A government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.” He was making the important point that once our government creates a new government program, it is very hard to get rid of it. The same could be said of hiring a government employee—once hired, they are rarely, if ever, fired.

At almost all government jobs, you would have to work pretty hard to be fired—drug use on the property, embezzlement, murder, that kind of thing. Businesses fire their workers three times as often as the federal government.
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Once you have been on the job with the government a few years, there is almost no chance that you will be fired or laid off. In fact, there is really only one way that you will be separated from your apparently God-given right to continue holding your federal job—death. At many federal agencies, death is more common than getting fired.
¹¹
The corpse from
Weekend at Bernie’s
is probably still sitting at his desk, drawing federal pay.

Here’s an easy, impartial test to determine whether working for the government is a good deal: how often do government workers voluntarily quit their jobs compared to the private sector?
¹²
If government workers are underpaid, they’d probably quit their jobs more than private sector workers; but if they are overpaid, they would probably hold on to those valuable jobs more than people in the private sector.

So, do government workers quit? Sure, but not very often. Government workers practically never quit their jobs—once employed by the government, state and local workers quit at one-third the rate of private sector workers.
¹³
Federal government workers quit even less often—at only one-eighth the rate of private sector workers.
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Government workers seem to either die at their government-issued desks—or, more frequently, on the links in Florida living off their guaranteed pensions. Why would anyone in their right mind ever give up a deal that good?

Retirement is where the real payoff comes—and it comes quicker for government workers than for the rest of us. Government workers are generally able to retire with thirty years of service at age fifty-five, or even earlier, at a full pension for life.
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In contrast, only 20 percent of private sector workers get this type of traditional defined benefit pension from their employer.
¹⁷
Almost all business workers have to depend on a retirement plan based on their own contributions and modest contributions from their employer, their Social Security payments, and any other savings to fund their retirement.
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And to receive full Social Security benefits, these workers now have to wait until they are sixty-six or sixty-seven (depending on their year of birth). Retirement security is very difficult to achieve for most American workers, except for the most successful and, of course, except for government workers.