Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind (7 page)

Now, imagine instead that you decide to take that job we have been talking about as a policeman in San Diego. When you are hired for that job, you are given the union-negotiated contract that specifies your pay, benefits, and nearly every aspect of your job. The union is your exclusive bargaining representative in almost all matters involving your job. This is not a service that they perform for you—it is a power that they hold over you. You are not even allowed to speak with your employer about any matter involving your job without the union doing the speaking for you. To the union, you are not an individual but a member of a bargaining unit—a group of employees that are represented by the same union and bound by the same union-negotiated contract. Whether you like it or not, you are part of a collective, a group of people that are dealt with only as a group. The union bargains for all of you as though you’re identical widgets.

Unions like to talk about the right to collective bargaining, but it is no right. Collective bargaining is what happens to you when your actual right to sell your own labor is taken away from you and given instead to a government employee union.

There is nothing wrong with individual workers deciding that they want to be members of a labor union. Free association is the essence of American republicanism. Workers have the right to join a union, a church, or any lawful assembly, as do all Americans. But with government employee unions, usually an earlier group of workers selected the union and made the choice to unionize. This election may have taken place forty or fifty years ago, but the union still has the power to represent all current and future workers—until the union is decertified, which rarely happens. The unions’ collective bargaining power tramples the worker’s right to sell his own labor.

Current workers didn’t choose to bargain with their employers collectively—the union is already representing them whether they want
it to or not. When it comes to employment, your relationship with the employer
is supposed to be consensual
. The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution bars slavery and involuntary servitude. If you’re being forced to work for a union—which in essence is what happens when you take a job at a unionized employer and are forced to pay union dues—you’re not giving your consent to that relationship. You should not have to pay a middleman at a private organization like a union just to get or keep your government job.

With collective bargaining, the union also inserts itself between the government employer and its employees, and sours the relationship. The union sets up an “us versus them” mind-set by casting its demands as a fight for employees’ “rights” against the employer.
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As a result, employees tend to be more connected to their union than to their employer. The government has transferred part of its “boss” function over its own employees to the union, while retaining its full responsibility to pay their salaries.

One of the arguments against privatizing a lot of government functions like the police, jails, and schools is that these functions are too important to be subject to market forces. But if these critical functions shouldn’t be subject to Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the market, they certainly should not be subject to the “iron fist” of the labor unions. The market—in contrast to the union—would keep salaries, benefits, and retirement packages for government workers at market norms, would increase productivity, and would improve the fiscal health of our nation significantly.

Another important right that the government gives up when it lets the union fox into its hen house is its right to walk away from the table in negotiations with the union. The terms of the collective bargaining
agreement compel the government to bargain with the union in good faith.
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So, the government employer cannot walk away from the bargaining table, but must continue bargaining with the union until agreement is reached, or in most cases, face binding arbitration. This means unelected arbitrators can get the final decision on the terms of employment contracts between our government and its employees.

Unlike the government’s own negotiators, the arbitrators make the decision based on what they consider fair, regardless of its cost and how the state will pay for it. This means arbitrators actually have the power to force a state or municipality to raise taxes by granting costly concessions to the unions and government employees.
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As economist Charles Baird explains, “An arbitrator in government-sector labor disputes is unelected but has power unilaterally to determine the size of government payrolls and thus significantly affect state fiscal priorities. Some states have been forced to raise taxes to pay arbitrators’ awards.”
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Baird calls this a form of “taxation without representation.”

Once the arbitrator approves a concession, the state or locality is left to figure out how to pay for it.
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But politicians may not mind arbitration because they can blame the arbitrator for overly generous terms in union contracts, giving politicians political cover against criticism from other constituents.

The biggest problem with unionization of government workers is strikes. In theory, organizing workers into labor unions is supposed to promote “labor peace” because there is an organized procedure for workers and employers to work out their differences. In reality, unionizing workers increases the number of work stoppages and strikes, whether legal or illegal. A frequently quoted labor truism is “The only illegal strike is an unsuccessful one.”
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When strikes are successful, the strikers negotiate for amnesty for their illegal strike activity. So, no-strike clauses don’t have the teeth needed to actually prevent strikes.

Strikes are not only a problem for our nation, but also for the workers themselves. Union members don’t have any rights to vote on whether or not their union calls a strike. Unions themselves decide how to call a strike which may include a vote by union members, but may
just involve a decision by union officers. And of course, if the union calls a strike, union members lose their pay and receive only “strike pay” from the union, which is generally a lot less, so a prolonged strike can cause members significant financial hardship.
⁶⁶

Strikes are more pernicious when undertaken by government workers than in the private sector. If workers in a toothpaste factory go on strike, using one of President Reagan’s favorite examples, people can just buy a different type of toothpaste. The business owner loses, but the community doesn’t suffer much. But what happens when the police or firefighters in your city go on strike? Other than a few private security firms out there, the government has a monopoly on protecting citizens from crime and fire. If the police or firefighters in your community go on strike—whether their union-negotiated contract permits them to do so or not—who are the citizens in that community going to call?

The power given to the labor unions over government workers is far more ominous for public safety workers than for mere pencil pushers. As one commentator put it, collective bargaining is less of a problem when “the maintenance men of a public zoo are authorized to compel public bargaining than when soldiers, policemen, firefighters, public-school teachers, and garbagemen have such authority.”
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If government workers who provide essential services to our nation are organized and can strike, whether legally or illegally, the community faces a real threat. This is one of the reasons that Congress prohibited collective bargaining over certain national security employees—the FBI, the CIA, and the Secret Service.
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We just can’t have the men and women who are responsible for our national security called off the job for a strike. But as we will see in
Chapter 4
, the Obama Administration permitted the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to unionize, creating a big chink in our national security armor.
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Other national security employees and civilian military employees have been unionized as well, which could leave our nation defenseless and exposed in case of strikes.

If you are lucky enough to live in a right-to-work state, you probably don’t think these points really apply to your state.
After all,
you think,
we don’t even have unions in our state.

Courtesy: National Right to Work Committee

Wrong. As you will see in nearly every chapter of this book, right-to-work laws protect most workers in your state from the worst union ill—forcing workers to pay union dues to get or keep their job.
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But government employee unions are still operating in every state in America and affecting policy and elections there. Right-to-work laws are good, but we must do better if we are going to defeat the government employee union menace that is plaguing our nation.

Right-to-work laws are a significant step in the right direction. The greatest goal of unions, as we’ve explained, is to increase the number of workers from whom it can forcibly collect dues. Nothing else impacts the bottom line of the unions more than forced-dues collection, so the unions are constantly trying to find new pockets of workers that they can force into this type of economic servitude. If more states passed right-to-work laws and made union membership truly voluntary, union bosses would stop being the Shadowbosses that they are today. It is that simple.

Government workers in right-to-work states do join unions, but far fewer join than in the forced-dues states, where the workers are forced to pay union dues whether they join the union or not.

Right-to-work laws, which are on the books in twenty-three states, protect most workers only against being forced to pay dues to a union—not against being forced to accept representation by a union. Hard as it is to believe, sixteen of the twenty-three right-to-work states can and do permit unions to exercise collective bargaining power over government workers at the state or local level. Collective bargaining gives unions considerable influence over government in these states.

To prevent union control over government workers, states must actually prevent the state government and its localities from giving unions collective bargaining power over workers, as seven states do: Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia. Only these states come close to adequately protecting workers’ rights and, correspondingly, have among the lowest unionization rates of government workers in the nation. But even prohibiting collective bargaining doesn’t prevent the government employee unions from reaching into almost every state and local election, as we’ll show.

Courtesy: National Right to Work Committee

This sad tale began when government employee unions and elected officials realized that they could do more together than apart. With the unions backing them, elected officials didn’t have to eat so many corn dogs and kiss so many babies at so many state fairs. Rather than having to please thousands of voters, politicians found it far easier just to gratify their Shadowbosses, the government employee union officials. And union officials realized that rather than trying to organize all those businesses, they could get the government to let them unionize huge numbers of government employees, more or less with the stroke of a pen. Of course, none of the government officials who sign exorbitant union contracts actually have to pay for them—that is your job as an American taxpayer.