Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind (8 page)
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Authors: Mallory Factor
Tags: #Political Science, #Political Science / Labor & Industrial Relations, #Labor & Industrial Relations
The scam was on.
Not surprisingly, the transformation to union control of our government didn’t happen all at once. There’s an old saying about how to cook a frog. If you put a frog in a pot of boiling water, the frog will jump out. But if you put a frog in a pot of cold water and gradually heat the water, the frog will stay in the pot, trying to adapt until it’s too late and he is cooked.
You, dear taxpayer, are the frog.
In the next chapter, we will tell you how you got in the pot, who turned up the heat, and why you’re starting to feel more than a little woozy.
- Union bosses pay themselves rich salaries by getting you to foot the bill.
- Of the 125 million people working in America, only about 13 percent are represented by a union. For private sector workers, less than 7 percent are members of a union. But of the 20.5 million people working for our government, 41 percent are represented by a government employee union.
- One in three federal workers is represented by a union. Thirty-five percent of state workers and almost 47 percent of local workers are unionized, and as much as 60 to 70 percent of government employees are unionized in certain heavily unionized states.
- Two in three teachers, police officers, and firefighters are unionized.
- Government service is now more lucrative than the private sector. Federal workers can earn 30 to 40 percent more in salary and benefits and 22 percent more in cash salary than they would earn in the private sector with the same skills.
- There are over 459,016 federal workers making over $100,000 in salary—over one in five of all federal civil service workers. Federal employees get up to ten weeks of paid leave per year, or almost the equivalent of working only four days a week.
- Government workers retire at full pension substantially earlier than private sector workers retire (usually only with their savings and Social Security).
- The key to union wealth and power is forced-dues contract provisions, which are permitted in twenty-seven states and practiced in at least twenty-two states.
- Federal, state, and local government employees work on union matters for about 23 million hours annually—while being paid by the government. This “official time” costs American taxpayers over $1 billion per year.
- Government employee unions can cripple America’s economy, communities, and national security via strikes.
- Right-to-work laws protect workers against being forced to pay dues to a union in twenty-three states, but in sixteen of these states, government workers can still be forced under union collective bargaining control.
| States Ranked by Percent of Government Employees in a Labor Union (Right-to-Work States in Bold) | |||
| Rank | State | Government Employees in a Union (percent) | Government Employees in a Union or Represented by a Union (percent) |
| 1 | New York | 72.2 | 75.3 |
| 2 | Connecticut | 64.5 | 66.3 |
| 3 | Massachusetts | 62.9 | 64.2 |
| 4 | Rhode Island | 62.6 | 63.7 |
| 5 | Minnesota | 60.0 | 61.8 |
| 6 | Oregon | 59.4 | 62.9 |
| 7 | New Jersey | 58.9 | 60.4 |
| 8 | California | 56.9 | 60.0 |
| 9 | Alaska | 53.2 | 56.0 |
| 10 | Washington | 52.4 | 56.5 |
| 11 | Illinois | 52.0 | 54.1 |
| 12 | Michigan | 52.0 | 55.0 |
| 13 | Pennsylvania | 51.8 | 56.6 |
| 14 | Hawaii | 50.7 | 53.4 |
| 15 | Wisconsin | 50.3 | 53.4 |
| 16 | New Hampshire | 48.8 | 54.6 |
| 17 | Vermont | 48.7 | 52.2 |
| 18 | Maine | 45.8 | 55.5 |
| 19 | Ohio | 42.6 | 45.6 |
| 20 | Nevada | 40.9 | 47.1 |
| 21 | Montana | 38.4 | 41.9 |
| 22 | Delaware | 36.7 | 39.5 |
| 23 | Iowa | 35.9 | 46.0 |
| 24 | Maryland | 31.0 | 34.8 |
| 25 | Indiana | 28.3 | 31.4 |
| 26 | West Virginia | 26.9 | 30.2 |
| 27 | Colorado | 26.4 | 29.8 |
| 28 | Florida | 26.4 | 31.8 |
| 29 | Nebraska | 25.4 | 32.6 |
| 30 | Alabama | 24.8 | 26.8 |
| 31 | Missouri | 21.4 | 28.1 |
| 32 | Kentucky | 19.9 | 24.6 |
| 33 | Kansas | 19.7 | 27.8 |
| 34 | Utah | 17.6 | 22.2 |
| 35 | D.C. | 17.5 | 19.7 |
| 36 | New Mexico | 17.4 | 23.8 |
| 37 | Texas | 17.1 | 21.1 |
| 38 | Arizona | 16.6 | 21.2 |
| 39 | Oklahoma | 16.6 | 21.1 |
| 40 | North Dakota | 16.5 | 21.2 |
| 41 | South Dakota | 16.3 | 21.9 |
| 42 | Tennessee | 15.3 | 20.0 |
| 43 | Idaho | 14.9 | 17.1 |
| 44 | Virginia | 14.1 | 17.1 |
| 45 | Wyoming | 13.5 | 16.2 |
| 46 | Arkansas | 12.2 | 13.9 |
| 47 | South Carolina | 11.8 | 15.4 |
| 48 | Mississippi | 10.4 | 15.3 |
| 49 | Georgia | 9.9 | 12.4 |
| 50 | Louisiana | 9.8 | 13.9 |
| 51 | North Carolina | 9.1 | 13.3 |
Based on data provided by
Unionstats.com
.
Data Sources: Current Population Survey (CPS) Outgoing Rotation Group (ORG) Earnings Files, 2011. Sample includes employed wage and salary workers, ages 16 and over.
© 2012 by Barry T. Hirsch and David A. Macpherson. The use of data requires citation.
The Union Fist
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N a small city in upstate New York, near Buffalo, the bosses of a local union are on trial. They are charged with federal racketeering and extortion conspiracy in their efforts to
encourage
local companies to sign labor contracts with the union. What did they do? They allegedly threw boiling coffee at nonunion workers and committed $1 million in vandalism of company property.
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Court documents also charge them with sending threatening letters to company officials at their homes, stabbing a company president in the neck, and telling another company executive that they were going to his home to sexually assault his wife.
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But the most unbelievable part of the case was an alleged conversation between a union boss and a company president. The president allegedly asked the union boss why he should sign a collective bargaining agreement with the union: “You guys slash my tires, stab me in the neck, try to beat me up in a bar. What are the positives to signing? There are only negatives.”
“The positives,” the union boss allegedly replied, “are that the negatives you are complaining about would go away.”
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This story sounds like it has to be a joke, but it is taken directly from the grand jury indictment in the case.
How did the unions get so brazen about their power over companies—and now our government? Unions have a long history of thuggery, and the rise of government employee unions is likewise mired in corruption and deceit. It involves egregious threats of violence and high-level manipulation. But it started, as most awful things do, with good intentions.
In the mid-1800s, labor unions started out as voluntary organizations of workers in particular trades. Workers joined unions of their own free will, and the unions bargained for better salaries, benefits, and working conditions on behalf of their members. In some cases, labor unions helped workers improve dangerous and unhealthy working conditions. The meatpackers unions, for example, were backed by the public thanks to the muckraking work of Upton Sinclair, author of the 1906 novel
The Jungle
. In that book, he depicted meat workers toiling under terrible working conditions; some stumbled into rendering tanks and were made into lard, which went on grocery shelves nonetheless.
In many cases, labor unions coerced workers to join their unions and brought violent, bloody strikes to their industries. Bashing heads and breaking kneecaps were accepted weapons in the union arsenal. But the important point is that unions started out as
voluntary
associations—even if those associations became less voluntary over time. So how did forced unionism begin and then spread to the government sector?
It started during World War I, when President Woodrow Wilson relied on labor unions to organize workers for the war effort, as an emergency measure to increase productivity and preserve labor peace.
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But it took the Great Depression to truly legitimize labor unions. The Depression—and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s class-warfare rhetoric—made people believe that the rich were making their money on the backs of poor workers. These people also came to believe that labor unions would rebalance the power between workers and business owners.
President Roosevelt was one of the biggest proponents of labor unions and redistribution of wealth. Despite being an immensely rich white fellow, FDR despised the so-called moneyed class. The rich, he claimed, were trying to take excess profits from their businesses and, in the process, cheating workers out of what was rightfully theirs. Thus, laws needed to be changed to give labor unions more power to grab a bigger chunk of the profits.
Fighting against excess profits by businesses was a popular rallying cry of the time, mainly because of its populist message: soak the rich.
In a way, FDR was the first member of the broad Occupy Wall Street coalition.
The father of the American labor union movement, Samuel Gompers, had opposed forcing workers into labor unions when he led the American Federation of Labor through 1924. “No lasting gain has ever come from compulsion,” he said.
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Furthermore, Gompers believed that man’s ownership of his own labor is a precious right: “The only difference between a free man and a slave is the right to sell or withhold his labor power. This precious right must be cherished and guarded against all invasions.”
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Gompers had articulated a very important principle of workers’ rights—everyone has the right to sell or refuse to sell his labor in the marketplace. If workers decide to sell their labor collectively, that is fine as long as it is their choice to do so and they are not forced into collective bargaining.
But FDR wasn’t concerned with preserving voluntarism in the labor movement. In 1935, Congress passed and FDR signed the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). The chief Senate sponsor of the NLRA was New York Democrat Robert Wagner—which is why the law is still commonly referred to as the Wagner Act. Wagner was a member of Roosevelt’s “Brain Trust,” and a true believer in the “excess profits” line of reasoning. The Wagner Act gave labor unions extensive powers to unionize workers in American businesses. Those powers would be extended to allow unions to organize government workers around a quarter century later.
After the Wagner Act passed, workers could be forced to join a union and forced to pay union dues to get or keep their jobs. So, if you worked in a factory and a majority of workers decided to accept a union as their representative, you’d now be represented by the union, and you’d have to pay dues. Only later, in 1947, did the Labor-Management Relations Act (also known as the Taft-Hartley Act) allow individual states to pass right-to-work laws giving workers protection against being fired for not paying union dues, and there are now twenty-three right-to-work states with these laws on the books.
After passage of the Wagner Act, businesses had a much harder
time resisting labor unions who came in to unionize their workforce. As historian Burton Folsom explains, “The Wagner Act certainly weighted the scales toward labor.”
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The Wagner Act requires employers to bargain collectively with unions. It also forbids employers from using certain “unfair labor practices” to prevent employees from unionizing. The Act also put into place a watchdog organization to make sure that businesses were abiding by the new restrictions: the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). As you’d expect, the NLRB is usually used as a pro-union club against businesses. (In 2011, the NLRB brought suit against Boeing for opening a new factory in right-to-work South Carolina instead of expanding its operations in union-dominated Washington State, which NLRB dropped when Boeing reached an agreement with the union in its Washington plant to expand production there.)
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