Yes.
Public-sector unions shouldn’t have rights most in U.S. don’t have.
By Nick Schulz
The governors in Wisconsin and other states trying to change the system within which public-sector employees negotiate their salaries and benefits are doing the nation a great favor.
At some point, the country’s political class was going to have face fiscal realities. The governors are the first to do so, and for that they deserve deep and abiding support.
Public-employee unions are unlike private-sector unions. In the private sector, some of the interests of employees and employers aren’t aligned. Employers want to keep costs low, but employees want to maximize their pay and benefits, thus raising costs to employers. In order to strengthen their hand, employees unite to collectively bargain over wages and benefits.
Now consider the case of public-sector unions. Public-sector employees want to maximize their wages and benefits, too. But unlike their private-sector counterparts, they have a very big role to play in choosing the employers on the other side of the negotiating table. They do this by taking funds earned through collective bargaining and sending them right back to the people they bargain with in the form of political contributions.
If that sounds like a rigged system, well, it’s because it is.
Opposing collective-bargaining rights for public employees does not make one anti-union. After all, many of the great champions of the American labor movement — including George Meany, the first president of the AFL-CIO — sensibly opposed public-sector unions.
Franklin Roosevelt, another friend of labor, put it well, “The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.”
But for the past half-century, it has been transplanted into the public service. Although the results have been great for public employees, they’ve been a disaster for taxpayers.
Andrew Biggs, my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, and Jason Richwine of the Heritage Foundation have been researching the total compensation for public employees at the federal and state levels for the past two years. Their results should raise an eyebrow or two.
In California, for example, they found public employees “are compensated up to 30 percent more generously than are similar employees in large private firms.”
In other words, taxpayers are overpaying relative to the market price for services they are receiving.
“And the California experience,” they say, “is similar to that of other large states with powerful public unions.”
You can’t blame teachers, police officers, firefighters and other public employees for wanting the best deal they can get. They’re no different than you and me. To a certain extent, it’s impressive they’ve gamed the system to their advantage as well and as long as they have.
But as economist Herb Stein once said, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” Recognizing the status quo in public-employee compensation is untenable, governors are putting a stop to it.
Teachers, police officers and firefighters remain popular with the public — and rightfully so. But the American people elected change-minded governors in part because they knew that while the public employees themselves were wonderful, the system they were operating within had become rotten.
Of course, overhauling public employee compensation will get states only so far. Other spending cuts and reforms will be needed as well.
That’s all the more reason to reinvent the system of compensation for the politically well-connected unions. It sends an important message that no one is above the required sacrifices and changes.
Nick Schulz is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
No.
Attack on unions is part of larger fight to weaken employee rights.
By Michael J. Wilson
The frustration and idealism that poured into the streets of Cairo in early February and eventually changed that nation are finding their counterpoints at state capitals across the U.S.
In Egypt, the goal was political freedom. Here it’s economic justice. Both are necessary for a healthy society. The Egyptian protesters persevered in the face of bullying rhetoric and violence. America’s working families can change their nation, too, if they show the same courage and determination.
The immediate instigation for the U.S. protests is the attempt by GOP governors and legislators to pay off their big-money backers by breaking some of the last bastions of secure middle-class American lives: public employment and the unions that represent public workers. Under the guise of budget politics, the GOP is pursuing a core ideological dream of a cheap work force, which ensures high corporate profits and low taxes on the wealthy.
That dream already has been fulfilled in much of the private sector, as evidenced by the stagnant real incomes of most American workers over the past 40 years, the replacement of stable pensions by risky 401(k)s and the loss of employer-provided health insurance. Now the corporate-backed GOP is turning its firepower on the one exception to this sad tale of crumbling middle-class security: public employment.
That private-sector employees have become more poorly paid, lost benefits and had the risks of retirement shifted to their shoulders at a time when private-sector unions were losing members and influence is no coincidence.
Nor is the fact that public employment has remained stable during a time of increasing public-sector unionization. That’s why the GOP has decided public-worker unions must be broken.
One reason that public-sector unions have survived while their private-sector counterparts have struggled is that governments traditionally were less likely to engage in the kind of underhanded tactics routinely engaged in by industry to keep unions out and their workers down.
But now Republican statehouse politicians are fulfilling their promise to bring business practices to government by attempting to destroy their workers’ unions, rather than cooperate with them to achieve agreed-upon ends.
Make no mistake, public employees and their union representatives are always ready to negotiate in good faith over necessary changes in collective-bargaining agreements, offering salary and benefit adjustments as part of an overall plan that addresses revenue as well as spending.
But the Republican governors and legislatures have no interest in negotiation because their real goal has nothing to do with balancing budgets. They welcome confrontation, believing it’s a political battle they can win.
They’re wrong. Republicans are essentially saying to the public: “We want public workers to be treated just as terribly as everybody else.”
That’s hardly a winning slogan. Presented with this analogy, the American people are rejecting this race to the bottom, with private-sector workers instead looking at the agreements achieved by their brothers and sisters in the public sector and asking, “Why not us?”
That’s why it’s not just teachers and home care aides waving signs and chanting slogans at state capitols — but clerks from Walmart and office assistants from downtown law firms, machinists and bus drivers, students and retirees. They know that the battle to preserve public-sector unions is part of a larger struggle.
The question we face as a nation is how much economic and political power we will allow to be collected in fewer and fewer hands.
Michael J. Wilson is the national director of Americans for Democratic Action in Washington.
