Posted by
Defend America on Saturday, February 06, 2010 6:04:32 PM
The New Tammany Hall
Public sector unions have become a labor aristocracy--and they are bankrupting states and municipalities.
October 12, 2009,
Vol. 15, No. 04
Ever since the 1972 Democratic convention nominated George McGovern
over the objections of the AFL-CIO, the standard wisdom has been that
organized labor's power in American politics has declined dramatically.
The failure of the current Democrat-dominated Congress to pass labor's
highest legislative priority, the Employee Free Choice Act ("card
check"), is taken as indicative of unions' political incapacity. But
the picture looks very different on the state and local level where
public sector employee unions have gone from one victory to another.
Indeed, they are the one group, besides Goldman Sachs executives,
that's done well during the current Great Recession. Public sector
unions have become political powerhouses in New York, New Jersey,
Washington, California, and a host of other states. They have become so
powerful as to threaten the Madisonian system set up to constrain any
one faction from overwhelming the public interest.
Once upon a time public sector workers received less pay than their
private sector counterparts in return for better benefits and greater
job security. But that bargain has been breached. Public sector wages
have more than caught up, while the differential between public and
private sector benefits has increased so much that public sector work,
particularly for the unskilled, is greatly coveted. To protect such
benefits, the unions have tenaciously opposed Senator Max Baucus's plan
to tax expensive health insurance plans to finance an extension of
coverage. Supporters of public sector union power have developed a
rationale for the government employees' gold-plated perks. The argument
is that public employees are the vanguard of the working class. As
such, the benefits they achieve will eventually have to be matched by
private sector employers. As Carla Katz, the leader of New Jersey's
Communications Workers of America, explained to Paul Mulshine of the Newark Star-Ledger,
reformers embrace "the progressive theory that unless you create a
substantial wage and benefits package that reflects good jobs and the
ability to have a middle-class life style, there will be a perpetual
race to the bottom."
Katz not only represents thousands of state employees, she is also the
richly rewarded former girlfriend of New Jersey governor Jon Corzine.
Katz's influence on Corzine became clear in 2006 when the impassioned
governor spoke to a Trenton rally of roughly 10,000 public workers and
shouted out: "We will fight for a fair contract." Corzine was of course
management in that situation, not labor. But with the power of the
public sector unions to drive election outcomes, they now sit on both
sides of the bargaining table. Unlike private sector unions, the sheer
number of workers represented is not the linchpin of their influence.
Private sector unions have a natural adversary in the owners of the
companies with whom they negotiate. But public sector unions have no
such natural counterweight. They are a classic case of "client
politics," where an interest group's concentrated efforts to secure
rewards impose diffused costs on the mass of unorganized taxpayers.
Also unlike private sector unions, those in the public sector can
achieve influence on both sides of the bargaining table by making
campaign contributions and organizing get-out-the-vote drives to elect
politicians who then control the negotiations over their pay, benefits,
and work rules. The result is a nefarious cycle: Politicians agree to
generous government worker contracts; those workers then pay higher
union dues a portion of which are funneled back into those same
politicians' campaign war chests. It is a cycle that has driven
California and New York to the edge of bankruptcy.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/017/031citja.asp?pg=1