Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind (3 page)

Second, government employee unions imperil our communities by having the power to call essential workers on strike, and doing this even if such strikes are technically illegal, as we will see. If private sector workers are called out on strike by their union, some people may be inconvenienced. If essential public safety workers like policemen or firefighters, or even our unionized border patrol agents for example, go on strike, whether legally or illegally, communities suffer far worse fates.

Third, while corporations may hire lobbyists to represent their interests before our government, at least the corporations actually contribute to the growth of our economy by making products and providing services that make the pie bigger and make America more competitive. When government employee unions lobby our government, they are really just lobbying to make our government bigger, which weighs down our economy as a whole. Unions partner with government officials to grow the size of government, to hire more government employees, and to grant them more compensation. Then, these unions keep our government inefficient by preventing it from reorganizing, streamlining, and privatizing government services, because a more efficient government would mean less union dues revenue. There will be a tipping point when our government gets so big that the last remaining taxpayers in
America will no longer be able to support the enormous cost of running our government. And we are rapidly approaching this point.

It is important to realize that government employee unions, like all unions, are private organizations. Unions feed off the largesse of government for the benefit of their members and union bosses. Government employee unions get their business directly from our government but are not themselves a part of the government. Unions represent government employees because that is their business.

Albert Shanker, who served as the head of the American Federation of Teachers from 1974 to 1997, is credited with saying: “When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of schoolchildren.”
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Although it is hotly disputed whether or not he actually said this, the quote hammers home the point that the
unions’ sole function is to represent their members, not to work toward goals that may be in our nation’s interest. Unions act in the interest of the unions themselves, not the public good. We must never forget that unions are run for the benefit of union bosses and their members and are not benevolent organizations.

Twenty-three states are “right-to-work” states, meaning that these states have right-to-work laws that protect most private sector workers against being fired if they don’t join a union or pay dues. Government workers in these states are generally also given right-to-work protections, but not all workers in these states are protected against being forced to pay union dues. For example, airline and railroad employees are not protected by right-to-work laws no matter where they live or work. This is because the federal Railway Labor Act governs these workers and trumps state right-to-work laws.
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So pilots at United and American Airlines, for example, are unionized and are forced to pay union dues even if they live and work in right-to-work states.

In right-to-work states, though, most workers have a choice as to whether or not to financially support a union. Not so in the other states, the “forced dues” states that don’t protect this important right. In forced-dues states, a union that controls a group of workers under a collective bargaining contract can force
every last one
of those workers to pay union dues or be fired, including state and local government employees.
¹⁹
And because so many workers are forced to pay union dues in forced-dues states, unions earn most of their dues income in these states.

Just because right-to-work states don’t generate much dues income for unions, it doesn’t mean that unions leave these states alone. The Shadowbosses have long tentacles. Unions spend considerable money, earned in the forced-dues states, to influence politics and policy in the right-to-work states. And government employee unions maintain a web of paid political organizers in every congressional district in America to make sure that their reach covers our entire nation. Unions are far more involved in politics and policy in right-to-work states than most people believe.

Government employee unions are always working to expand their membership and to organize new groups of workers. They’re like the tribbles in
Star Trek
—they seem harmless until they clog up the essential functions of the ship—in this case, our government.

To keep their dues business growing, government employee unions are reaching beyond merely representing government workers. Unions have been working to organize new groups of workers who are not employees of the government or any company but who receive subsidies from the government. In a number of states, government employee unions have already forced parents who care for their disabled children and people who care for their aging parents into unions and made them pay dues. The next step is to expand this organizing model to new groups of Americans—Social Security recipients, disability recipients, veterans, welfare moms, food stamp recipients, and other groups that receive government funds and benefits.
²⁰

Think about it—there are 3.5 million civilian employees who work for the federal government, making it the largest single employer in America, and around 17 million people working for our state and local governments.
²¹
The unions are already representing 8.3 million of them. But there are also tens of millions of Americans who receive some benefits or entitlements from the government who could also be unionized with a few tweaks to existing laws. Imagine how much more income unions could generate by representing them as well.

What does all this mean in practical terms? The unbridled growth of crony unionism and government corruption will destroy the United States as we know it. Not just crazy deficits or nutty benefits packages—utter ruin. We’re almost there already.

The enormous costs of paying state and local government employees is tearing through state and local budgets. It’s bad in every state in the nation—though, of course, it’s much worse in states with heavily unionized government employees and where unions are permitted to extract forced dues from workers.

This Chart Shows How
Labor Union Friendly
or
Taxpayer Friendly
Each State Is Based on Its Laws, Regulations, Court Decisions, and Union Density.

Courtesy: F. Vincent Vernuccio, Competitive Enterprise Institute,
www.workplacechoice.org

Government employee costs—generous salaries, benefits, and pensions—have grown exponentially and in union controlled states, these costs can’t be reduced without the consent of the unions. Union-negotiated contracts make it nearly impossible for union-controlled states to bring their budgets into line, putting them in a far more precarious financial condition than less unionized states, which have more flexibility to “right-size” as needed.

Not coincidentally, states with the longest and strongest history of government employee unions are also the states with the worst budget crises. Of the ten states with the highest debt per capita in 2010, all of them are heavily unionized and none of them are right-to-work states.
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Congress has even heard testimony that identified government employee unions as a “major contributing factor—perhaps
the
major contributing factor” to our state and local budgetary crises.
²³

Another crisis in America is our failing K–12 education system. The blame for this problem can be laid at the feet of the two teachers unions, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). That’s because the unions negotiate the teachers’ contracts that determine who gets hired, who gets fired, what teachers teach, how they are trained, and ultimately whether American students are competitive with the rest of the world.

Let’s be honest—if you were to imagine an ideal K–12 program for the twenty-first century, would you select a nine-and-a-half-month program that breaks for ten weeks in the summer? Would you choose a 170-to 180-day school year, when America’s competitors have a school year of 220 days or more? Would you need to spend an average of nearly $11,000 a year per school child, not including the cost of school buildings and infrastructure?
²⁴
Would you build extensive infrastructure that is only used seven to eight hours a day, for only part of the year?

Our school schedule made sense when we lived according to the agrarian calendar and we needed our kids to help us in the fields during planting and harvest. But now we are competing with China and India and many other nations whose children go to school for more hours a
day and more days a year than ours do. We need a school calendar that is optimized for student learning.

There’s something standing in the way of improving the competitiveness of our students—the teachers unions. The teachers unions control the school calendar, prevent us from paying better teachers more, stop principals from firing bad teachers, and even control what our teachers are allowed to teach our children.

The teachers unions insist that it is your fault that our K–12 system is failing—you, the greedy taxpayer. Of course, they tell us everything would be better if we just spent
more
money on education. But throwing more money at the problem isn’t really the answer. In fact, Microsoft founder Bill Gates recently admitted to the
Wall Street Journal
that the $5 billion he spent trying to improve K–12 education in America yielded very few measurable improvements at all.
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And Apple’s immortal entrepreneur Steve Jobs reportedly told President Obama shortly before his death that until the teachers unions can be “broken,” there is “almost no hope for educational reform.”
²⁶

But at least we’re getting the best teachers, right? Well, no. Just ask the young middle school teacher who won the “teacher of the year” award at the end of her second year teaching in New Jersey. After she received the award, she was fired. Why fire the teacher of the year? Because union rules dictate that the most recently hired teachers must be laid off first—which is known as “last in, first out.”
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The teachers unions set the rules that dictate that if a school district wants to keep great new teachers, it has to keep all the teachers who were hired before them—regardless of quality or performance. Under virtually all union contracts, school principals can’t lay off their worst performers while keeping their best ones.

The National Education Association, which is America’s largest labor union and the smaller American Federation of Teachers, which together control so much of our education system, put out the message that education is underfunded in America and our teachers are underpaid. In reality, we spend more than almost any other nation on our children’s education. And the average salary for our public school teachers is significantly higher than the median average personal income in the United States, not even taking into account the extensive vacation
time and the better-than-average benefits that teachers receive. By asking us all for more money for education, the teachers unions try to shift the blame for our failing K–12 education system from their shoulders to our own.

This is an America run by the government employee unions. And it’s only getting worse.

After World War II, over 35 percent of workers in the private sector were union members. Today, private sector union membership clocks in below 7 percent.
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To keep the money flowing and their coffers full, labor unions have had to seek out new frontiers.