Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind (5 page)

The average New York City police officer, for example, can retire after only twenty-two years of service—often in his early forties.
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An officer who retires as a captain can expect to receive upwards of $92,000 per year in retirement benefits, costing the city nearly $3 million during his retirement. Of course, we appreciate our police officers—they put their lives at risk to keep us safe. But no matter how much we appreciate them, we also have to realize that retired government workers in all areas of service are bringing our government’s house down and foisting huge burdens on the next generation of Americans.

Now, how many Americans do you think have the $3 million in retirement savings it would take to fund that police officer’s pension we were just discussing? Unfortunately, not too many. If you want to see how much you’d collect in pension if you were a government employee, the Manhattan Institute has a handy calculator at
CalculateYourPublicPension.com
which shows you how much you would collect on a state-by-state basis. Try it—you’ll be so shocked you might actually consider trading in your corporate job or your small business for the benefits of government work.
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Although there are differences between pensions available at the federal, state, and local levels, most government workers get a pension based on at least 60 percent of their last working salary. Since pension income is generally based on average salary from the last three working years of his career, the government worker can jack up his overtime in his last years on the job to boost, even double, the amount of his pension.
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And it gets even better—in some states, government workers who have hit retirement age can retire and get hired back at their same job and earn another government salary on top of their pension.
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It’s one for the price of two!

Government workers must work harder than workers in the private sector for all that extra pay and benefits, right? You decide. A news team investigation in Pittsburgh tracked edits to Wikipedia, the open-source website where anyone can log in to change facts about events, people, and objects. The news team found “thousands of edits done by government employees on government time using government computers.
And few of those edits have anything to do with government business.” What were these intrepid scholars up to? They were editing the Wikipedia pages for Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, singer Beyoncé, and James Bond. One employee edited the profile for Lurch, the butler on
The Addams Family
—he added the valuable information that Lurch didn’t actually play the harpsichord. Another employee wrote a full plot summary for a
Star Wars
TV series. Overall, the news team found 1,536 edits by state employees and 5,542 edits by federal offices. And, as the news team pointed out, “Wikipedia is just one Web site.”
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Even if these wiki-employees are an aberration, we do know that government employees tend to be in the office less often than workers in businesses. Federal employees get a whopping 13 days of sick leave, 10 federal holidays, and up to 26 additional days of vacation for a total of up to 49 days of paid time off per year. Because unions encourage their workers to use all their “sick” days as holidays instead of just when they are actually sick, government workers get the equivalent of up to ten paid weeks of vacation per year—that’s equal to working a four-day workweek every week!
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How would your business do with you gone that much?

There are lots of other benefits of working for the government, too. According to Steven Greenhut in his book
Plunder!
“Drivers of one out of every 22 cars on California roads have special license plates whereby their addresses are kept secret from toll agencies and parking enforcement agencies. When an officer pulls over someone with one of these plates, the addresses are in a special database that alerts the officer that the driver is a government worker, or fellow police officer, or a family member of someone in law enforcement or government work. The result is a de facto pass on many, if not most traffic laws by the drivers.”
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If working for the government can get you out of speeding tickets, what can’t it do?

On the downside, though, most union contracts prevent government workers from getting paid extra for good performance, although some government employees do get extra bonuses in the form of performance awards.
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So if you don’t feel like having your performance evaluated but still want to earn good pay and retire early with great benefits, the government sector is for you. But if you want to be paid based on your performance, try the private sector.

This may explain why you have a harder and harder time getting people at the Social Security bureau or the Department of Motor Vehicles to hustle to serve you. After all, they understand what you may not—they don’t work for you; you work for them. Your job is to keep making the pie so that the government employee unions and their “net tax receiver team” can eat more of it. Now, get back to work!

Unions were on the endangered species list by the 1960s and 1970s. Then, like most real-life endangered species, they found their great protector: the government. Now unions are flourishing, and they are threatening all the other species in our political ecosystem.

Of the 125 million people working in America, only about 13 percent are represented by 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, 35 percent of state government workers, and almost 47 percent of local government workers are represented by a government employee union.
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In the more heavily unionized states, government employee unionization rates can be as high as 60 to 70 percent. More than two in three public school teachers are unionized, about two in three police officers and firefighters are unionized, and one in two corrections officers are unionized.
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In the private sector, unions are still on the endangered list and still declining every year—less than 7 percent of all private sector workers are union members.
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Workers in America’s businesses seem to have decided that whatever benefits unions bring, they are not worth the cost. But in the government sector, unions are flourishing.

Millions of government employees join unions. Of course, many government employees in forced-dues states join the union because they have to pay union dues anyway. But over a million federal employees are members of a government employee union, even though these
workers can’t be compelled to financially support a union.
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And to a much lesser extent, some government employees in right-to-work states who also can’t be forced to pay union dues still join a union.

All government employees rushing into the unions must be getting something important for the expensive dues that they pay their union, but what? They’re keeping their lucrative jobs even when common sense would dictate that these jobs should be cut. The unions are protecting them from being displaced by technology and greater efficiency in the workplace.

Unions protect government workers against their own obsolescence. To see how, look at the U.S. Postal Service, a branch of our government that employs about 750,000 workers,
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including 574,000 heavily unionized career postal workers.
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The Postal Service has far more employees than any corporation in America except Walmart.
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A public relations pamphlet from the post office boasts, “If it were a private sector company, the U.S. Postal Service would rank 29th in the 2010 Fortune 500,” a ranking based on gross revenue.
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Of course, if the Postal Service were really a private sector company, it would have been out of business a long time ago.
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Despite investing up to $2.7 billion annually in capital investments on new mail processing equipment and other equipment designed to increase efficiency,
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your mail service is not getting more efficient. Perhaps this is because postal managers sometimes keep “using [obsolete] mechanical equipment even when automatic equipment was available, just to keep workers from standing around idle.”
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Or it may be because postal union contracts prohibit the Postal Service from reassigning idle workers to facilities that actually need them.
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Even as the Postal Service was losing $8.5 billion in 2010 (with that much cash, you could actually buy Chrysler), the confident president of the American Postal Workers Union still said that he was fighting for “more—more control over activities at work, more money, better benefits—we want more.”
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More, more, more.

Similarly, while many countries in the world transformed their air
traffic control system using Global Positioning System (GPS) technology over a decade ago, our air traffic controllers union is still resisting this “new” technology.
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“Wait!” you protest. “Air traffic controllers union? Didn’t President Reagan hand those guys their heads in the early ’80s?” Yes. But, like a zombie buried prematurely, the union hand reached out from the grave. Just a few years later, air traffic controllers re-unionized and elected the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) as their exclusive representative. Why? Because they needed the union to protect their jobs against improved technology making many air traffic control jobs obsolete.
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We all rely on GPS today to find the best route, even to keep a virtual eye on where our friends are via Facebook and collect badges at our favorite coffee bar via foursquare. Why is our air traffic control system ignoring GPS and still handing off aircraft from tower to tower across the country using radar, more or less the same way we did when John F. Kennedy was president?
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It’s because a GPS-based system requires significantly fewer controllers to do the same job, and union bosses prefer to stick with the old system. So long as unions have friends in high places in our government, flying in the United States will be more expensive and less efficient than in all those other countries that use GPS.

And how did the union handle it when national news media reported incidences of air traffic controllers falling asleep on the job, putting planes and passengers’ lives in jeopardy? The union negotiated with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for the perfect solution—for each shift, it required that another air traffic controller be placed on duty to make sure that the first air traffic controller doesn’t fall asleep, and actually allowed controllers to listen to the radio and read on the job to help keep themselves awake.
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If that doesn’t work, undoubtedly the unions can propose an air traffic controller watcher watcher. And so on.

In government, we all know who the dinosaurs are—some postal workers, air traffic controllers, and pencil pushers. These are the people who would lose if the unions were kicked out and the government streamlined itself. And the winners would be us, the taxpayers. But we are dispersed and not fully aware of what the unions and our
government are up to. Most of us still believe that we’re flying pretty safe and getting our mail more or less on time. By the same token, when we
really
need a package delivered quickly, we bypass the U.S. Postal Service and take a stroll down to nonunionized FedEx instead.

Government employee unions use campaign contributions and political support to influence government decision makers at all levels of government. Using this very friendly and effective method of persuasion, the government employee unions can get Congress to give them more federal workers to unionize, persuade states to force more workers to pay dues to them, and ensure that other elected officials go easy on them in contract negotiations.

Political activity was not as important to the private sector unions because politicians couldn’t generally affect the unions’ bottom line as directly. But buying political influence—legal bribery—works perfectly for government employee unions. After all, it is the government that determines whether these unions will be able to represent new groups of government employees, so it makes sense for unions to invest their money in putting their friends in government. These unions run like smoothly oiled machines, and they argue that nobody gets hurt by their political influence. Except the American pie maker, that is.

What do government employee unions do with all that dues money that they earn off the backs of government workers and American taxpayers? They pay the Shadowbosses first, of course. While former SEIU president Andy Stern lamented the fact that people “sometimes think being a union leader is a right or an inheritance,”
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the truth is that the Shadowbosses themselves think that being a union boss is a right. Stern himself drew $306,388 in compensation in 2009 before stepping down in 2010.
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Being a Shadowboss is like being a dictator of a third-world country—once you’ve got power, you don’t step down willingly and you take as much as you can while you are in office.

Gerald McEntee, the president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), makes $555,367.
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AFSCME’s former international secretary-treasurer William Lucy took home $847,810 in salary alone in 2010. AFSCME had sixteen executives at the national headquarters who made in excess of $200,000 per year, and almost half its headquarters employees made over $75,000 in 2010. There are many more union officials earning high salaries at the state and local level, although this information is much harder to come by. In contrast, the average AFSCME member makes less than $45,000 per year.
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