Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind (9 page)

For nearly two years after the Wagner Act was adopted, it had relatively little impact because employees and businesses expected the law would be overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court as unconstitutional—as it should have been. In April 1937, the Court, under intense pressure from FDR, who threatened to pack the Court with additional justices to get the decision that he wanted,
⁹
upheld the constitutionality of the Wagner Act in a 5–4 decision. Once approved by the Court, the Wagner Act accomplished what Wagner and FDR had intended it to do—increase unionization. Membership in labor unions soared—the United Auto Workers actually experienced a
tenfold
increase in membership in the year the case was decided.
¹⁰

The other corollary was that within just a few months after the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the Wagner Act, business profits fell dramatically. After job growth of almost 7 million jobs over the previous five years, the economy turned downward again in 1937, and
1.9 million jobs
were lost from the economy. Private sector employment didn’t reach its pre-Depression level until 1941, as industry mobilized for World War II.
¹¹

With the labor unions owing their prominence to FDR, an unshakable alliance was formed between unions and Democrats. FDR and other politicians had pushed for the Wagner Act based on their progressive worldview, of course—but their support also had something to do with their campaign coffers, which were increasingly full of
labor union cash.
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As the unions prospered, so did their favored politicians.

Meanwhile, labor unions were focused on growing their membership and their bottom lines. “We are in business to make money,” said thug-boss Jimmy Hoffa of the Teamsters, who would disappear mysteriously in 1975. “We are out for every quarter we can get.” James Peirce, the president of the National Federation of Federal Employees, agreed: “We all need more members, greater representation, more money for our political funds.”
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William W. Winpisinger, the International Association of Machinists president, focused on socialist goals: “I am convinced the only way organized labor can repel the armies of right-wing radicalism is by fighting for total redistribution of this nation’s income and wealth.”
¹⁴
The mission hasn’t changed. Unions are still pushing for forced redistribution of income—from everyone else to them.

Even FDR felt that extending collective bargaining to government workers would be disastrous because it could lead to government workers striking against the government, which would be “unthinkable and intolerable.”
¹⁵
The unthinkable and intolerable, however, would soon become the law of the land.

A little more than a quarter of a century later, another friend of labor would open the gate to government workers unions. In January 1962, President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order No. 10,988, granting unions monopoly bargaining power over federal employees.
¹⁶
The Executive Order was supposed to promote the idea that “orderly and constructive relationships be maintained between employee organizations and management officials.”
¹⁷
And for Kennedy, this meant interposing unions between government workers and their employer through collective bargaining.

By extending collective bargaining to federal government workers, the Executive Order would prove to be a win-win for the unions and Democrats. And more union power meant getting a little closer to the permanent establishment of a dominant Democrat Party.

Before Kennedy’s Executive Order, many federal employees, like private workers, had the
right
to join a union. The National Treasury
Employees Union was founded in 1938;
¹⁸
the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), now the largest union representing federal workers,
¹⁹
was founded in 1932. And our foreign service employees could join the American Foreign Service Association as early as 1924.
²⁰

But JFK’s Executive Order changed everything. For the first time, federal employees could be
forced
to accept a union as their “exclusive” bargaining representative, just like in the private sector.

Not a big deal, right? Wrong. Having unions represent private workers in their dealings with business owners is vastly different from having unions represent government workers in their dealings with their government employer, as we’ve explained. “You know,” F. Scott Fitzgerald is said to have told Ernest Hemingway, “the rich are different from you and me.” “Yes,” Hemingway replied. “They have more money.” The government is different from the rest of us, too. It can hand out as much cash as it wants to anybody and never has to face any real consequences. No bankruptcy. When government employee unions wrest concessions from the government, the cost comes right out of the taxpayers’ pockets—the government officials supposedly negotiating for the taxpayers don’t feel a thing. It’s good to be the government. But it’s even better to be the union bargaining against the government.

Now, JFK didn’t go so far as to allow unions to collect dues from every federal worker that they represent. He actually carved out a provision allowing employees to decide whether or not to join a union and pay union dues. Those federal right-to-work protections have now become a critical right for federal workers.
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In the federal government and the right-to-work states, unions cannot force the workers that they represent to pay dues. This means that the unions’ real payout comes from the states that permit forced-dues collection.
²²

But JFK let the camel’s proverbial nose under the proverbial tent. Quite quickly after that, the camel came all the way into the tent and brought a bunch of his friends with him. More specifically, this Executive Order triggered a wave of copycat legislation in the states. These new laws authorizing collective bargaining over state and local government workers started in Wisconsin in 1959 but proliferated once Kennedy’s Executive Order was issued. Labor commentator Daniel DiSalvo
notes, “In 1959, only three states had collective-bargaining laws for state and local employees; by 1980, 33 states had these laws.”
²³
Now, forty-three states permit collective bargaining over state or local government employees.
²⁴
And twenty-seven states permit forced-dues provisions in union contracts, and twenty-two states actively force unionized state and local workers to pay union dues as a condition of employment.
²⁵
These forced-dues states include heavily populated California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan.

But how did things go so terribly wrong in most of the states? To tell this story, you will have to go back a few years and meet a little, bespectacled, unpleasant man named Jerry Wurf.

Jerry Wurf had been afflicted with polio from the age of four, making even walking a struggle, but Wurf never shied away from a brawl. He got his start in union agitation organizing cafeteria workers in New York City in the mid-1940s. To get inside the cafeterias to organize the workers there, Wurf got himself hired as a cashier. Then he played rough. If a cafeteria owner resisted the union’s demands, Wurf suggested that busboys “drop a tray laden with dirty dishes at the end of a serving line.”
²⁶
The Yiddish-speaking cafeteria owners quickly gave Wurf the nickname of
mal’ach hamaves
, which means the “angel of death.”
²⁷

In 1947, the
mal’ach hamaves
went to work for the labor union American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) to help them in their early efforts to organize government workers.
²⁸
Their first goal was to get New York City to grant unions collective bargaining power over city workers.

There’s an old joke about a donkey trainer known far and wide for training donkeys in a gentle way, a “donkey whisperer.” One day, a man who had a recalcitrant donkey brought him to the donkey whisperer for training. The donkey trainer immediately pulled out a two-by-four and whacked the donkey right between the eyes. The man was taken aback. “Why would you do that?” he asked. “You’re supposed to be the donkey whisperer!” he cried. “Well,” said the donkey whisperer, “before you whisper, you need to get their attention.”

Wurf knew how to get the attention of the government: by smacking them between the eyes with political muscle. In return for giving the union the power to organize government workers, Wurf pledged direct political support to politicians—not just money, but turn-out-the-vote support in the streets. He offered Democrat Robert F. Wagner Jr. (the son of Senator Wagner, who sponsored the Wagner Act) support in his run for New York City mayor in 1954. In return, Wagner agreed to support giving unions collective bargaining power over city workers. AFSCME then went out into the streets and delivered the votes needed to elect Wagner mayor. Thus began the great synergistic alliance between politicians needing election support from unions and unions needing political support from politicians.
²⁹

Wurf’s innovative arrangement with Mayor Wagner in New York City led to a groundswell in unionization of state and local government workers across the country—from 341,000 in 1961 to 5 million under union collective bargaining control a brief fifteen years later.
³⁰
Wurf’s true agenda was to extend the New York City model across the country. In that effort, he was backed in full by the radical progressives who thought that a socialist America was just around the corner. Of course, it would take until 2008 for the real socialist America to come into being with the election of Barack Obama… but we’ll get to that.

Not all politicians were as accommodating to Wurf as Wagner. And to get less accommodating politicians on board, Wurf would have to break out a figurative two-by-four: the classic union threat of violence and coercion. Violence has always bubbled under the surface of the union movement. Labor unions had always relied on the implicit threat that if things didn’t go their way, they’d bring out the lead pipes. In many cases, this meant inciting violence and then allowing it to spin out of control.

In other words: burn, baby, burn.

Let’s look at what happened when Wurf got involved in 1968 in the union-hostile territory of Memphis, located in right-to-work Tennessee. Wurf came to woo the new Memphis mayor, hoping to secure monopoly bargaining and automatic dues check-off privileges for the local AFSCME sanitation workers union.

Working conditions for Memphis sanitation men were degrading and dismal at the time. By then, the famous Dempster Dumpster technology—that’s that sound that wakes you up at 5 a.m., when wheeled waste containers are mechanically tipped into a garbage truck—had already been available for three decades. But not in Memphis. There, sanitation men still had to pick up and carry metal garbage cans and dump them into heavy leather tubs. Then, they had to sling the tubs over their shoulders and carry them through people’s yards. Many of the tubs leaked, “and during the course of the day the caustic flow from the garbage caused huge welts on the men’s shoulders, arms, and torsos.”
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There were still more indignities: white crew chiefs typically addressed black sanitation collectors as “boy,” and black men were not promoted to the job of supervisor.
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Also, the sanitation men were paid to cover a certain number of city blocks per day, no matter how long it took—with no overtime. And in 1968, their average weekly pay was a bit over $70 a week.
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In a sense, the situation in Memphis was one of those situations where workers were actually being exploited and mistreated, and where organizing the workers could perhaps produce improvements in pay and working conditions as it had in the earlier part of the twentieth century for garment workers and others. But this is not the lesson of this particular story.

By adopting existing wheeled waste container technology, the city of Memphis could have dramatically reduced the number of man-hours needed for sanitation services. Why hadn’t the city of Memphis implemented such changes? The government didn’t want to change the existing system, which worked fine for the supervisors, at least. Wurf himself noted, “One of the real problems in public service is that the people who make management decisions may not be as concerned with efficiency and profit and loss as management in private industry would be.”
³⁴

In any case, the sanitation workers called a strike in February 1968. Wurf got involved, both to make sure that the strike succeeded and to get the city to recognize the AFSCME local as the sanitation workers’ exclusive bargaining representative.
³⁵
It might not have been the perfect moment to strike, because it violated a few important principles that Wurf had developed for a successful strike. First, Wurf said that you are
“stupid if you have a garbage strike in January or February. It doesn’t stink as much as if you have it in the middle of the summer.” He also noted that Memphis mayor Henry Loeb was new in office, and “you don’t go after a politician the moment he gets into office. You haven’t had time to get people mad at him and you have to develop this.”
³⁶
Wurf didn’t call the strike, and “would have advised anyone against it,” but once the workers were out on strike, he was not going to send them back to work without getting concessions from the city.
³⁷

When faced with striking sanitation workers, Mayor Loeb agreed to institute overtime pay and uniform retirement benefits, and to fight racial discrimination. But he refused to recognize AFSCME as the sanitation workers’ exclusive bargaining representative and claimed that Tennessee law gave him no authority to hand union officials special privileges. He also refused to allow “dues checkoff”—which would have required the city to collect union dues on behalf of the union. Dues checkoff was critical to the union, but not very important to the workers themselves.
³⁸
Because AFSCME wouldn’t be recognized and they wouldn’t get dues checkoff, Wurf kept the workers out on strike. As the strike dragged on for weeks, both the sanitation workers and the city of Memphis faced real hardships.