Public Employees Unions Are Sinking California and the Nation

Steven Greenhut has an interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal about how public employees unions are destroying California’s budget and economy.

Greenhut begins by noting that with one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, California is losing its “productive citizens” to other states but is still saddled with an economy killing surfeit of public employees unions that “drive costs up and fight to block spending cuts.”

Greenhut goes on to report that the unfunded pensions that California is stuck with has increased by 2,000% in the last decade because of the overweening power of the unions.

Approximately 85% of the state’s 235,000 employees (not including higher education employees) are unionized. As the governor noted during his $83 billion budget roll-out, over the past decade pension costs for public employees increased 2,000%. State revenues increased only 24% over the same period. A Schwarzenegger adviser wrote in the San Jose Mercury News in the past few days that, “This year alone, $3 billion was diverted to pension costs from other programs.” There are now more than 15,000 government retirees statewide who receive pensions that exceed $100,000 a year, according to the California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility.

That is absurd!

Greenhut goes on to offer some hope that some Californians are beginning to learn how bad the unions really are, but I am not so sanguine. And even if California is just starting to “get it,” the problem isn’t just in California but in every state in the union, as the following chart shows:

There is at least one aspect of this issue that has slipped away from the coverage on the public employee union problem, one that has likely never dawned on folks interested in the issue. The fact is, these unions don’t have to exist as they do. In actuality there was no such thing as a union for government workers before the 1960s. As left wing and pro labor as it was, even Franklin Roosevelt’s administration thought that public employee unions was madness. But in 1958 Democrat New York Mayor Robert Wagner signed into effect a public employees union act that came to be called the “Little Wagner Act.” (Mayor Wagner was the son of Senator Richard Wagner of New York, author of the famed New Deal “Wagner Act,” or the National Labor Relations Act). This act allowed city employees to be open to collective bargaining with the city for the first time.

For many a year the idea of public employees unions spread only slowly. But recently these unions have really surged forward as major political players from the state and local levels all the way to the national level.

Sadly, it is getting worse, not better. In its latest report the Department of Labor finds that public unions make up 37% of the nation’s unionized workforce and is ever growing even as unions overall lost 10% in membership in this economic downturn. The New York Times was even shocked by this noting that a majority of union members are government workers rather than private-sector employees.

So, while public employee’s unions are relatively new in the American experience and now that the idea of a public employee’s union has metastasized across the country, we can see that the experiment in unionism has not only failed, but has become a danger to our democratic system.

The problem is that a unionized government workforce by necessity cuts out the ability of the voter to affect government policy, government spending, and the dissemination of government services. The incestuous relationship between unions that become a patron of politicians and politicians that return that patronage only to start the cycle over again wholly undercuts the voter’s ability to direct government to their desires and needs through the ballot box in the normal way a democracy should work.

Public policy expert David Denholm wrote an interesting treatise on public employees unions not long ago saying essentially this same thing. In that piece he noted that a court in North Carolina saw the danger that unions present a government. (download .pdf here)

By making the union a full and equal partner at the bargaining table, compulsory public-sector bargaining laws deprive the public of its right to participate in policy making. This point was emphasized in a U.S. District Court opinion which upheld the constitutionality of a North Carolina law declaring public-sector union contracts to be void. The Court said:

Moreover, to the extent that public employees gain power through recognition and collective bargaining, other interest groups with a right to a voice in the running of the government may be left out of vital political decisions. Thus the granting of collective bargaining rights to public employees involves important matters fundamental to our democratic form of government. The setting of goals and making policy decisions are rights inuring to each citizen. All citizens have the right to associate in groups to advocate their special interests to the government. It is something entirely different to grant any one interest group special status and access to the decision-making process.

The only conclusion that one can comfortably come to is that public employees unions are antithetical to good government. And since it has become abundantly evident that such unions are antithetical to good government we should be talking about eliminating them, not further coddling them.