Crippled By The Unions

By: R.J. Moeller

The American public feels it is drowning in red ink. It is dismayed and even outraged at the burgeoning national deficits, unbalanced state and local budgets, and accounting that often masks the extent of indebtedness. There is a mounting sense that taxpayers are being taken for an expensive ride by public sector unions. The extraordinary benefits the unions have secured for their members are going to be harder and harder to pay.

Mort Zuckerman is the Editor-in-Chief of US News & World Report, and was an initial supporter of Barack Obama in 2008 and 2009. But lately, Mr. Zuckerman has changed his tune as he (and America) has watched the president, Speaker Pelosi, and Majority Leader Reid throw economic caution and fiscal responsibility to the wind.

In his latest column, Zuckerman makes the critically important point that there is rampant and nefarious collusion between the public employee unions and the politicians they work tirelessly to elect.

The business community and a growing portion of the public now understand the dynamics that discriminate against the private sector. The public sector unions organize voting campaigns for politicians who, on election, repay their benefactors by approving salaries and benefits for the public sector, irrespective of whether they are sustainable. And what is happening with California is happening in slower motion in the rest of the country. It must be one of the reasons the Pew Research Center this year reported that support for labor unions generally has plummeted "amid growing public skepticism about unions' power and purpose."

There has been a transformation in the nature of our employment. Labor is no longer dominated by private sector industrial workers who were in large part culturally conservative and economically pro-growth. Over recent decades public sector employment has exploded and public workers have come to dominate the labor movement. These public sector employees have a unique and powerful advantage in contract negotiations. Quite simply it is their capacity to deliver political endorsements and votes for the very people who are theoretically on the other side of the negotiating table. Candidates who want to appear tough on crime will look to cops, sheriffs' deputies, prison guards, and highway patrol officers for their endorsement.

The point here isn't to pile blame on every union and every member of those unions. But to deny that there is a conflict of interest for the politician who marries his or her campaign to the same union workers that are being paid (exorbitantly) with the tax dollars that this same politician will have some control over.

City government was developed to serve its citizens. Today the citizenry is working in large part to serve the government. It is always hard to shrink government spending. It is particularly difficult when public sector unions have such a unique lever of pressure.

We have to escape this cycle or it will crush us. One way is to take labor negotiations out of the hands of vulnerable legislators and assign them to independent commissions. They would have a better shot at achieving a fair balance between appropriate salary increases and the revenues and services of local municipalities. The electorate won't swallow any more red ink.

Free markets aren't perfect, but state-controlled economies, the kind we're seeing implode in Greece, always lead to societal collapse.

"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."
-Alexis de Tocqueville