“Works to build a better community. Plans for the future. Ensures colleagues share in successes. Protects the less fortunate.”
Any mother would beam with pride if her child were so described. In a performance review, such comments would garner a promotion. In Wisconsin, these traits put a target on your back.
These four points are a fair description of what unions do. Teachers, nurses, police and firefighters make communities stronger and safer. They have sacrificed wage increases for better benefits or retirement plans, sometimes at the government’s request. In municipalities that allow discrimination, they have used collective bargaining to protect minority employees, including members of the LGBT Community.
Yet, in places with budget shortfalls, they have been scapegoated as the cause of excessive government spending. At the behest of Governor Scott Walker, the Wisconsin State legislature recently passed a law decimating the collective bargaining rights of public employee unions (unions whose members work for the government). Lest you think this was a daring act of pure conservative ideology, they excluded the police and firefighter unions that endorsed Gov. Walker’s campaign, and left private unions alone.
Anti-labor pundits suggest that public employee unions have too much power in collective bargaining, because they can affect the election of the mayors and governors facing them at the negotiation table. Gov. Walker implied that their cushy pension and benefit packages were to blame for Wisconsin’s budget woes. These could be compelling arguments, if they were remotely relevant.
Public sector unions do spend money on elections, and therefore have a say in the government officials that participate in negotiations. Wall Street bankers spend even more to elect the Congressmembers and lobby the administration officials that regulate their business. The only conspiracy either group is engaged in is participatory democracy. Apparently, we’ve spent so much time bemoaning low voter turnout that we’ve forgotten what engagement looks like.
The idea that unfair union benefit packages are to blame for current financial woes is wrong on multiple levels.
Most serious economists agree that the recent recession was due to risky financial maneuvers involving sub-prime mortgages and the “housing bubble.” If the missing trillions are anywhere to be found, it’s in the offshore accounts of the aforementioned bankers, not the pockets of public workers.
Yet Gov. Walker moved to cut taxes while demanding concessions from unions. As I remember the parable, the prodigal son only gets a party when he repents his mistakes. He doesn’t get his brother’s share of the inheritance, too.
As to union benefits and pensions, how are they “unfair”? It’s a common anti-labor talking point that public employee union members have higher salaries and better benefits than their private sector counterparts; however, they also typically have more education and experience. Control for that, and the differences wash away, with the possible exception that union members thought ahead, taking lower salaries for better retirement benefits.
Voters or their elected representatives, by the way, approved all of those benefits. Labor-friendly officials were elected and reelected, suggesting that voters approved of the deals made with unions. That changed in 2010, with the election of anti-labor governors and legislatures in numerous states, including Wisconsin.
Did these leaders take a harder stance in negotiations? Not so far. Instead, they pushed for laws that eliminated the negotiation process, known as collective bargaining. They’ve basically said, “I don’t have the backbone to stand up to unions, because I might not get re-elected if I upset them. So I’ll cut them off at the knees.”
In a prior column, I suggested that term limits were a lame way for voters to duck their duty to boot out bad officials. Ending collective bargaining is an even more pathetic way for governors to avoid having to sell an anti-labor agenda to an electorate full of workers who, if not already unionized, might see the facts and wish they could be.
Wisconsin voters seemed to have sensed this, electing a Democrat to Gov. Walker’s prior job as Milwaukee County Executive, and turning a frequently boring Supreme Court race into a nail-biter. Unfortunately, unions are being targeted in almost every municipality with a budget deficit, including here in California. In some case, these hardworking citizens have already renegotiated contracts and benefits to help with budget issues.
In the fight against Proposition 8, we told voters they didn’t have to like gay people to know that writing discrimination into the constitution was wrong. Similarly, one need not be a staunch union supporter to know that ending collective bargaining is wrong. Public employee unions stood with same-sex couples to defend their basic right to marry.
As a community, we don’t have to agree on every pact negotiated, but we should at least stand with unions in their fight to preserve the basic right to organize and bargain collectively.
