About one third of government workers belong to unions. Only 6.9 percent of private sector workers do. Not only are private sector workers on their own, nearly one in 10 of them is without a job today because of the recession. This set of facts adds up to more public support for governors Scott Walker of Wisconsin and John Kasich of Ohio as they work to weaken the rights of public sector unions to bargain collectively — or to eliminate that right altogether.
Public employee unions are strong because they are organized and their employers are not. They have won extraordinary benefits because those benefits don’t come out of the pockets of those who grant them. In fact, pleasing public sector unions often benefits those who do. The contests have been uneven, to put the case mildly.
In most states teachers and other public workers can retire with full benefits after working for little more than 30 years. In states like California where the unions have been particularly aggressive, firemen qualify for six-figure pensions while they still have 20 years of active life ahead of them. They also have health benefits for the rest of their lives that supplement Medi-care once they are 65.
Double-dipping is common in states which allow it. Teachers and administrators often work until they qualify for a pension, then take another school job, draw new salaries and build up still more pension credit.
When private sector unions win outsize benefits, the companies which grant them often go broke. General Motors offers the most egregious example. GM and its brother car companies gave in to the UAW when times were flush and wrote contracts that gave workers pensions and health benefits that were outlandishly unaffordable. The industry is making profits once again because those contracts were rewritten and downsized.
California and the dozens of other states with yawning deficits and grossly under-funded pension reserves will be forced into similar restructuring of the wages and benefits they provide their workers.
THE RIGHT TO ORGANIZE implies the right to bargain collectively. But because of the inequalities between public sector unions and those who hire the workers, ways must be found to protect the public interest — the taxpayers’ interest — in those negotiations. Perhaps commissions should be established and given the power to override contracts that provide wages and benefits to public workers that exceed private sector awards.
Social justice isn’t served by giving full pension benefits to public workers 10 years earlier than workers in the private sector can retire. Ditto for health care benefits.
The interests of the public are broader than financial. A public interest commission should also have the power to monitor and alter other factors which have a direct bearing on the quality of work being done. Such a commission could in-vite requests from the public to evaluate the performance of public workers after similar requests were made without results to the bureaucracy for which they work.
The goal would be to move from mediocre performance to excellence. The marketplace does that, albeit in a rough way, for the private sector. There is a crying need for weeding out poor performers and rewarding excellence in our public workplaces.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
