Over the last eight years in Minnesota, we have taken decisive action to prevent our problems from becoming a state crisis . Public employee unions fought us virtually every step of the way. Mass transit employees, for example, went on strike for 44 days in 2005—because we refused to grant them lifetime health-care benefits after working just 15 years.”
Sounds like a good trade to me; work 15 years and get health care for life. Many unions get their members a paycheck for life, along with all other benefits, like pensions, profit-sharing and so on. This is like a farmer who doesn’t plant a crop expecting to get paid with nothing to harvest. Who wouldn’t want that deal? It’s the ability to manipulate the system for personal gain, no matter the outcome, like the union’s actions during the East-coast blizzard at the end of 2010.
In deadly blizzard conditions, Union workers deliberately slacked off so they could work longer hours and get more overtime pay. A New York City councilman confirmed that the workers responsible for clearing the roads drove with their blades pulled up high, to necessitate repeated plowing of the same areas. In addition to the cost to taxpayers—both in undue wages and lost work for the New Yorkers not lucky enough to work for the city—their selfishness also cost at least one life. The snow forced one Brooklyn mom to deliver her baby in a building lobby, where she waited for nine hours for an ambulance before her baby died. Somebody in the union should go to prison for this fiasco.
Contrast that with the mean private sector that sent people and equipment to Chile to save otherwise doomed Chilean miners? Given the choice on whom I’d depend, unless U.S. Special Forces are involved, give me the private sector.
We have been trained to believe that corporations are cruel and make profits by denying workers basic safety on the job, better working conditions, and so on. In order to stop this capitalist oppression, workers needed solidarity. Once the union served its purpose of getting workers rights, their work was essentially done, so the game needed to change. Recall when companies were offering all types of incentives to attract the best employees? Unions decided that it was not enough to simply have the opportunity for a safe, stable job, but it would get workers a piece of the action. They got corporations to offer sweetened stock incentives, as well as benefits packages, and salaries exploded. The best companies offered child care, telecommuting, flexible hours, and eventually profit-sharing.
It was in labor’s interest to be a “good parasite,” so the host had to be kept alive and healthy. On management’s side, it had to balance the company’s financial health against the happiness of the worker. Give them too much, and the future of the company was threatened by the ongoing expense; too little, and workers may strike. Both parties had the company’s financial health in mind, as neither would benefit from the death of the source of the money, which is the business itself.
The union was done. Corporate America was onboard, and began sweetening the pot themselves. The private sector offered the union little growth opportunity. The only frontier left unexplored was the public workers’ unions.
For many generations the obvious conflicts of interest inherent in such a system made public workers’ unions impossible to legalize. Even now they are not legal in about half the states, existing mainly in heavily Democrat-controlled states, such as Illinois, California, Michigan, New York, New Jersey, to name a few. But the conflict is obvious.
In public employees’ unions, there is no business to generate money for either party. Labor is government workers. Management is the government’s political leadership. Who generates the money? The rube, better known as the taxpayer. There are no “profits” to be divided up between the “company” and the workers. Therefore there is no natural interest on either side to be economically prudent or practical. There is no natural restraint for either side to try to preserve financial health, as there is no company to keep alive. The taxpayers are just there, helpless cows to be milked, a seemingly endless supply of money which only requires a bit of rhetorical persuasion and the keeping of some secrets in order to access it.
As Jason Ivey[11] points out,
“When the price of a postage stamp goes up, are you getting more for your money? No. If anything, the price of a stamp should go down because we’re all corresponding with each other electronically these days…It would be understandable, perhaps, for package and freight rates to rise depending on certain external factors, like gas prices, volume, and other things. But a stamp always rises in price, because efficiency [by the postal service] is not even an objective.”
In other words why does the postal service need to look for ways to cut back? They are going to get their money regardless, and there is no competition for sending letters. The cost of sending packages and overnight postage by the government has suffered, because of Fed-Ex, UPS and DHL, who offer competition. The Postal Service has responded with more competitive rates, though most people still prefer private sector alternatives. Fed-Ex, UPS, and DHL remain the lower cost package transporters, so why can’t Fed-Ex, UPS, or DHL carry our letters?
The Fed would tell you it’s a matter of national security. The mail could contain “stuff.” Well can’t overnight packages contain the same “stuff”? The fact is there is no reason for the Fed to be in the business of delivering letters. Fed-Ex, UPS, or DHL would be monumentally more efficient in delivering regular mail, as they essentially do it every day in the form of larger mail called packages. But the postal union would have a conniption. Management is normally an adversary of labor at the negotiating table, again trying to preserve financial health and maximize profits for stakeholders. However this is not the case with government unions. Management is actually invested solely in the happiness of the workers, making them both complicit in milking the rube.
In America, the Democrats are embraced and supported by the unions. Public employee unions make huge donations to Democrat candidates, perform get-out-the-vote work for them, and work hand in hand to get Democrats elected at all levels, city, state and federal. Once elected, these Democrat office-holders are then expected to sit down and represent the taxpayer in negotiations against the unions for pay and benefits? It’s pretty antithetical to think politicians would bite the hand that is now feeding them.
Teachers’ unions collect union dues that they funnel to Democrat candidates who then insure that teachers get whatever they want in terms of benefits. So today teachers in primary and secondary schools get tenure within two years in some cases. Teachers are not responsible for social security. Teachers generally get the entire summer off. They complain about the pay, but there are many teachers who make well into the $80,000 plus per year range.
The funds for education are earmarked almost 100 percent for public sector education. Private sector education is funded by parents or private benefactors, for the most part. Homeschooled kids receive nothing, and faith-based schools get little to no public funding. Ironically it is the private sector that produces the best students. Meanwhile the worst schools get all the money.
Jon Corzine former Democrat Governor of New Jersey gave a speech once where he exhorted his audience that he would be out there plugging for them, fighting for their interests, doing everything he could do in his capacity as governor of New Jersey. The bad news is that his audience was not the majority of his constituents, but was New Jersey public employee union members. Not only was the governor not representing the majority of his constituents and the actual employers of the union, but Corzine was actually agitating the union against its employer.
This happens on every level, every day, all across America. Our elected leaders collude with union leaders and happily agree on more increases in the amount of our money these people will get. The unions finally found a self-healing host in the government. Unfortunately they may have milked the cows to exhaustion.
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Unions in place and blacks in check, the Democrats dropped the next bread crumb on the trail to socialism, the next crisis—the Great Depression. The Great Depression allowed FDR to sell “new deals,” in order to keep America working, but it also