When Is America Finished Paying Her Dues?
WHEN unions first gained power in the United States, they gave mistreated and beleaguered workers the right to collectively bargain in the face of tremendous disadvantages and hardships. Brave men and women stood up and stared down politicians, special interests, monopolies, and robber barons and fought for fairness and a slice of the American dream. They didn’t demand special rights, they demanded equal rights.
Boy, have times changed.
We’ve gone from a world where labor unions sacrificed for the right of all American workers to collect a fair wage to a world where Big Labor sacrifices their workers in exchange for more power and influence.
These days, unions have become powerful political machines that work against individual rights in favor of special interests. They look down on fundamental American ideals like competition, capitalism, and freedom of choice and instead embrace monopolies and bureaucracy—the very things they once fought against.
Maybe the nine percent of people who’d like to join a union aren’t smart enough to understand this, but no one is stopping them. It’s like telling a pollster that you’d “like to wear a blue shirt tomorrow.” Why not stop talking about it and just do it?
Fortunately, most Americans aren’t fooled. A recent Rasmussen survey, mirroring many other polls, found that 81 percent of nonunion workers do not want anything to do with union representation. Overall, only a measly nine percent said they would actually like to join a union. Like a roach motel (or is it an Eagles’ song?), you can check in anytime you like, but you can never leave.
Given how great unions supposedly are and how much influence they now wield, you’d think people would be running to them in droves.
So why is the complete opposite happening?
From 1997 to 2004, private-sector employment grew from 66.1 to 103.6 million. But over those same years, union membership declined from 14.3 to 8.2 million. Either something is seriously wrong with the unions’ product, or they have the worst marketing department of all time. I’m going with the former.
Even those who find themselves in danger of losing their jobs, a group of people you’d expect to be wildly interested in the “security” of a union, aren’t pining for representation. Among those companies that are laying workers off, just nine percent of employees are interested in joining a union—the exact same pro-union percentage as the general population.
Survey results like that are probably why union membership has been in a freefall. In the late 1950s, one-third of all private-sector workers belonged to a union. By the mid’70s, that number had dropped significantly, but a quarter of all private-sector jobs were still unionized. (Of course, the mid-’70s also brought us Jimmy Carter and the Bee Gees, so something was clearly off.) But now? Unions are basically an afterthought—only 7.6 percent of nongovernment workers belong to one.
Why do I have to keep saying “private sector” and “nongovernmental”? Because unionization of government jobs is five times higher than that of private ones. The reason for that is simple: Private companies care about pesky little things like “profits” and “maximizing shareholder value.” As any good businessperson knows, unions result in higher labor costs and more red tape, two things that hurt a company’s ability to compete—but two things that a government monopoly could not care less about.
Over time, it’s become obvious that workers who get to choose between job security and success almost always bet on their own success. And with the multitude of laws that now protect workers from management abuse, along with a diverse job market created by free enterprise, most people have realized that the red tape of unions does nothing but hold them back. The ones who haven’t? Well, they’re idiots who usually say things like . . .
“OH, COME ON, GLENN, UNIONS ARE ONLY TRYING TO LEVEL THE PLAYING FIELD FOR THE WORKING MAN!”
Have you noticed how union groups talk like it’s still 1930 and their members are headed down into the coal mine without any water or flashlights? Guess what? It’s not 1930. These days, workers have rights, protections, and benefits that those from the early twentieth century couldn’t even fathom.
So, why are unions still around? Good question, easy answer: they’ve got lots of friends in very high places.
During the 2008 election, candidate Obama promised that he would offer a more union-friendly administration, saying, “This election is our chance to finally have a president who doesn’t choke saying the word ‘union.’” Unsurprisingly, unions responded to that sentiment—big-time. They worked as if their lives depended on electing Obama and other Democratic candidates across the country—and, in some ways, maybe they did. With dwindling membership, a growing irrelevance, and the marquee companies they “bargain” with disappearing faster than Obama’s campaign promises, it was only a matter of time before unions would be fighting for their very existence.
Politicians and unions are involved in a very convenient partnership. Unions take money from their workers and give it to politicians to help them get reelected. Politicians, in turn, ensure that unions maintain their power.
To prevent that from happening, unions long ago decided to start paying a lot more attention to political campaigns. According to Open Secrets, a website that tracks political fundraising, Big Labor made up twelve of the twenty top donors from 1989 to 2008. Here are those twelve, along with a mystery percentage for each . . . see if you can figure out what it is.
Big Labor, Big Donors
The percentage next to each union is . . . drum roll, please . . . the amount of money each group has given to Republicans over the last decade. Yep, of the twelve big unions that made the top twenty list, every single one of them leaned “strongly” toward the donkey with their contributions. In other words, for ten straight years, the communication workers, teachers, auto workers and aerospace workers unions have given a combined zero dollars to Republicans. That’s some balance! I guess we should be thanking the carpenters for stepping up to the plate with nine percent.
The truth is that most unions are no longer worker-rights groups, they’re political action committees. They don’t work to enact changes in their own companies or industries as much as they work to enact changes in laws that will help them claim more power and influence—something that’s about as far away from their original mission as you can possibly get.
Many people who are forced to join unions don’t appreciate that their dues are used as political donations to elect a candidate the member doesn’t even like. But what many members don’t know, because the unions don’t exactly advertise this, is that they have something called “Beck Rights.” (Seriously, that’s really the name.) Based on a 1988 Supreme Court decision, workers cannot be forced to pay any dues other than the amount specifically needed to fund their collective bargaining. Hmmm, that gives me an idea: How about we unionize all union workers with the intent of collectively bargaining with their leaders to reduce membership dues?
If management intimidation is really as bad as many claim, then why do 60 percent of all private-ballot elections (in which workers decide whether or not to form a union) actually succeed? Isn’t big, bad management supposed to be pulling the fire alarm or calling in fake bomb threats any time a few workers sit down together in the lunchroom?
When management intimidation does undermine union efforts to organize (and, whom are we kidding, that certainly does happen), there are about a trillion laws on the books (give or take) to make sure that someone pays. The National Labor Relations Board gets plenty of complaints about unfair labor practices—but those complaints are levied against both sides: employers and unions.
Unions claim to only want a level playing field, but what they really want is special treatment. Despite winning 60 percent of workplace elections, union leaders are still dragging out the intimidation myth and using it to argue that secret ballots are no longer fair. Their proposed remedy is something called the Employee “Free” Choice Act (EFCA) . . . aka “card check,” and it’s an idea that’s been around for a long, looooong time. The difference now? Big Labor savior President Obama.
Since there are no limits to the idiotic names politicians attach to things, why not go on a retroactive renaming campaign?
Let’s call the internment of Japanese Americans “The Involuntary Vacation Act.” The American Recovery & Reinvestment Act can be renamed “The Socializing of America Act.” And the War on Terror can be turned into the much-friendlier-sounding “Overseas Contingency Operation.” (Oh, wait . . .)
According to the National Labor Relations Board, there were 22,497 unfair-labor-practices charges filed in fiscal year 2008. 16,179 were filed against employers and 6,210 were filed against unions—83 percent of which were for “alleged illegal restraint and coercion of employees.” It just goes to show that when you lend your power to someone else there’s nothing to stop them from using it against you.
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) currently oversees anonymous, secret ballot workplace elections supervised by impartial federal regulators. Unions want to trash that system because, they say, management has too many opportunities to scare their workers out of voting “yes.”
It’s funny how people can view an issue entirely differently once they’re directly affected by it (i.e., the story in the Second Amendment chapter about the gun-control advocate who changed his mind after being mugged). But The New York Times takes this to a whole new level. Their editorial board is unabashedly pro-union, recently writing, “There is little doubt that American workers need unions . . . A bill that would have made it easier for unions to organize workers died in the Senate last June. Congress should take up this issue again to stop companies from using threats and other aggressive tactics to keep organized labor out, and to help win workers their rightful share of the economic pie.”
There’s only one problem with that: The New York Times Company, which owns the Times, along with other newspapers around the country, was engaged in a major stand-off with their unions, demanding millions in wage concessions and threatening to shut down operations and lay off workers if they didn’t comply.
In response to this apparent hypocrisy, the company’s spokeswoman said, “Each of our 18 daily newspapers has independent editorial control, and the business side has no say in the positions taken by our editorial boards.” In other words, populist issues like fighting for a “rightful share of the economic pie” are easy to talk about in the abstract, but when the rubber meets the road and real jobs and profits are on the line, things become much more complicated.
NAME THAT LIBERAL ICON!
“I believe in the secret ballot as a very important part of our democracy. When we elect a president, sheriff or member of Congress, we walk into the voting booth and pull the curtain free of anyone trying to twist our arm . . . it is in the interest of labor and management to have a secret ballot.”
—Former Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern, talking about card check.
And that’s where card check comes in. It eliminates secret-ballot elections in favor of public ones. Very public ones. In fact, under card check, there are no elections at all; the “voting” can be done via a piece of paper passed around the office. If a majority of employees sign that paper—poof!—you have yourself a union.
Think about it—you’re minding your business on the welding machine when a few guys approach you. They hand you a clipboard and a pen and give you a little “talk” about the benefits of union membership, along with the possible consequences of not playing nice. Are you going to sign?
Of course you are . . . and a few signatures are all it takes for a union to be recognized. “Card check” moves the election from a private voting booth to a private meeting between you and the enforc—sorry, I mean organizers.
Peter Hurtgen, a former member of the NLRB, explained exactly who is pushing for these so-called free elections: “In my experience, neutrality/card check agreements are almost always the product of external leverage by unions, rather than an internal groundswell from unrepresented employees.”
That’s a fancy way of saying that the only people who are demanding a change in voting systems are the people at the top who are just looking for more power.
If the idea that merely getting a majority of employees to sign a card can result in an official union scares the bat crap out of you, then buckle up, because it gets much worse. The EFCA has no regulations or safeguards that mandate what “voting” cards must look like or say—not the size of the card or font, or even the language. In fact, the only requirement seems to be that the card has to contain a single, vague line somewhere mentioning that the card authorizes a union to represent the worker.
Believe it or not, despite all of the yelling about “card check,” it isn’t even the most economically destructive demand in the EFCA. Another provision, far less talked about, is one that would impose binding government arbitration if the employer and union fail to reach agreement within 90 days of a new union’s being certified.
Imagine how this would play out in a private business: You are haggling with a prospective boss about your salary. A few months have gone by and you haven’t yet reached an agreement, but you’re getting closer. Suddenly, there are some uninvited visitors in your waiting room. It’s the Feds. They’re there to inform you of your new salary, along with what your benefits will be and what your raises will be for the next five years.
In another era, that was called “communism.”
Senator Arlen Specter, who holds a pivotal vote on the card-check issue, announced in March that he wouldn’t support the EFCA because the recession makes it “a particularly bad time.” That in itself is an amusing line since, if we are to believe the unions, card check creates jobs—but what’s not amusing is how Specter qualified his decision. He might reconsider, he said, “when the economy returns to normalcy.”
In retrospect, when Specter said that, he was just one month away from seeking political asylum with the Democrats, so what Specter probably meant to say was that he might reconsider “if Big Labor helps him get reelected.”
Given this provision, unions would have exactly zero incentive to bargain in good faith. After all, why bargain when you can get exactly what you want (if not more—don’t forget those political contributions) simply by waiting a few months for the government to ride in on their white horse and save the day?
The bottom line is that unions believe that a 60-percent win rate is for losers. They dream of the day when every American worker is in a union (and, more important, paying their dues), whether they want to be or not.
Fortunately, even with Obama in the White House and a Democratic majority in Congress that unions helped to put there, card check is such a terrible idea that it still might not pass.
Three major corporations that have resisted unions, Starbucks, Whole Foods, and Costco, proposed a compromise that would have left most of the EFCA intact if these two poisonous components (the elimination of secret ballots and the use of government arbitration) were shelved. They were immediately rejected. Compromise is not in the unions’ vocabulary.
Do you ever wonder what kind of positive changes organized labor could make if they didn’t spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to buy elections? How much good do you think that kind of money could do in the private sector? Or a charity? How many jobs could unions actually create or save? How much better could the benefits be?
History is littered with examples of groups that began with the best of intentions, but were eventually hijacked by people who cared only about accumulating as much money and power as possible. As a result, these groups lose sight of their original mission and instead waste money on things (like lobbyists) when it would be far better spent on their own constituents.
In the middle of the EFCA campaign, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the fastest-growing union in the country, fired 75 of its 220 employees. Despite spending a holy fortune electing Barack Obama, they couldn’t scrape together a few thousand bucks to salvage the jobs of some poor schlubs in their own organization? That should prove pretty definitively where their priorities really lie.
In the irony of ironies, the laid-off workers filed unfair labor practices charges against the SEIU with the National Labor Relations Board. I’ll pause here so you can let that soak in . . .
If you can believe it, there is actually an organization called the “Union of Union Representatives” that represented the aggrieved union workers. Dumb question, but if unions are so fair and magnificent and necessary to workers, then why would union employees need unions to protect them from a union?
Pleaaaaaaaaaaaase, tell me there is a “Union of Union of Union of Representatives” that worked on behalf of the Union of Union Representatives that worked on behalf of the fired union members. That would make my year.
So why did the SEIU fire those poor “hardworking” souls that have the right to a job, a fair wage, fair benefits, fair blah, blah, blah? Here’s the explanation, straight from the top: “This is not a financial issue,” explained SEIU president Andy Stern. “We need to respond to the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity our members created by helping elect President Obama.”
“The staff union, the Union of Union Representatives, has complained to the National Labor Relations Board, asserting that the S.E.I.U. has failed to bargain about the impact of the layoffs and has sought to dissolve the staff union by reducing its membership.”
—The New York Times
Huh? I guess with that kind of nonsensical double-talk it’s not a surprise that Andy Stern heads a union.
The SEIU spent $80 million during the 2008 election cycle to get their candidates elected and was planning to spend tens of millions more to advocate on behalf of universal-health-care and card-check legislation. In other words, they spent money on politicians instead of payroll. If that’s not a “financial issue,” I’m not sure what it is.
Remember when the SEIU branch in Nevada gave a key endorsement to Obama that put him over the top there? That, along with their millions in campaign contributions, apparently bought a lot of goodwill in Washington, goodwill that they are all too happy to cash in:
You may have heard that California has had some budget issues (i.e., they were about $42 billion short). As programs were cut and taxes were raised, it became clear that sacrifices would have to be made by everyone—everyone except the SEIU. After losing their battle over cuts in wages of home health-care workers in Sacramento, they went to Washington instead. Officials there lent a sympathetic ear and California was threatened with the loss of $6.8 billion in federal Medicaid money unless they reconsidered their cuts.
Want to know exactly what $33 million in campaign contributions buys you? Well, it turns out that the SEIU was given “unprecedented access” to a conference call between Washington officials and state officials who were talking about the proposed wage cuts for home-health-care workers. “This is an unusual situation,” said a spokeswoman for the California Department of Health and Human Services. “It is incredibly unusual in our experience to have stakeholders on a call like this.”
In Illinois, Hartmarx, a men’s suitmaker, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after being unable to pay back $141 million in loans from its bank, Wells Fargo. Seems pretty cut-and-dried, except for the fact that Hartmarx plant employees are represented by the SEIU. The union turned to the state government (and we all know how ethical those Illinois politicians are), which then publicly threatened Wells Fargo—not with violence, but with something much worse: loss of business.
It turns out that Wells Fargo is the custodian for the Illinois State Portfolio and, as the Illinois state treasurer put it: “Unless the company remains open, [Wells Fargo] will not be doing business with the State of Illinois any longer.”
Is it just me, or does the word “extortion” come to mind?
“Words are cheap, everybody, there is not a presidential candidate, a gubernatorial candidate, a congressional candidate, who won’t tell you that they’re pro-union when they’re looking for an endorsement. I’ve been working with SEIU before I was elected to anything.”
—Barack Obama, preaching to the choir at a post-debate party hosted by the SEIU.
“Special Interests”
+
“Corporations”
+
“Government”
= Fascism
BUT
“UAW”
+
“Chrysler/GM”
+
“The Obama
Administration”
= Capitalism?
Not quite. Unions, especially ones that helped to elect our politicians, often seem to be “exempt” from sharing in the necessary sacrifices.
One of the best examples of this is the failure of Chrysler. After the company declared bankruptcy, the unions walked away with a better deal than virtually anyone else. Due to the arm-twisting from the government (they’re called “Uncle Sam” because they’re really good at getting people to say “uncle”), companies and investors that had lent Chrysler the capital they needed to stay afloat were forced to take it on the chin—but not the unions.
For example, consider “The International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America,” better known as the UAW. Their sacrifice was to make unspecified cuts to wages and benefits, alter some work rules, and waive Chrysler’s $8 billion payment to their retiree health-care fund. Okay, that sounds fair, you’re probably thinking—but that’s only because you haven’t heard what they got in return: a $4.6 billion government loan to a new retiree health-care fund, $600 million for their pension fund and—the icing on the cake—a whopping 55 percent equity stake in the newly reorganized Chrysler.
In other words, the unions now own more than half of Chrysler, all for a measly $3 billion.
The UAW gave 99 percent of their 2008 election-cycle donations to Democrats. I’m sure that didn’t have aaaaaaaanything to do with how the Chrysler negotiations went down. Right?
Other parties didn’t fare quite so well. Before the bankruptcy, Daimler held $2 billion in secured loans to Chrysler and owned a 19 percent stake in the company. After the deal, in a disappearing act that would make Houdini jealous, Daimler waived the $2 billion they were owed and also gave up their entire stake in Chrysler. What did they get in return? The privilege of putting an additional $600 million into the UAW pension fund.
Cerberus, a private-equity firm that was basically the life preserver to Chrysler’s flailing, splashing, drowning business, was also strong-armed into giving up everything for nothing in return. Prior to the government-led agreement, Cerberus held $500 million in secured loans,
an 80-percent stake in Chrysler, and full ownership of Chrysler’s headquarters. After the arrangement? The firm gave up all of its assets and received absolutely nothing in return. Who was negotiating this deal for them, Gerald Levin?
Gerald Levin = Former Time Warner CEO who decided to merge with AOL, a deal that cost shareholders over $200 billion. He was recently named one of the “20 Worst CEOs Ever.”
And, of course, let’s not forget the taxpayer. Remember when the government loaned Chrysler $4 billion in TARP funds and another $3.2 billion in bankruptcy financing? Hope you weren’t too attached to it (and it’s not like we really need the money anyway) . . . because it’s all gone. But here’s the best news of all: We’re lending the company another $4.7 billion. Isn’t the definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result?
In return for the new $4.7 billion loan, taxpayers got an eight-percent equity stake in Chrysler. But don’t worry! That we now officially own a big piece of Chrysler doesn’t mean the government is going to be involved in their turnaround. Remember, the president doesn’t “want to run auto companies . . . (he’s) got more than enough to do.” Like running our banks.
Even Canadian taxpayers got screwed over by this disaster. The Canadian government handed over $3 billion in loans, which, and you have to admire their honesty, they assume Chrysler won’t ever be repaying. Talk aboot a raw deal, eh?
I sure am. When Americans make money from the fruits of their free-market labor, it’s the greatest thing in the world. But when they make it based on blackmail, monopolies, and taxpayer funds . . . not so much.
When St. John’s University labor-law professor David Gregory (no known relation to the Bush-hating NBC “journalist” by the same name) was asked to name other unions that have done as well as the UAW did in the Chrysler deal, he replied: “Nobody’s even close.”
Big Labor will constantly—and I mean constantly—tell you about how their workers make more money than a corresponding nonunion employee. And they’re absolutely right. But there is an old saying that while statistics don’t lie, liars use statistics, and this so-called union triumph is a great example of that. Yes, union workers make an average of $195 more per week than non-union workers, but is that really the whole story? After all, in mates in state prisons pay far less in health-care benefits than their nonjailed counterparts. Does that mean that we should all strive to do twenty to life?
Unions and prisons, not as different as you might think:
Neither offer you the option to decline membership.
Once inside, you are completely ruled by the decisions of others.
The benefits are fantastic (smoke breaks, afternoon naps).
“Newbies” have to watch their backs.
You spend most of your time lying down with nothing to do.
Of course not—because being in a union, like being in prison, has consequences.
Unions are able to attain higher pay and unheard-of retirement goodies for their workers because they can hold companies and taxpayers hostage. (It doesn’t hurt their case that most of them operate in government-backed cartels, either.) But even if you’re okay with that, the data itself is still skewed. Union workers typically have automatic raises built into their contracts. In times when the economy is in a downturn and most workers are taking cuts, union workers stick to their guns and demand their contractual raises.
Higher pay is a great benefit of unions—but there is a major downside: your salary doesn’t really matter if you no longer have a job. So while unions trumpet the wages they secure for their members, they bury statistics that reveal how their heavy-handed policies cost jobs.
This graph shows private-sector job growth from 2003 to 2008 in three types of states: those with heavy unionization (above 9.1 percent of private employees in unions), those with low unionization (5 percent to 9 percent in unions), and those with very low unionization (under 5 percent).
The results are straightforward and striking: The more unionization, the less job growth. Heavily unionized states had about two-thirds less total private-sector job growth than states with very low unionization. That represents tens of thousands of missing jobs, which forces workers to rely on social safety nets like unemployment or welfare, putting an even heavier burden on state budgets.
But there are other consequences to unionization as well, because when unions “win,” consumers lose. The costs of unrealistic contracts aren’t borne by greedy executives, they’re borne by customers (many of whom are also “hardworking” men and women).
President Obama fired General Motors Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner—a man selected by a private board of directors and approved by private shareholders. But what about Ron Gettelfinger, head of the United Auto-workers Union? He was the man on the other side of every labor contract Wagoner had to sign. Doesn’t he bear any responsibility in saddling GM with labor and benefit costs that proved completely unsustainable?
Apparently not.
Why? Well, as evidence of how much the unions had given back in trying to keep GM solvent, UAW president Ron Gettelfinger told the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee that they’d agree to slash wages in half for new workers and exclude them from the legacy health and pension plans that were saddling the company.
Sounds great, except for one little problem: Since 2000, the number of hourly workers at GM is down 50 percent. In other words, there are no new workers.
By not basing labor costs on a free-market system of supply and demand, expenses quickly become out of whack with reality. Over time, those expenses (high salaries, unheard-of pensions, low-cost health care, etc.) inevitably increase the cost of products, thereby destroying industries (cars, airlines, etc.) and costing thousands of people their jobs.
Mark J. Perry, a professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan (and an expert on the car industry), calculated the average compensation for employees of the Big Three auto companies, including benefits, at $73 an hour. At the same time, U.S.-based employees (who are apparently not “working men and women”) of Japanese automakers earn $48 an hour—52 percent less.
In 2007, the legacy costs (things like pensions and health-care costs) of every car produced by the Detroit Big Three amounted to $1,800. These days, because production is down and early retirement is up, legacy costs now account for around $3,000 per car.
Think about what those costs do to a business trying to compete in a global free market against other companies that don’t have that same albatross around their necks. A car that costs an automaker $20,000 to make jumps to $23,000 before a profit is even considered. That puts U.S. automakers at a severe disadvantage to their counterparts, a disadvantage that has finally proven too much to overcome.
But it’s not only the legacy costs. If you really want to see how deeply inefficiency, waste, and plain stupidity are embedded into the union mind-set, look no further than “job banks”—an idea that only a combination of government and organized labor could possibly dream up.
In the 1980s, some Detroit automakers (like GM and Chrysler) placated the auto unions by creating the Job Opportunity Bank Security System, or job banks for short. Despite their name, those banks weren’t about creating jobs, they were about keeping people without them busy. Union employees who were laid off were put into these “banks” and paid nearly their full salary to just hang out and improve themselves watching movies and taking enrichment classes.
After the auto bailouts, many Americans were so disgusted by job banks that the pressure finally became too much and unions officially began to close them. Participants (who had already been laid off once) were all laid off again. Sort of. This time they went home and began collecting over 72 percent of their full-time pay.
That, my friends, is what they call union sacrifice.
One of the major reasons that unions first came into existence was to provide a balance against the power of monopolies. Monopolies made it nearly impossible for workers to get a fair shake because they had nearly complete power over their respective industries. That’s why it’s ironic that unions now rely on the biggest and most powerful monopoly in the world to acquire and maintain their power: the government.
While most of us rely on competition and a sense of personal achievement to bring out our best, public union employees are protected regardless of their talents or accomplishments. And that goes to the very core of what is wrong with unions: they celebrate mediocrity. What is the point in exerting yourself when the reward doesn’t change? What is the point of coming in early, staying late, or putting any extra effort into your job when your status and pay are defined by 500-page collective-bargaining agreements?
I mentioned earlier that public-sector workers are five times more likely to be in a union than private-sector workers, but what’s kind of ironic is that even union members who thought they were working in the private sector, like those in the UAW, are now essentially working for the government anyway. I guess a pretty good marketing strategy for the unions would be to convince the government to nationalize everything. Oh, wait a second . . .
If you think this is an overly harsh critique, just look at one of the most prevalent and powerful examples of this in the country: teachers’ unions.
First, the requisite disclaimers: There are a ton of great teachers in America, many of whom have decided to forgo far more lucrative careers because of their love of education. And it’s often a thankless job—anyone who has kids knows how tough it can be. But the unions only make the task even harder. They virtually guarantee that mediocre teachers stick around, while high-performing ones get so frustrated that they leave.
Let’s imagine for a moment a world without teachers’ unions. (Cue dream-sequence music and wavy lines.) All employment would be “at will.” Teachers would work at a school because they want to and, conversely, schools would employ only teachers that are doing a good job. Like employees at most businesses, teachers would strive to do their best in order to get promoted or receive a year-end bonus and bad or dangerous teachers would be immediately dismissed—no questions asked.
In other words, let’s imagine a world where teachers earn their salaries through hard work and talent, and where, as a result, American children lead the world in academic achievement.
Okay, the crazy dream sequence is now over. Back to reality.
Unions invest far more heavily in controlling school boards and stocking state houses and city councils with friendly supporters than they do in actual education. And that is where a government-union partnership is at its most destructive.
Out of 43,000 tenured teachers in the entire Los Angeles school district (which has a less than 50-percent graduation rate), only 112 were terminated for the entire decade of 1995–2005. That’s 0.26 percent of teachers. Talk about job security.
A Los Angeles public school union representative explained why there are so few firings: “If I’m representing them, it’s impossible to get them out. It’s impossible. Unless they commit a lewd act.”
But that rep may have spoken too soon because, in some districts, even a lewd act may not be enough.
When 20/20 anchor and best-selling author John Stossel confronted New York City public-school chancellor Joel Klein about a teacher who sent a sexually explicit email to one of his 16-year-old students, he got a taste of how hard it is to get rid of a teacher.
“He admits [to it],” Klein told Stossel. “We had the e-mail.”
“ You can’t fire him?” Stossel asked.
“It’s almost impossible.”
Why? According to Stossel it’s because “of the rules detailed in the New York school system’s 200-page contract with their teachers. There are so many rules that principals rarely even try to jump through all the hoops required to fire a bad teacher. It took six years of expensive litigation before the teacher was fired. During those six years, he received more than $300,000 in salary.”
Do we want our private industry to be run like the school systems of major urban areas? If unions have their way, that’s exactly what is going to happen.
