government employees

Wisconsin Judge’s Strange Ruling Blocking Limits on Collective Bargaining Surprises Legal Observers

by Hans Bader on March 25, 2011 · 2 comments

in Labor, Legal

Wisconsin legal observers were “surprised last week when Madison-based judge Maryann Sumi issued a temporary restraining order blocking implementation of Gov. Scott Walker’s bill to limit public-sector collective bargaining.” A law professor was “astonished” by the legally-baseless ruling, which didn’t even bother to “address the relevant laws and rules that demonstrate that what the legislature did was proper.”

The judge’s decision made no legal or logical sense, but did make political sense: the judge has to run for reelection in a liberal area, and her own son was a union organizer. Her son is a liberal political operative who also happens to be a former lead field manager with the AFL-CIO and data manager for the SEIU State Council. Moreover, the judge’s husband is a campaign donor to three of the Democratic lawmakers who fled the state to block the passage of the collective bargaining law, as well as a donor to Gov. Walker’s opponent.

Judges in Wisconsin have to run for reelection, and this judge is elected in liberal Dane County, where the new collective bargaining law was resoundingly unpopular, and the new governor lost by a wide margin even while winning easily statewide.

There was little legal basis for the judge’s ruling. The Senate Chief Clerk and non-partisan legislative attorneys signed off on the legislation being consistent with the open-meetings law.

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Did Wisconsin Police Violate the First Amendment through Selective Enforcement of Limits on Protests?

by Hans Bader on March 3, 2011 · 1 comment

in Features, Labor, Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony

Post image for Did Wisconsin Police Violate the First Amendment through Selective Enforcement of Limits on Protests?

Ordinarily, protesters who tried to occupy the Wisconsin Capitol Building would be swiftly arrested and removed. But this weekend, police in Madison, Wisconsin, not only allowed pro-union protesters to stay and sleep in the state Capitol Building, they joined them.

Wisconsin union supporters applauded this lawlessness. One exulted, “Police have just announced to the crowds inside the occupied State Capitol of Wisconsin: ‘We have been ordered by the legislature to kick you all out at 4:00 today. But we know what’s right from wrong. We will not be kicking anyone out, in fact, we will be sleeping here with you!’ Unreal.”  (Days later, the police finally told the protesters to leave the Capitol Building, but “didn’t evict“ them at that time, and protesters were still camped out in the Capitol Building on the morning of March 1, with their garbage and trash littering the building and the surrounding areas. By the time the police finally took grudging action to limit the protesters’ access to the building, it was during business hours — when the building has traditionally been open to the public. So a union lawyer then promptly got a temporary restraining order that, with little explanation, forced Wisconsin officials to reopen the building to the public during business hours, thus making it harder for them to clean up the building and prevent future occupations.)

This foot-dragging by police and their selective enforcement of the law was a violation of federal court rulings, like Dwares v. City of New York (1992), that require police to enforce the law in a viewpoint neutral manner. In Dwares, police were sued for refusing to arrest people who attacked flag-burners because they disagreed with the flag-burners’ message — even though police ordinarily enforce laws against assault.

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Bogus Statistic from Wisconsin Union Backers Spreads Despite Repeated Debunking

by Hans Bader on February 28, 2011 · 6 comments

in Economy, Employment, Labor, Regulation

Post image for Bogus Statistic from Wisconsin Union Backers Spreads Despite Repeated Debunking

“A lie can make it half way around the world before the truth has time to put its boots on” — like a false statistic recently spread by supporters of Wisconsin’s government-employee unions, such as MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. Despite being debunked by PolitiFact, it has since been widely repeated in multiple letters to the editor, and it remains uncorrected on the web sites of publications like The Economist.

On Wednesday, PolitiFact debunked the claim by Wisconsin union supporters that Virginia, which bans collective bargaining in state agencies, ranks 44th in the nation in ACT/SAT scores, compared to Wisconsin ranking 2nd. For example, it noted that in 2009, Virginia ranked 22nd in ACT scores, while Wisconsin ranked 13th. As PolitiFact notes, this claim was originally disseminated by the Wisconsin Democratic Party, which has now retracted it.

(Although PolitiFact didn’t note this, in 2010, Virginia actually beat Wisconsin in ACT scores, with Virginia ranked 12th and Wisconsin ranked 17th. Unlike Wisconsin, Virginia is a right-to-work state that bars forcing employees to pay union dues. Collective bargaining with government employee unions is currently mandated in Wisconsin, but banned in Virginia.)

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No, Wisconsin’s Budget Deficit Wasn’t “Manufactured” by Walker and the GOP

by Hans Bader on February 23, 2011 · 2 comments

in Economy, Employment, Labor, Regulation

Post image for No, Wisconsin’s Budget Deficit Wasn’t “Manufactured” by Walker and the GOP

Wisconsin is one of the most heavily taxed states in the country, and its government employees are paid much better than the state’s taxpayers. Like many states, it’s facing a substantial budget deficit. But when the state’s newly elected Republican governor, Scott Walker, attempted to place reasonable limits on government-employee pay and collective bargaining, liberal commentators such as Rachel Maddow falsely claimed that the state’s budget crisis was manufactured, and that Wisconsin actually had a projected budget surplus.

This claim has now been debunked by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, which endorsed Obama in 2008 and John Kerry in 2004: “Our conclusion: Maddow and the others are wrong. There is, indeed, a projected deficit that required attention, and Walker and GOP lawmakers did not create it.” Maddow blamed the state’s current deficit on business tax breaks supported by the governor, but those cuts are a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the state’s overall budget; and as the Journal-Sentinel noted, “the cuts are not even in effect yet, so they cannot be part of the current problem.”

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Obama Fans the Flames in Wisconsin, Seeking to Block State Budget Reforms

by Hans Bader on February 21, 2011

in Economy, Employment, Labor

State employees are paid better than people in the private sector. But government-employee unions refuse to make sacrifices to help close huge state budget deficits. Democratic legislators allied with those unions shut down the Wisconsin State Senate last week, fleeing the state to Illinois in order to block a quorum. Meanwhile, “over 1,000 teachers” called “in sick to force the closure of schools in Madison, Wisconsin” for another day, in a massive shutdown of Wisconsin schools.

Obama is fanning the flames, reports The Washington Post:

President Obama thrust himself and his political operation this week into Wisconsin’s broiling budget battle, mobilizing opposition Thursday to a Republican bill that would curb public-worker benefits and planning similar protests in other state capitals. . . .The president’s political machine worked in close coordination Thursday with state and national union officials to get thousands of protesters to gather in Madison and to plan similar demonstrations in other state capitals.

Wisconsin’s governor has been vitriolically attacked by state employees for seeking to limit their pay and collective-bargaining privileges. Some of these protesters are wielding signs bearing the words uttered by John Wilkes Booth as he assassinated Abraham Lincoln, “sic semper tyrannis.” Others are putting crosshairs on pictures of his face, along with the word “reload.” Others are branding him as “Hitler,” or comparing him to the fascist dictator Mussolini and Egypt’s recently ousted ruler Mubarak. So much for the short-lived era of civility that Obama and his supporters preached without practicing.

To shut down the Wisconsin State Senate, all the Democratic senators fled to a hotel in Illinois, which has a sympathetic Democratic governor. (Illinois Governor Pat Quinn just signed into law a 67 percent increase in income taxes, after a campaign in which he promised the state’s well-paid workers no layoffs and two-years of cost-of-living increases. Never mind that Illinois already has more government employees per person than neighboring Indiana.)

States are required by their constitutions to balance their budgets. The federal government doesn’t have to. So it’s easy for Obama, who has the ability to run up record deficits to hire tens of thousands of new federal employees, to fault cash-strapped state governments for trying to reduce the entitlements and collective bargaining rights of their employees. As Victor Davis Hanson notes, “what distinguishes Obama’s homespun platitudes about public-sector jobs from state governors’ more honest worries is just that ability. . .But pass a law that the U.S. must balance its books like the states must,” and President Obama might change his tune.

(Obama ran up the largest deficit in history in 2010, running up more debt in just one month than Bush did in the entire year of 2007. Obama’s recent budget proposal increases spending over the next two years while pretending to cut it, drawing criticism even from the liberal Washington Post.)

Even with budget cuts, government employees in Wisconsin would still live far better than the taxpayers who pay their salary. Wisconsin’s governor “would require many state workers to contribute 5.8 percent of their salary toward their pensions (up from 5 percent) and pay 12.6 percent of their insurance premiums — still much less than the average Wisconsinite pays for insurance through work.” As the Washington Examiner’s David Freddoso notes, “I defy anyone to find a private sector workplace where you can contribute only 6 percent for a generous defined benefit retirement plan, and have your employer pick up the tab for 88 percent of your health insurance. It just doesn’t exist. What we’re seeing is a protest based on disrespect for the taxpayers who are picking up the tab, most of whom do not make as much as the members of the teacher’s union.”

The public-sector unionization that Obama so prizes is something America just can’t afford.  As The Washington Post’s Charles Lane notes:

The truth of the matter is that ‘collective bargaining’ in the public sector is too often a parody of the real thing. For years, public-employee unions have used their dues money to help elect pliant politicians — usually Democrats — who, in turn, award the unions what they want at contract time. The taxpaying public’s only role in this costly cycle is to foot the bill. It’s not democracy when citizens lose control over the pay and benefits of the people who work for them. It’s not progressive when employee compensation takes finite resources away from Medicaid, parks, roads and libraries. And it’s not collective bargaining when union representatives sit on both sides of the table.

TSA Officers Are Not Screened for Psychological Problems

by Kathryn Ciano on November 18, 2010 · 4 comments

in Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual

“I want to do patdowns on airplane passengers. What would TSA need from me before I have authority to do whatever is required to check people’s pants?”

That’s how my conversation with TSA’s Human Resources department began. I wanted to know how much the Transportation Security Administration vets these low-wage officers before giving them full range — and federal backing — to decide exactly how much to touch airplane passengers before the officers are satisfied with their precautions.

TSA doesn’t require much at all, it turns out. This government agency-gone-wild performs a background check to weed out applicants who are convicted felons, but TSA does not test at all for applicants’ psychological soundness.

These are low-wage government employees granted full authority to touch passengers however they like. There is no indication that TSA agents have selectively abused their authority, but as with all government programs: If there are no checks in place to limit power, authority will be abused. Forget racial profiling; if there no limits to officials’ power, what would stop them from claiming the most attractive powers need a more thorough patdown?

Safety is important. Yet as long as TSA does not test to determine whether agents are psychologically sound, and as long as this runaway government agency has full authority over any person who enters an airport, individuals are not safe from TSA’s propensity to abuse their power.

From my piece over at The Examiner:

Cops are charged with doing what they deem necessary to stop alleged criminals from bad behavior and can face penalties if they violate the privacy of innocent citizens without cause. Meanwhile, TSA officials may do whatever they deem necessary to treat passengers however they want, including fining innocent Americans and ejecting them from airports should they refuse to comply with TSA’s determination to treat them like criminals — a consequence of merely entering an airport.

When the TSA was authorized to deal with airport security, the government wondered whether federal agents or private security would do a better job. It turns out that a test program revealed that private security keeps passengers safe better than do federal agents.

In any case, such extreme, invasive searches are forbidden even for soldiers in Afghanistan searching citizens there, unprotected by the presumptions granted Americans in the US Constitution. TSA officials are not above the law, and they should not have full discretion to decide when they can violate American’s constitutional rights.

TSA is not above the law. Law-abiding Americans should not be treated as though we were criminals. We should stop this bloated government agency from putting their hands down our pants. But, as long as officials insist on patting us down, shouldn’t we at least ask these agents whether they have a history of sexual assault?

Photo credit: cjdavis’ flickr photostream.

Obama Wants Taxpayers to Cough Up $50 Billion To Bail Out Public-Employee Unions

by Hans Bader on June 14, 2010 · 2 comments

in Bailout Watch, Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Employment, Energy, Environment, International, Labor, Politics as Usual, Precaution & Risk, Regulation, Sanctimony, Stimulus to Nowhere, Trade, Zeitgeist

President Obama now wants Congress to spend $50 billion to keep state governments from laying off government employees.  In essence, this is a bailout for the public-employee unions that bankroll liberal politicians.  Earlier, Obama’s allies in Congress proposed spending billions to bail out mismanaged and underfunded union pension funds.

The state governments will never have to pay back any of this bailout money, which rewards them for irresponsibly increasing government-employee pay much faster than inflation, to levels much higher than in the private sector.

By contrast, the private banks that were bailed out have repaid most of the money they received, while their shareholders lost most of their money–92.6 percent at Citibank.

While millions of private sector employees have been laid off in the current recession, few government employees have been.  The few government layoffs that have occurred would not even have been necessary if government employees were willing to accept pay cuts.  For example, in Montgomery County, Maryland, where a handful of teachers may end up being laid off due to a huge budget deficit, the average teacher makes $76,483 in base pay, not counting $30,000 in benefits, and other county employees are paid much better than teachers.  (Even if teacher layoffs occurred across the country–which they won’t–class sizes would still be smaller than they were a decade ago, since there are more teachers with higher pay teaching fewer students in the typical American classroom.)

Obama has not hidden his bias towards these unions.  As he noted in a 2006 book, “I owe those unions. . .When their leaders call, I do my best to call them back right away.  I don’t mind feeling obligated.”

Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package was deliberately crafted to focus on propping up pink-collar government employment at the expense of private-sector blue-collar jobs, where unemployment is concentrated.  The stimulus package is using taxpayer subsidies to replace U.S. jobs with foreign green jobs. It also destroyed jobs in America’s export sector.

The private sector bailouts have been bad enough.  An oversight panel found that the bailout of insurance giant AIG had “poisonous” consequences.

But bailouts of governmental and quasi-governmental entities will end up being far more costly.  The Obama administration lifted a $400 billion limit on bailouts for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the corrupt, government-sponsored mortgage giants that even Obama administration officials admit were at the “core” of “what went wrong” in the financial crisis.

Senate Democrats recently blocked any reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  (Obama received $125,000 in contributions from these mortgage giants as a senator.)

At the direction of the Obama administration, Freddie Mac ran up more than $30 billion in losses to bail out mortgage borrowers, some of whom have high incomes.  Federal regulators sought to make Freddie Mac hide the resulting losses from the SEC and the public.  The Obama administration showered the mortgage giants’ executives with $42 million in compensation.

Fannie and Freddie helped spawn the mortgage crisis by creating an artificial market for risky mortgages.  ”From the time Fannie and Freddie began buying risky loans as early as 1993, they routinely misrepresented the mortgages they were acquiring, reporting them as prime when they had characteristics that made them clearly subprime.”  They paid their CEOs millions, and engaged in massive accounting fraud–$6.3 billion at Fannie Mae alone–to increase the size of their managers’ bonuses.  As Government-Sponsored Enterprises, they were exempt from the capital requirements that apply to private banks, so they did not have enough reserves to cover their losses when their mortgages started defaulting.

Virginia Shows the Way in Taking on the Pensions Crisis

by Ivan Osorio on April 5, 2010

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Employment, Labor, Regulation

As the federal government continues to expand at an ever-growing pace, the Old Dominion is doing things differently. As The Richmond Times-Dispatch explains, Governor Bob McDonnell is trying to get the state to live within its means (and those of taxpayers), focusing on a key issue.

The most significant piece of McDonnell’s budget — though not widely noted — was the decision to trim the pension costs of future state employees. By shifting the model for those hired after July 1 to one that more closely resembles private-sector retirement plans, McDonnell took an enormous step in ensuring the state’s solvency — which should soon emerge as a distinct competitive advantage for Virginia’s economic development — while keeping faith with past promises made to current state workers.

This essential reform would have been impossible if Virginia politics were dominated by the public-sector unions that seem determined to drive California and New York, to name the most prominent examples, into bankruptcy, crippling tax increases — or perhaps both. McDonnell has set an important precedent here.

Indeed, as the Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards notes, Virginia, by barring collective bargaining by public employees, should serve as a model for other states. Almost as important is to depoliticize pension fund investment decisions, which have led pension funds to under-perform.

For more on public sector unions, see here and here.

Overpaid Bureaucrats Expand in Number and Pay

by Hans Bader on September 30, 2009

in Labor, Politics as Usual, Stimulus to Nowhere, Trade

Thanks to the $800 billion stimulus package, and other huge government spending increases, the number of federal and state employees is projected to increase massively. The federal government’s payroll may grow by more than 200,000, and perhaps as much as 600,000, over the course of the Obama administration. Obama’s budgets, which would result in record deficit spending of $9.3 trillion, would add at least 100,000 additional bureaucrats during just his first budget, and perhaps as many as 250,000.

This is going to be enormously costly, because federal employees are paid much better than private-sector employees, especially for unskilled jobs and jobs requiring only a liberal arts degree. (On the other hand, there are a few highly-skilled professional jobs that are paid lower in the federal government than in the private sector, but that’s rare).

State and local government employees are even more overpaid.  “More than 40% of city employees In Vallejo, California, had salaries greater than $100,000 in 2008. In May 2008, Vallejo filed for bankruptcy. Taxpayers support some hefty teacher salaries in Illinois. For example: a physical education teacher earning $163,000 (more than 400 earn in excess of $100,000); an English teacher earning $164,000 (more than 300 earn in excess of $100,000); a driver education teacher earning $170,000 (94 earn in excess of $100,000). In New York, state agency workers collected more than $459 million in overtime, with one aide clocking in 2,455 extra hours, nearly tripling her base salary from $38,500 to $110,841.”

Government employees have radically better benefits and pensions than private sector workers. “When wages and benefits are combined, federal civilian workers averaged $119,982 in 2008, twice the amount of $59,909 which workers in the private sector averaged for wages/benefits. The value of benefits for federal civilian workers averaged $40,000/year, four times the value of benefits that the average private sector employee receives. Only 12% of retirees from the private sector have defined benefit pensions to supplement Social Security. Their average annual pension is $13,083, and they are not eligible for full Social Security benefits until their late 60s. But the majority of public sector workers have pension plans that allow them to retire 10-25 years earlier with benefits many times the retirement payout that Social Security would provide. In San Jose, California, 256 retired officers and firefighters and 34 other city workers collect $100,000+ pensions, and all city retirees get free healthcare.”

Pay in the public sector rises faster than in the private sector even during Republican administrations. Pay for federal workers rose 53.7% between 2000 and 2008, compared to 28.5% for private sector workers.

Many of the new bureaucrats are being hired as a result of Obama’s welfare-filled stimulus package, which largely repealed welfare reform.

Obama claimed the stimulus package was needed to prevent the economy from suffering from “irreversible decline,” but the Congressional Budget Office admitted that the stimulus package would shrink the economy “in the long run.” The stimulus package has since destroyed thousands of jobs in America’s export sector, and subsidized countless examples of government waste and corruption.

Earlier this year, Obama fired an inspector general, Gerald Walpin, who uncovered millions of dollars of waste and fraud in the AmeriCorps program, including by a prominent Obama supporter, endangering the Obama supporter’s ability to administer federal stimulus spending in Sacramento.

The stimulus package also imposes on states racial set-asides and prevailing-wage requirements, which increase the cost to taxpayers of government contracts. The prevailing-wage requirements will increase states’ costs by at least $17 billion. Racial set-asides also are very costly.

The Democratic Party is closely tied to the government employee unions, which consistently endorse its candidates.  This poses a political risk, since the Democrats are already viewed by some “working-class voters” as “the party of the undeserving rich.”

The $9.3 trillion in deficits under Obama’s budgets is twice the $4.4 trillion baseline left behind by Bush, despite at least $1.9 trillion in tax increases projected under Obama.

Big Labor’s Big Prize in Health Care “Reform”

by Ivan Osorio on September 30, 2009 · 1 comment

in Healthcare, Labor, Regulation

In his Wall Street Journal column today, Holman Jenkins highlights one of the prizes at stake for organized labor in the current health care debate.

Union members not only like the tax-free, open-ended health -care benefits they’re used to getting. More important and often overlooked, organized labor itself is increasingly made up of health-care workers who benefit from an incentive system that artificially force-feeds great gobs of GDP into the industry’s maw.

Their long retreat elsewhere in the economy may continue unabated, but unions are steadily growing their clout in government and health care, two sectors that increasingly overlap and would become even more overlapped under the bills in Congress. Consider a scheme being test-driven in Missouri, where Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon, AFSCME and SEIU last year backed a ballot proposition to create a “Missouri Quality Homecare Council.”

As the A.P. matter-of-factly reported: “The ballot summary shown to voters said nothing about making it easier for in-home care providers to unionize.” But that was precisely the function. Now some 13,000 home health workers hired by patients but paid for by Medicaid are on the verge of being recognized as a union.

But won’t collective bargaining inevitably mean higher Medicaid costs for Missouri taxpayer? Gov. Nixon, whose campaign reportedly received $650,000 from SEIU and AFCSME, obviously has other priorities.

In Canada, where health care is largely government controlled, 61% of health-care workers are unionized. In the U.S., it’s only 11%. Democrats are bent on changing that and the bills floating around Capitol Hill are rife with provisions to replicate the Missouri scheme nationally.

As my co-authors and I point out in a new Cato Policy Analysis (“Vallejo con Dios: Why Public Sector Unionism Is a Bad Deal for Taxpayers and Limited Government”), organized labor has been pursuing this strategy for some time now.

Now some unions are trying to expand the definition of “public” by trying to organize government contractors. Washington state provides a good example of this. There, the trend began in 2001, when voters approved a ballot measure, Initiative 775, to allow independent long-term health care providers to unionize and bargain collectively over hours, compensation, and working conditions.39 Then in 2007, Washington state authorized collective bargaining for adult-home-care providers who receive Medicaid and other state aid.40 Stretching the definition of “public employee” to any home-care provider who may contract with the state can give a public employee union a foothold in the private sector. Further, under such an arrangement, union fees can be deducted from state compensation checks before the recipients ever see them, so the care providers never miss money they never see.

For more on labor, see here.

For more on SEIU, see here.

For more on health care, see here.