NEA

In Wisconsin, Smaller Class Sizes through Fiscal Restraint

by Ivan Osorio on June 30, 2011

in Economy, Employment, Labor

Of the various hyperbolic leftist talking points against the recently enacted Wisconsin collective bargaining law, the “war on teachers” was easily the most shrill, dumb, and tiresome. It was also flat wrong.

Now a similar collective bargaining reform by the Kaukauna Area School District (part of the Appleton metro area) is projected to shift the District’s budget from a substantial deficit to a large surplus. The Appleton Post Crescent reports:

As changes to collective bargaining powers for public workers take effect today, the Kaukauna Area School District is poised to swing from a projected $400,000 budget shortfall next year to a $1.5 million surplus due to health care and retirement savings.

The Kaukauna School Board approved changes Monday to its employee handbook that require staff to cover 12.6 percent of their health insurance and to contribute 5.8 percent of their wages to the state’s pension system, in accordance with the new collective bargaining law, commonly known as Act 10.

“These impacts will allow the district to hire additional teachers (and) reduce projected class sizes,” School Board President Todd Arnoldussen wrote in a statement Monday.

Teachers unions have been advocating reduced class sizes for years. Whatever the merit of smaller classes — and there is no universally accepted definition of what constitutes an “ideal” classroom headcount — they would require the hiring of more teachers, resulting in more dues-paying union members.

Now Kaukauna is poised to give the unions that, in exchange for some modest increases to their health insurance and pensions. Yet I  doubt the state’s NEA affiliate will be celebrating (hat tip: Iain Murray).

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

Are Government Employee Unions Losing the Democrats?

by Ivan Osorio on December 10, 2010

in Economy, Labor, Regulation, Zeitgeist

Government employee unions have long been renowned as one of the Democratic Party’s most loyal and dedicated supporting constituencies. For years, Democratic politicians have supported public employee unions’ agenda of increased government spending, leading to more government jobs and thus more potential union members.

For teachers unions — which are among the most politically powerful government unions — Democrats have helped them resist popular school reform efforts that could threaten the government-school monopoly, including school choice and charter schools.

That was great deal for the unions and their political allies, but a dead weight on everybody else, as taxpayers funded a continually expanding government sector, while a growing number parents saw their children stuck in underperforming schools. Now cracks are finally starting to show in that alliance — and they may get wider in the near future.

It is perhaps no coincidence that some of the nation’s boldest education reformers have been Democrats. From outgoing Washington, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (who was a Democrat before he re-registered Republican and is now an Independent), it is mayors in Democrat-controlled cities who have faced the most dire conditions in the schools they were elected to oversee.

Both Fenty  and Bloomberg saw the need for drastic action, thus their appointment and strong support for their respective school chancellors — Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein — both of whom pursued an aggressive reform agenda.

Now Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, also a Democrat, has joined the pro-reform chorus. Not surprisingly, his city’s teachers union, United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA), wants no part of Villaraigosa’s reform efforts. Moreover, Villaraigosa himself has a teachers union background. To his credit, the mayor is striking back.  In a speech this week, Villaraigosa criticized the UTLA leadership in no uncertain terms:

Over the past five years, while partnering with students, parents and non-profits, business groups, higher education, charter organizations, school district leadership, elected board members and teachers, there has been one, unwavering roadblock to reform: UTLA union leadership.

While not the biggest problem facing our schools, they have consistently been the most powerful defenders of the status quo. I do not say this because of any animus towards unions. I deeply believe that teachers’ unions can and must be part of our efforts to transform our schools. Regrettably, they have yet to join us as we have forged ahead with a reform agenda.

By partnering with the Los Angeles School Board, we created the Public School Choice program that is now allowing non-profits, charters, teacher groups — anyone with a proven track record of success — to compete to run new or failing schools. By 2012, over 50 low-performing schools will be under new leadership, with a new chance for success.

UTLA leadership fought against this reform.

Partnering with the School Board and the charter school community, we doubled the number of charter schools in an effort to raise our test scores and alleviate overcrowding.

Partnering with the Parent Revolution, we successfully passed legislation here in Sacramento, empowering communities to shut down, reopen or takeover a failing school if a simple majority of parents petition to do so.

Working with LA Unified, I founded the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools to turn-around 21 of the lowest-performing schools.

And partnering with civil rights organizations and the ACLU, we filed a lawsuit to take a stand against the practice of seniority-based layoffs, which were disproportionately affecting our poorest schools and students of color.

At every step of the way, when Los Angeles was coming together to effect real change in our public schools, UTLA was there to fight against the change and slow the pace of reform.

Now let me pause to underscore the point once again that I come from an organizing background. I vociferously believe in the fundamental right for a worker to organize, to have a voice and a seat at the bargaining table. But union leaders need to take notice that it is their friends, the very people who have supported them and the people whom they have supported, who are carrying the torch of education reform and crying out for the unions to join them.

UTLA boss A.J. Duffy angrily dismissed Villaraigosa’s remarks, saying that, “Pointing fingers and laying blame does not help improve our schools.” Yet pointing fingers at those responsible for the dire state of public schools is what is needed.

Duffy’s reaction, while unfortunate, is not surprising. For he and other government union bosses to change course, the incentive structure under which the UTLA, and government employee unions in general, operate needs to change.

As the late president of  American Federation of Teachers, Albert Shanker, so honestly put it, “When school children start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of school children.” Until they do, Villaraigosa’s call on UTLA leaders to drop their opposition to his administration’s reform efforts and join him in making L.A.’s public schools better is likely to continue falling on deaf ears.

Likewise, government employee unions exist to represent the interest of their members, not of taxpayers. And government employees benefit from the growth of government, so the interests of public sector unions and those of taxpayers are fundamentally at odds.

Adding to the problem is the fact that it is on union-friendly politicians’ interest to give the unions what they want, since — in the classic concentrated benefits/diffuse costs public-choice problem — they’re more likely to protest at being denied greater compensation than taxpayers are likely to protest seeing their taxes go up gradually. Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, also a Democrat, recognized this, though unfortunately once he was safely out of office:

The deal used to be that civil servants were paid less than private sector workers in exchange for an understanding that they had job security for life. But we politicians — pushed by our friends in labor — gradually expanded pay and benefits . . . while keeping the job protections and layering on incredibly generous retirement packages.

In government, unionization is greater at the state and local levels. For years, state and local governments were able to sustain their unionized employees’ generous compensation packages, as long as their economies continued growing. But since the nation’s economy went south, states and localities are struggling, and state and local politicians — Democrat and Republican alike — must face this crisis.

Indeed, in New York, Governor-elect Andrew Cuomo — yes, also a Democrat — may be headed for a showdown with government employee unions over wages and pensions. The unions won’t like it, but the taxpaying public will. In that regard, I think left-leaning Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum gets it right:

I sometimes wonder if [UTLA head A.J.] Duffy understands just how widely his union is loathed? Somebody should correct me in comments if I’m wrong, but as near as I can tell UTLA literally has no support anywhere from anybody that it doesn’t directly give money to. Everybody else hates them with a passion. That doesn’t mean Villaraigosa can win a big public battle with UTLA, of course, since they give lots of money to lots of people, but he might. If Villaraigosa plays his cards right, he’ll have about 90% of the city on his side. Pass the popcorn.

Indeed, this and other similar fights will be worth watching.

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

Government Unions Buying More Power

by Vincent Vernuccio on October 25, 2010

in Labor

Yesterday The Washington Examiner showed how public sector unions are buying their power though campaign donations. In their excellent editorial “Public employee unions versus working Americans,” the Examiner contrasts the grassroots movement of the Tea Party with the big money interests of government employee unions. It also shows the hypocrisy of President Obama going after (with false allegations) so called shadowy, unnamed “foreign interests,” while much of the money on the left comes from unions fighting for larger and more expensive government at taxpayers’ expense.

With the 2010 midterm congressional election campaign entering its final week, the fundamental divide in American politics has rarely been defined with more raw clarity than it is now.

On the one side are voters representing a vibrant private sector that creates jobs, builds prosperity and throbs with opportunity. Here are found the Tea Party movement, most congressional Republicans and a few of their Democratic colleagues, millions of independent voters, Main Street and small-business associations, and, increasingly, seniors. The other side is led by government employee unions who take from the private sector to further enrich and empower themselves and their political allies, including President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and the Democratic majority that has controlled both chambers in Congress since 2007. The unions’ supporting cast includes radical Big Green environmentalists, trial lawyers, most precincts of the mainstream media, and college professors.

Obama and company have been on a demagogic spree in recent weeks, attacking the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and a host of shadowy, unnamed “foreign interests” for allegedly pumping millions of anonymous dollars into U.S. politics to buy the election. The charge is demonstrably false, but that doesn’t prevent its endless repetition. On Friday, however, we learned courtesy of the Wall Street Journal that the biggest political spending in 2010 is by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. AFSCME will have funneled an estimated $87.5 million into the campaign by Nov. 2, all of it going to Democrats and an amount far exceeding the chamber’s $75 million. More millions are being poured into Democratic campaign coffers by other public-sector unions. On Friday, for example, the National Education Association spent $500,000 on ads aimed at helping Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak defeat former Rep. Pat Toomey, the Republican in the Pennsylvania Senate contest.

But there is a fundamental problem here that FDR understood years ago and that AFSCME President Gerald McEntee inadvertently highlighted when he told the Journal: “We’re spending big. And we’re damn happy it’s big. And our members are damn happy it’s big — it’s their money.” Actually, it’s not simply “their money.” Every dollar paid to a unionized government worker was taxed away from somebody who earned it in the private sector. So when these unions spend millions to elect Democrats who will vote for bigger government, they are literally using money from the productive part of America to enable more government taxing and spending. FDR might well have had this inconvenient fact in mind when he wrote in 1937 that “meticulous attention should be paid to the special relationships and obligations of public servants to the public itself and to the Government … the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.”

The interests of government employee unions are inextricably opposed to the public interest. It’s time campaign finance law recognized this truth.

How Much Harm Do Teacher Unions Do?

by Ivan Osorio on October 14, 2009

in Labor, Politics as Usual, Regulation

Plenty, according to the new film, The Cartel. The film purports to show “educational system like we’ve never seen it before. Behind every dropout factory, we discover, lurks a powerful, entrenched, and self-serving cartel.” Trailer below.

In fact, the power of teachers unions is part of an even greater problem: the growing ranks of unionized government workers, a phenomenon that creates a permanent constituency favoring the growth of government — one that is well organized, motivated, and well funded.

For more on public sector unions, see the study, “Vallejo Con Dios: Why Public Sector Unionism Is a Bad Deal for Taxpayers and Limited Government.”

More on Public Sector Unions

by Ivan Osorio on October 14, 2009

in Economy, Labor, Politics as Usual, Regulation

Slate blogger Mickey Kaus explains how public sector unions are driving state and local governments to the brink of bankruptcy (via Nick Gillespie at Reason Hit & Run, via Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit):

The justification for public sector unionism is way weaker than that for private sector unionism. “[Government] workers are not extracting a share of the profits but rather a share of taxes,” as former N.Y. Liberal Party leader Alex Rose puts it. And the right to strike, in the hands of key public unions, approaches a blackmail power. But the political strength of the unions is such that even most Republicans, at the state and local level, are scared to question them. They gelded Arnold Schwarzenegger. You want to be next?

Kaus cites a Weekly Standard article by Fred Siegel and Dan DiSalvo, in which they explain the public choice dynamic that makes government employee unions especially powerful:

[W]ith the power of the public sector unions to drive election outcomes, they now sit on both sides of the bargaining table. Unlike private sector unions, the sheer number of workers represented is not the linchpin of their influence. Private sector unions have a natural adversary in the owners of the companies with whom they negotiate. But public sector unions have no such natural counterweight. They are a classic case of “client politics,” where an interest group’s concentrated efforts to secure rewards impose diffused costs on the mass of unorganized taxpayers.

And how bad can it get?

The combined power of the teachers and health care workers has made the New York state legislature a wholly owned subsidiary of the public sector unions. The law mandates that all new legislation be evaluated for its fiscal impact. In recent years those calculations were performed by an actuary named Jonathan Schwartz. In 2008, when Schwartz found that a piece of bipartisan legislation allowing city workers to retire early with full pension benefits would impose no new costs, the New York Times blew the whistle. Schwartz, who had been fired from a city job, worked not only for the state assembly but also, it turned out, for District Council 37 of the SEIU. When asked which other unions he had worked for, he replied, “How many unions are there?” His client list included the teachers, firefighters, detectives, correction officers, and bridge and tunnel officers. Not surprisingly New York State has the highest per-employee pension costs in the country.

For more on the strain that public sector unions place on government budgets — and on democratic government itself — see “Vallejo Con Dios: Why Public Sector Unionism Is a Bad Deal for Taxpayers and Representative Government.”

New Study on How Government Employee Unions Squeeze Public Budgets

by Ivan Osorio on September 28, 2009

in Economy, Features, Labor, Regulation, Zeitgeist

Remember the California budget debacle? Now it seems like not a month goes by without another state facing a budget crisis. Now it’s Michigan’s turn. Predictably, state politicians are trying to scare the public with talk of cutting funding for libraries and prisons, in order to make tax increases an easier sell. Also predictably, policy makers appear to be avoiding looking for budget savings where substantial ones could be realized: government payrolls. As The Detroit News points out:

Employee pay and benefits make up one of the biggest costs of state government. Michigan had 52,769 workers as of March and a state classified payroll of $4.73 billion for fiscal year 2007-08. When the auto industry was larger, Michiganians were among the top 20 states in per-capita income. But that income has declined to 11 percent below the national average. The state with the nation’s worst unemployment rate can no longer afford to pay above-average compensation. Michigan state workers earn 6 percent more than the national average in salary and benefits, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Michigan private-sector workers make 29 percent less than the national average for state workers.

As in other states, government employee unions oppose cuts that would affect their members. All unions do this, but public sector unions are different in that they don’t have to fear putting their employer — government — out of business, so they can ratchet up demands, which are fulfilled at taxpayer expense, to a much greater extent than private sector unions generally are able to. The upward spiraling public sector pay and benefits that result from this can wreak havoc on public finances.

For an in-depth analysis of the effect of the widespread unionizaiton of government employees, see the new Cato Institute Policy Analysis, “Vallejo Con Dios: Why Public Sector Unionism Is a Bad Deal for Taxpayers and Representative Government,” co-authored by University of South Florida economics professor Don Bellante, David Denholm of the Public Service Research Foundation, and myself.

DC on the School Reform Front Lines, Again

by Ivan Osorio on March 2, 2009

in Economy, Labor, Regulation

Today’s Washington Post features an editorial that strongly criticizes Congressional Democrats’ rush to kill the District of Columbia’s school voucher program, which enjoys bipartisan support in the heavily Democratic nation’s capital, and is considered a success by those whose opinion should most matter in this debate: schoolchildren and their parents.

We would like Mr. Obey and his colleagues to talk about possible “disruption” with Deborah Parker, mother of two children who attend Sidwell Friends School because of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. “The mere thought of returning to public school frightens me,” Ms. Parker told us as she related the opportunities — such as a trip to China for her son — made possible by the program. Tell her, as critics claim, that vouchers don’t work, and she’ll list her children’s improved test scores, feeling of safety and improved motivation.

The school vouchers main opponents are, of course, the teachers unions that contribute heavily to Democratic politicians. But this should not be a partisan issue. Adrian Fenty, D.C.’s Democratic mayor, has already shows great resolve in taking on the District’s troubled public school systems in his appointment of Michelle Rhee as Schools Chancellor, to whom he has granted considerable authority. As a recent profile of Rhee in The Atlantic noted:

Rhee, responsible not to a school board but only to the mayor, went on a spree almost as soon as she arrived. She gained the right to fire central-office employees and then axed 98 of them. She canned 24 principals, 22 assistant principals, and, at the beginning of this summer, 250 teachers and 500 teaching aides. She announced plans to close 23 underused schools and set about restructuring 26 other schools (together, about a third of the system). And she began negotiating a radical performance-based compensation contract with the teachers union that could revolutionize the way teachers get paid.

Mayor Fenty, to his credit, has stood by his Schools Chancellor’s decisions against an onslaught of criticism from teachers unions. This is precisely the kind of boldness he needs to display now to defend the voucher program. If the program is lost, so will be many of the District’s educational improvements.

For more on teachers unions, see here.