SEIU

Public Pensions Fuel Government Growth

by Ivan Osorio on January 4, 2012 · 1 comment

in Bailout Watch, Economy, Employment, Labor

The straitened finances afflicting state and local governments across the nation have brought unprecedented scrutiny to government employees’ compensation, particularly pensions. As pro-market critics have pointed out how generous many public pensions are, government union representatives have pleaded poverty in response.

Today in The Wall Street Journal, Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute and Jason Richwine of The Heritage Foundation, say, “Not so” to such pleas of poverty. They do so by comparing defined benefit pensions to defined contribution retirement plans, such as 401(k) accounts.

Complex formulas obscure the fact that public pensions typically are much more generous than 401(k)s, making the situation ripe for misleading claims.

A case in point is the Illinois Teachers Retirement System (TRS), which insists that, because Illinois teachers don’t participate in Social Security, the average teacher’s pension of almost $43,000 “cannot qualify as ‘too generous.’” One might assume from such a statement that the typical Illinois teacher who retires this year after a full career will collect $43,000 per year. Not so. That average figure reflects the pensions of employees who retired years or decades ago, as well as individuals who worked only part of their careers in public schools.

The 2010 annual report for the TRS actually shows that the average teacher who retires today after 30 to 34 years of service had final earnings of $84,466 and collects a pension of $60,756 a year, plus annual cost-of-living adjustments, providing an income higher than 95% of retirees in Illinois.

These sums — and the strain they put on government finances — need to inform the debate over public pensions. But reformers need also to keep in mind the political implications of overly generous government pensions.

Generous pensions allow union-friendly politicians to satisfy their labor supporters’ demands while pushing those demands’ costs well into the future. Taxpayer resistance to increased spending is less powerful when politicians hide the spending through years-long delay. And that delay is one of the tools that have allowed government employee unions to become the permanent lobby for ever expanding government that they are today.

For more on pensions, see here.

Union vs. Union Fight

by Ivan Osorio on September 8, 2011

in Economy, Employment, Labor

A band I was in years ago had a song titled, “Sheet Rockers vs. Aluminum Siders,” about a fight our singer saw at work on a construction site.

I was reminded of it earlier today, when members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) stormed the Port of Longview, Washington, where they held security guards hostage, blocked a train, and destroyed property, damaging railroad cars and dumping grain. They were protesting the hiring at a grain terminal by the employer, EGT, of a contractor employing workers belonging to a different union, the Operating Engineers.

Such union turf battles are not novel. What is unusual about this one is that it doesn’t involve the ubiquitous Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which in recent years has picked fights with UNITE-HERE, the California Nurses Association, and its former affiliate, National Union of Healthcare Workers. And now members of a health care workers local in Michigan are trying to disaffiliate from SEIU, which a local spokesman said, “seem to only be interested in collecting dues from us.”

While SEIU’s unusually large number of fights with other unions is largely due to the efforts of its recent former president, Andy Stern, to centralize his authority, inter-union fights are still nasty in a way rarely seen between market competitors. That’s probably because for unions, the stakes are higher. (Current SEIU head May Kay Henry has largely continued Stern’s policies.)

Under current labor law, unions enjoy the privilege of monopoly representation of all workers in a bargaining unit, which makes representation an all-or-nothing proposition — you can’t fight for market share when the market is indivisible.

For more on SEIU’s fights with other unions, see here.

In Wisconsin Recall, Unions Run to Stay in Place

by Vincent Vernuccio on August 9, 2011 · 3 comments

in Economy, Employment, Labor

No matter what the outcome of today’s recall election, nothing substantive will change in Wisconsin. Even if organized labor were to sweep all six recall elections of Republican state senators, the unions would still not have the votes in the Assembly to pass any legislation. They will not be able to restore the government union’s lavish benefits, which were brought down to Earth this spring. And even if they were somehow able to muster legislation through both the Senate and the Republican-controlled Assembly, they still will not have enough votes to overturn a veto by Governor Scott Walker.

According to the John K. MacIver Institute for Public Policy, a Wisconsin think tank, Big Labor and its allies have funneled over $14 million into the recall effort.

The Washington Post reports that much of the money (on both sides) comes from groups outside of Wisconsin.

Outside groups — led by national unions on the Democratic side and limited government groups such as the Wisconsin Club for Growth on the Republican side — have shoveled more than $25 million into the recall effort, with both sides spending about the same amount. The candidates, meanwhile, have raised more than $5 million.

The staggering dollar amounts being showered on the eight recall campaigns — which after a July 19 election and Tuesday’s six contests will conclude with two elections on Aug. 16 — are shattering state records. In 2010, when the 99-member assembly and half the 33-member state Senate was up for election, outside organizations spent $3.75 million in Wisconsin — 15 percent of this year’s total.

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Judge Rules against SEIU in Fight with another Union

by Ivan Osorio on July 25, 2011 · 1 comment

in Economy, Employment, Labor

A judge has ruled that the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) improperly benefited from an employer threatening workers with loss of raises in a 2010 election in California that pitted it against a breakaway SEIU local. The election was to determine whether 43,500 Kaiser Permanente workers were to be represented by SEIU, the former SEIU affiliate, or no union. The Washington Post‘s Alec MacGillis reports:

Administrative Law Judge Lana Parke ruled that Kaiser had improperly withheld pay raises from workers in Southern California who had switched to the new union and that SEIU had then improperly threatened the workers voting in the Northern California election that they, too, could have raises denied if they made the switch.

Leaders of the new union, the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW), decided to split from SEIU in response to what they perceived as a power grab by the SEIU national headquarters, then under the leadership of Andy Stern.

Stern sought to consolidate several locals into a handful of giant mega-locals, a strategy that led to a series of embarrassing setbacks for the SEIU, including the split that created the breakaway NUHW and a corruption scandal in Los Angeles.

MacGillis further states:

Leaders of the breakaway union noted that the ruling came at the same time as SEIU and other unions are arguing in favor of new rules proposed by the labor relations board to reduce employer coercion against workers before union elections.

However, for NUHW to portray this incident as a case of employer intimidation is disingenuous. Kaiser’s conduct may hardly be exemplary, but its real fight was with SEIU, which has a history of making deals with employers without members’ input, and has tried to intimidate NUHW through strong-arm tactics ever since it became an independent union.

For more on the internecine SEIU fight and its related scandals, see here and here.

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.

New CBO Pension Report: Underfunding Could Be Higher

by Ivan Osorio on May 6, 2011

in Bailout Watch, Economy, Labor

That state and local governments  face serious pension funding problems isn’t a particularly controversial contention. However, the question of how much they’re underfunded by is much more contentious.

Last week, the Pew Center on the States released a report that estimates the nation’s total public pension underfunding at $1.26 trillion, based on the discount rate which  the Government Accounting Standards Board (GASB) allows fund managers to use in order to determine their level of contributions needed to meet future obligations. The Pew report is significant in that it acknowledges the arguments that the GASB-based estimate may be too low.

Now a new report by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) follows suit, and goes further. It discusses in some detail the “fair-value approach” advocated by some GASB critics, and estimates what total pension underfunding would be using lower discount rates.

  • For assets, the fair value is what an investor would be willing to pay for them—that is, the current market value (or an estimate when market values are unavailable); it is not the averaged, or smoothed, market values that are reported under GASB guidelines.
  • For pension liabilities, the fair value can be thought of as what a private insurance company operating in a competitive market would charge to assume responsibility for those obligations.

In the case of state and local pension plans, the discount rate for future benefit payments using the fair-value approach is lower—and, therefore, the estimated present value of those payments is higher—than under the GASB approach. Under the fair-value approach, future cash flows are discounted at a rate that reflects their risk characteristics. Hence, for pension liabilities, the discount rate reflects the fact that the cash flows associated with accrued liabilities are fixed and carry little risk; it is very unlikely that the liabilities will not be honored. By contrast, under the GASB approach, the discount rate used for liabilities reflects the greater risk associated with pension funds’ assets. Under the fair-value approach, one way to approximate the discount rate applied to future benefit payments is by using the interest rate on municipal securities adjusted to remove the effect of tax deductibility): In 2010, the discount rate would have been about half as large as the median discount rate of 8 percent under the GASB guidelines. (For additional discussion of discount rates, see Box 1 on page 6.)

A study published last year that examined the sensitivity of estimates of underfunding to discount rates for pension plans in the Public Fund Survey illustrates the large difference between the GASB and fair-value approaches. Unfunded liabilities in 2009 amount to about $0.7 trillion when liabilities are discounted at 8 percent but total $2.2 trillion when liabilities are discounted at 5 percent and $2.9 trillion when they are discounted at 4 percent (see Table 1). Those unfunded liabilities, as calculated on a fair-value basis, indicate funded ratios of roughly 55 percent and less than 50 percent, respectively.

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Political Bailouts for Underfunded Union Pensions

by Ivan Osorio on April 28, 2011

in Bailout Watch, Economy, Employment, Labor

While the nation’s attention has focused on government employee unions’ fight to retain their collective bargaining privileges, unions in the private sector are in an even bigger fight for their own survival.

Many major private sector unions’ pension funds are severely underfunded to the the extent that they threaten the unions’ own solvency, as well as their biggest selling point for attracting new members: a stable and secure retirement. At The Weekly Standard, Mark Hemingway explains just how bad things could get.

[T]he problem of bankrupt union pension plans is not going away. It’s more than likely a number of big union pension plans will go bankrupt. All of a sudden, union employees who were expecting generous pension plans will be dumped onto the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the government-sponsored enterprise that backstops pension plans. The maximum payout is just under $13,000 a year, or “dog-food money,” notes McMahon.

That’s when things are likely to get really ugly. Multi-employer pension plans are by law governed by boards equally divided between employer and union representatives. There’s already no love lost between rank-and-file union members and the class of political consultants and executives that has come to dominate union leadership. Both of the SEIU’s national pension plans issued “critical status letters” to their members in 2009?—?the Pension Protection Act requires such letters to be issued when funds can cover less than 65 percent of their obligations. The SEIU, however, maintains a separate pension plan for its national officers that was funded at 98.3 percent, according to the latest data.

Expect waves of class action lawsuits over pension mismanagement aimed at recouping money from the employers and unions responsible. This could well bankrupt unions. And when union pension plans begin failing, unions will be deprived of perhaps their biggest selling point — job stability with unrivaled retirement benefits.

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Faulty Public Pension Accounting: A Problem too Big to Ignore

by Ivan Osorio on April 28, 2011

in Economy, Employment, Labor, Regulation

One reason the ongoing debate over collective bargaining for government employees has been so loud is that the stakes are so high — for unionized government employees on one side and for taxpayers on the other.

For years, public sector collective bargaining enabled government employee unions, especially at the state and local level, to aggressively lobby for generous compensation in exchange for political support for the politicians who grant such largess.

Those politicians, seeking to avoid taxpayer wrath today, deferred many of the costlier elements of that compensation well into the future, including pensions. To make matters worse, states underfunded those pensions for years, and the accounting methods they used hid the funding gaps.

Today, however, much as the budget crises affecting state government around the country has brought public attention to the bad bargain for taxpayers that is public sector collective bargaining, state pension accounting standards face considerable public scrutiny, from across the ideological spectrum.

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Hold the Sizzle: Chipotle, Immigrant Employees Get ICE’d

by Dennis Grabowski on February 14, 2011 · 4 comments

in International, Labor, Mobility, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Regulation

Chipotle boasts that it offers “food with integrity,” but the popular restaurant chain may want to consider an addendum in light of its recent actions: “so long as the federal government doesn’t get involved.”

The chain was forced to fire over 600 employees from its 50 Minnesota restaurants last month — about half of its employees in the state — in light of an audit conducted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Says one Minnesota paper,

The investigation of Chipotle began several months ago, [Chipotle communications director Chris Arnold] said, when ICE asked to see work eligibility documents. The company was not told why it was singled out for review. ICE then provided Chipotle with a list of employees whose documents might be invalid, he said.

Chipotle tries to screen new employees, but some provide false documents showing they are eligible workers, Arnold said. In cases where employees insist they have the proper documents, Chipotle has sought to give them extra time to produce the identification, he said.

“We have asked ICE whether they would allow a 90-day period to resolve discrepancies, and they have told us that they absolutely would not,” Arnold said.

Not only is ICE denying Chipotle the 90-day period to clear up documentation issues with its employees — an allowance that is “standard practice,” according to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) — but it is actively increasing the size and scope of its investigation of the restaurant chain. Earlier this month, ICE announced that it would also be auditing the 60 Chipotle locations in Virginia and Washington, D.C.

Robert McGoey, a co-coordinator of the rights-based organization Denver Fair Food, suspects that Chipotle will eventually be audited in every state due to its 80 percent Latino employment. Similarly, a February 11 article in The Nation reveals that John Morton, the head of ICE, says it “plans many more mass firings.” This tactic fails to meet the organization’s goals, made explicit in the same article:

The ICE website says it targets employers “who are using illegal workers to drive down wages … [those] likely to pay illegal workers substandard wages or force them to endure intolerable working conditions.”

At Chipotle, however, as in every other sanctions target, ICE never improved conditions. Wages remain the same. In fact, although Morton boasts ICE collected $7 million in employer fines during 2,740 audits, those who cooperated in firing workers were given immunity. The only people penalized were workers.

It seems that Chipotle is being targeted on the basis of its largely Latino demographics, rather than any abuse of undocumented workers in the workplace. While wages are unlikely to improve in a market in which “there are nearly five unemployed workers competing for each available job,” ICE’s failure to leave improvements in its wake was virtually guaranteed when it targeted a fast-food chain with above-minimum wages across the board. According to a report from the Immigration Policy Center published on February 9,

[Concerning] Chipotle, labor leaders who criticized the firm for the way it handled layoffs in the wake of the ICE audit say the company is “definitely above the bottom tier” in its overall treatment of workers. Even though the chain is non-union, the SEIU’s Nammacher said Chipotle pays above the minimum wage and offers some basic benefits. “They’re an above-board corporate player,” he stated.

Not only is Chipotle a poor target for an organization seeking to root out “intolerable working conditions” (Chipotle is even known for its practice of paying higher food costs in order to better the compensation of supply-chain employees), but ICE’s impacts harm the very individuals whose interests the organization purports to be acting in. According to a 2009-2010 report from the Human Rights Immigrant Community Action Network,

ICE’s new workplace enforcement strategy of auditing employment files, allowing employers to fire undocumented workers en masse – also dubbed “silent raids” – has deepened the economic and humanitarian crisis in many communities across the country, making workers further vulnerable to labor rights violations and other forms of abuse.

The study details several cases in 2009 and 2010 in which ICE audits — intended to publish “bad apple” employers — did anything but.  ”In each of these cases, rather than hold the employer accountable for existing labor law violations and abuses, ICE’s I-9 audits triggered massive layoffs leaving thousands of families in crisis and more vulnerable to abuse.”

SEIU president Javier Morillo described the effects of this practice on undocumented workers, stating that “They are pushed out of jobs where they are being paid above the table.” He added, “They pay taxes, Social Security taxes, etc. They are being moved, many of them, to precisely the bad employers that pay cash, that pay less than minimum wage.”

The deeper that one delves into ICE’s actions, the more that the government organization’s actions seem inconsistent. According to the organization’s website, “ICE’s primary mission is to promote homeland security and public safety through the criminal and civil enforcement of federal laws governing border control, customs, trade, and immigration.”

It’s unclear, however, how the organization’s recent moves against the employees of Chipotle are in any way consistent with its stated ends of promoting security and safety. It is similarly unclear that Chipotle was abusive  in its dealings with the undocumented workers that it unknowingly employed.

What is clear, however, is that ICE’s actions threaten the very employees whose working conditions it claims to defend.

What Government Unions Want: One, Two, Many Californias

by Ivan Osorio on January 6, 2011 · 1 comment

in Economy, Employment, Labor, Regulation

That the large Republican gains in the 2010 midterm elections pose a setback for organized labor’s agenda is hardly news. What will be newsworthy is how incoming policy makers at both the federal and state level will fight back against union power — especially government union privileges — over the next couple of years, and to what extent they succeed.

The Economist sums up the challenge elected officials face as they stare down the government union political machine (and offers a good overview of the global nature of this problem):

It would be a mistake to write off the public-sector unions. They are masters of diverting attention from strategic to tactical questions. Undoubtedly the unions will lose some of their privileges over the coming years; the scale of the debt crisis makes this inevitable. But will governments have the courage to tackle the root causes of the problem (such as pensions) rather than dealing with secondary problems (such as wages)? And will they dare to tackle questions of power rather than just pay and perks? If they are to claim victory in the coming fight, they need not just to restore the public finances to health. They also need to breathe the spirit of innovation into Leviathan.

And not all politicians challenging government unions are Republicans. As The New York Times reported this week:

State officials from both parties are wrestling with ways to curb the salaries and pensions of government employees, which typically make up a significant percentage of state budgets. On Wednesday, for example, New York’s new Democratic governor, Andrew M. Cuomo, is expected to call for a one-year salary freeze for state workers, a move that would save $200 million to $400 million and challenge labor’s traditional clout in Albany.

Indeed, as I noted recently, the longstanding alliance between government employee unions and Democratic politicians has become strained. Public sector unions may be among the Democratic Party’s most loyal constituencies, but the gaping budget deficits to which unionized government employees’ generous compensation packages have substantially contributed bear no party label.

And it’s not as if bloated state budgets guarantee a high quality and adequate supply of public services. As Arnold Kling puts it so well in EconLog blog:

If you do not have enough sanitation workers because you cannot fill job openings at the current level of pay, then those government workers are underpaid.

On the other hand, if you do not have enough sanitation workers because your budget is busted by the ones you have, then those government workers are overpaid.

Thus, the bipartisan nature of this pushback should not be that surprising — yet it has taken government union leaders by surprise, being unaccustomed as they are to finding themselves on the defensive. Naturally, they plan a response.

And what the unions want should worry anybody who cares about fiscal sanity. As Politico reports:

Labor leaders take hope in the story of California, where Schwarzenegger arrived after a recall with an apparent mandate for dramatic change and, in 2005, moved to shift state employees from a defined benefit to a defined contribution pension plan — the goal of many Republicans, but anathema to unions that see it as a threat to traditionally secure retirements.

Instead, Schwarzenegger found himself stymied by a state Legislature whose Democrats were tightly tied to labor, as well as by failures at the polls. Most public workers ultimately negotiated new benefit “tiers” with Schwarzenegger, but the changes fell far short of the Republican wish list, and the governor leaves his Democratic successor, Jerry Brown, a large budget gap.

We all know how that turned out.

(Hat tip: F. Vincent Vernuccio)

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

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