GOVERNMENT OF, BY AND FOR THE UNIONS

The violent imagery and uncivil rhetoric journalists have searched for in vain at Tea Party rallies are in evidence in the protests in Madison, Wisconsin against Gov. Scott Walker’s efforts to trim the power of public employee unions.

The New York Times likened the protests in Madison to those against Arab dictatorships.

Wisconsin is a democracy, not a Middle Eastern autocracy.  Those who subvert democracy are those who would shut down the government to keep the will of the people, as expressed at the polls in November, from being enacted.

Wisconsin is nearly bankrupt.  There is a $137 million shortfall in the fiscal year that ends June 30, and a projected deficit of $3.6 billion for the two years after that.

The deficit cannot be closed without trimming pay and benefits of public employees.  In 2008, these accounted for half of all state and local government spending, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.  If government workers were paid the same as private sector workers, no state would have a budget deficit, calculated blogger George Noga, a Certified Public Account.

Gov. Walker wants public employees in Wisconsin to contribute roughly half as much, proportionately, to their health plans and pensions as do workers in the private sector.

The governor also wants to restrict public employee unions to bargaining for wages only, leaving the health and benefit packages and work rules up to elected officials to decide.  And he wants the state to stop collecting dues for the unions, and to require them to win recertification elections each year.

If local governments in Wisconsin could make changes in these areas, they could save about $1.44 billion in the next biennium, said Patrick McIlheran of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

That’s critical, because the 57 percent of the state’s budget that goes to aid to local governments has to be slashed to close the $3.6 billion hole.

Without that flexibility, the only way state and local governments can control costs is to lay people off.  One Wisconsin school district has announced plans to lay off a third of its teachers.  Gov. Walker estimates that if his bill doesn’t pass, up to 12,000 state and local government workers would get the axe.

The unwillingness of public employee unions to make even the smallest sacrifices on behalf of the beleagured taxpayers who support them was illustrated last August when the teachers’ union in Milwaukee sued to prevent the school board from dropping Viagra from its health plan coverage

This is “an assault on unions,” said President Barack Obama of Gov. Walker’s plan.

That’s true.  But Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the president most favorable to industrial trade unions, would have stood with Mr. Walker.

“Meticulous attention should be paid to the special relations and obligations of public servants to the public itself,” FDR said in 1937.  “The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.”

There’s a critical difference between private sector unions and public employee unions, noted liberal Time magazine columnist Joe Klein:

“Industrial unions are organized against the might and greed of ownership,” Mr. Klein said.  “Public employees unions are organized against the might and greed…of the public?”

The primary reason why public employee unions are a bad idea is because politicians pay them off with our money.  These unions receive billions from taxpayers, who in return contribute millions to the politicians who gave them those billions.

This is a good deal for teachers in Milwaukee Public Schools, who this year will receive an average of $100,000 in pay and benefits for nine months work. 

Milwaukee teachers aren’t getting the big bucks because they’ve been doing a crackerjack job.  In a ranking of the 100 worst performing schools in America, 8 were in Milwaukee. 

Students in Milwaukee public schools perform half as well as the state average in most measures of academic achievement.  And the state average isn’t so great.  Two thirds of Wisconsin’s 8th graders can’t read proficiently, according to the National Assessment for Education Progress This despite the highest per pupil spending in the Midwest.

And it’s a good deal for the politicians who hand them our money.  Public employee unions are now the biggest spenders in our elections.

But it’s a terrible deal for the rest of us.

Far too many state legislatures “have been cowed by the political power of the unions and enacted contracts that force state and city governments to be run for the benefit of their employees, rather than for their citizens,” Mr. Klein said.