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Pasco County News | Breaking News

Read and reconsider, Gov. Scott

Posted Feb 23, 2011 by Tom Jackson

Updated Feb 23, 2011 at 03:13 PM

The Heritage Foundation expands on George Will’s Sunday column, “Out of Wisconsin, a lesson in leadership for Obama,” which laid an eloquent foundation for understanding the incompatability with the public interest inherent in public-sector unions.

Will writes, in part:

For some of Madison’s graying baby boomers, these protests are a jolly stroll down memory lane. Tune up the guitars! “This is,” [Gov. Scott] Walker says, “very much a ‘60s mentality.”

He does, however, think there is sincerity unleavened by information: Many protesters do not realize that most worker protections - merit hiring; just cause for discipline and termination - are the result not of collective bargaining but of Wisconsin’s uniquely strong and century-old civil service law.

“I am convinced,” he says, “this is about money—but not the employees’ money.” It concerns union dues, which he wants the state to stop collecting for the unions, just as he wants annual votes by state employees on re-certifying the unions. He says many employees pay $500 to $600 annually in union dues—teachers pay up to $1,000. Given a choice, many might prefer to apply this money to health care premiums or retirement plans. And he thinks “eventually” most will say about the dues collectors, “What do we need this for?”

What follows is the money graf:

Such unions are government organized as an interest group to lobby itself to do what it always wants to do anyway - grow. These unions use dues extracted from members to elect their members’ employers. And governments, not disciplined by the need to make a profit, extract government employees’ salaries from taxpayers. Government sits on both sides of the table in cozy “negotiations” with unions.

Well. Scott made news by saying he has no problem with those unions and collective bargaining practices that amount to Hoovering taxpayer pockets. Hmmm. Perhaps Florida’s new governor believes he has enough on his plate already without picking a fight with public employee unions. But they were never going to be on his side in the first place, and they’re already lining up (with teachers’ groups at the forefront) to assail his austerity-now budget proposal.

In that light, the Heritage Foundation piece, “Morning Bell: Government Unions vs American Taxpayers,” makes a compelling argument for urgency:

Recent studies show that state and local governments are severely underestimating their pension and benefit promises, including a $574 billion shortfall for the nation’s top major cities and a possible $3.4 trillion shortfall for the states. The cause of these crippling pension and benefit obligations is no secret. The Post explains: “Public employees often enjoy more generous pension and health-care benefits, and these are at the root of the long-term budget problems confronting many states.”

How did this happen? Why did so many state and local governments not only spend too much today but promise future spending far beyond the means of taxpayers to pay for it? Government unions. And across the country, legislators and governors are beginning to fight back.

The professional left (including the AFL-CIO, the SEIU, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, the NEA, AFSCME and President Barack Obama) is trying to portray these budget battles as an assault against all unions. But as Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R), who is pushing legislation to curtail government union bargaining power, explained last night, this is just plain false:

“The bill I put forward isn’t aimed at state workers, and it certainly isn’t a battle with unions. If it was, we would have eliminated collective bargaining entirely or we would have gone after the private-sector unions. But, we did not because they are our partners in economic development. We need them to help us put 250,000 people to work in the private sector over the next four years.”

Walker is right: Government unions are inherently different from private-sector unions. The purpose of private-sector unions is to get workers a larger share of the profits they helped create. But government is a monopoly and earns no profits. All government unions do is redistribute more tax dollars from taxpayers to unions. The left used to understand this. Not only did President Franklin Delano Roosevelt write in 1937: “All government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service,” but as recently as 1959, the AFL-CIO Executive Council stated that “government workers have no right [to collectively bargain] beyond the authority to petition Congress—a right available to every citizen.”

Scott surely knows this already. And Florida’s reckoning day—ask the Pasco County School Board, currently at a potentially disastrous impasse with the teachers’ union—will arrive sooner rather than later. How the governor will escape the corner he’s painted himself into will be a demanding test of political dexterity.