Public unions force the taxpayers to fund Democrats:
Everyone has priorities. During the past week Barack Obama has found no time to condemn the attacks that Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi has launched on the Libyan people.
But he did find time to be interviewed by a Wisconsin television station and weigh in on the dispute between Republican Gov. Scott Walker and the state’s public employee unions. Walker was staging “an assault on unions,” he said, and added that “public employee unions make enormous contributions to our states and our citizens.”
Enormous contributions, yes — to the Democratic Party and the Obama campaign. Unions, most of whose members are public employees, gave Democrats some $400 million in the 2008 election cycle. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the biggest public employee union, gave Democrats $90 million in the 2010 cycle.
Follow the money, Washington reporters like to say. The money in this case comes from taxpayers, present and future, who are the source of every penny of dues paid to public employee unions, who in turn spend much of that money on politics, almost all of it for Democrats. In effect, public employee unions are a mechanism by which every taxpayer is forced to fund the Democratic Party.
Which is both why they need to be outlawed, and why the Democrats are fighting so hard, to the point of threatening blood in the streets, to protect them. It’s obviously part of that new civility we’ve been hearing so much about.
[Update a while later]
Time for public-employee unions to go, and end a half-century mistake.
[Early afternoon update]
Even FDR understood — there is no role for government unions.
Hey, when you’ve lost Richard Cohen…
That makes as much as sense as saying “Coca-Cola forces us to give money to Republicans.” or “Searching the Web on Google forces us to give money to Democrats.”
Unions provide a service (to teachers). They are paid (dues). They donate some of that money to politicians that support their interests (1st Amendment).
If you don’t like special interest money in politics, fine. But don’t single out unions as special in this respect.
We’re not singling out unions. We’re singling out public-employee unions. Do you not see the distinction, and why your other examples are irrelevant?
Brock, either you didn’t read the article or you have a serious issue with reading comprehension.
To use your example, Coca Cola is a corporation with revenues coming from product sales. If the company chooses to give money to a political candidate, they are doing so from their sales revenue. There are no public tax revenues going to a candidate in this situation.
Teachers are paid by public funds, collected through taxation. Union membership dues (often mandatory) are therefore paid via public funds. There is a significant conflict of interest for a teachers union to contribute donations that originated from public funds to a political candidate who can award more public funds to their supporters.
This issue has never been about the use of private money for political purposes; instead it has always been about the use of public money for political purposes.
But they are special in this respect, Brock. If Coca Cola donates money to someone I don’t like, I can always buy Pepsi. When SEIU or AFSCME donates to elect more Democrat thieves to office, I don’t have the option of dealing with some other Franchise Tax Board or DMV or state board of licensure.
The money government employee unions spend to buy politicians yields a rich return in ever higher salaries and benefits, out of which ever rising dues money can be diverted in ever-rising amounts to buy yet more politicians.
In engineering terms, we have a positive feedback loop here. As with the famously public positive feedback loop that destroyed the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940, the process builds amplitude until the strength of the materials involved is exceeded and then the whole thing comes down with a crash; things that literally can’t go on, don’t.
The government employees of my state (CA) have arranged to retire on 90% pensions in return for their campaign donation largesse. To fund their plush retirements, they intend to tax me, and the rest of private sector California, as heavily as they deem necessary to secure their goodies. If that means we taxpayers face retirements of eating generic brand cat food in the cold and the dark, well, it’s apparently our own damned faults for not being smart enough to get a government job.
The Wisconsin taxpayers, offered the same deal, have declined. Our moonbat governor isn’t going to rescind the collective bargaining rights he handed to his party’s various parasite constituencies back when he was on his first effort at ruining this state and, even if he was willing, the bought-and-paid-for hacks in the state legislature wouldn’t hear of it.
Fortunately, we have the initiative process in California. I feel safe in predicting that repeal of public sector collective bargaining will be on the ballot in 2012, if not sooner, and will pass by a crushing majority.
Starting two years hence, progressives here and elsewhere are going to have to pay for a lot more of their anti-social activities out of their own pockets for a change. Should be fun to watch.
If you don’t like special interest money in politics, fine. But don’t single out unions as special in this respect.
A business can always do activities other than collect public funds. But what can a public-sector union do? It is by its nature publicly funded. it has considerable financial and political power at its disposal by default.
I look at this in a game theory point of view. There are games which by their nature encourage cooperation, for example, group fun activities like watching a movie, and then there are games which by their nature encourage all sorts of cross-purpose conflicts and treachery, such as Monopoly. Public unions have a readily accessible lever for increase their return. They wield considerable influence on the politicians who negotiate on behalf of the public. And aside from that lever, there’s no means for improving their station. They don’t have a business to grow.
No private business or union has the same incentive to consume public funds. Even when they do consume public funds, these sources are fickle and overreliance can result in drastic problems when politics shifts funding to competitors. They don’t have to worry for private businesses that each election could radically change the customer’s decision-making or that political forces may deliberately try to hurt the business for its support of another faction.
Wow Brock,
I guess that didn’t go as you expected, now did it.
One other item that you forgot to mention is that “joining” the union (aka – forced to pay dues) is mandatory for many of these employees. It doesn’t matter whether you want to join or not, you are forced into it and pay just like the rest. In Wisconsin, the money gets taken directly from the employee by the government, then handed over to the Unions. The Unions then take that money and give it to the politicians who vote to give more and more money/benefits to union employees. Win/Win for state legislators/union bosses, lose/lose for the rest of the folks who aren’t allowed into this ‘fixed’ game.
Brock gives all his money to lefty fundraisers so they can vote for him. That way he doesn’t have to strain himself by thinking.
Well said, Dick. Interesting points, Karl and Tom. Uncalled for, Jeff — Brock is not a shallow thinker.
Indeed, I find myself in somewhat agreement that the money issue is not the right focus, true as it may be that the SIEU and big government are mutually-enabling co-parasites on the wallet publc. I am troubled at a fundamental level by the notion that any individual, or group of individuals, should be barred from contributing money to the politician of his or their choice, regardless of how they earned it and from whom. Would we ban political contributions from divorce lawyers, porn stars, or makers of natural male enhancement pills?
I feel the argument against public-employee unions (I have no objection to private-employee unions) must be made on the lack of a negative feedback control noted by Dick, and others: in private business we can tolerate the whole-hearted self-interest of a union, because the natural counterbalance is the ability of the firm to stay in business. No union can demand more than the market will bear, so to speak, so it is in essence little more than a way for labor to organize its voice at the bargaining table. Since management tends to have advantages in speaking coherently, a union can be a useful counterweight.
But in public business there is no ultimate backstop to the self-interest of unions, because the government has no competitors and cannot go out of business. The only limit is the good conscience of legislators, assuming for the sake of argument such a thing actually can be proved to exist.
What Carl said, but only because I got here late.
Yeah. That’s why.
I think that it is VERY telling that public-employee unions regard right-to-work legislation as a death knell.
In Iowa’s case, and in the case of the law Indiana is trying to pass, “right-to-work” only means that one cannot be forced to pay union dues in order to be covered by the union’s bargaining agreement. It doesn’t outlaw unions, it doesn’t prohibit collective bargaining, it just makes it possible for employees to benefit from the system without paying into it.
The fact that unions see right-to-work as a threat must mean that they realise that being a dues-paying member has no intrinsic value, and therefore, if given a choice, enough members would prefer to stop paying dues that it would kill off the union (not that legislation can stop thuggery or other coercion, of course, but that’s why there are penalties for such things).
Of course, it would also be quite telling to take a poll and find out how many teachers would stop paying dues if they knew that they would still be covered by the Bargaining Unit, but it wouldn’t be complete without pointing out that they’d be hypocrites for wanting to opt-out of paying dues while at the same time attacking legislators that want to give them the freedom to make that choice…
To Brock:
A government functionary union gets its money at gunpoint, Coca Cola doesn’t.
There’s a distinction, but no difference. I’ll try again.
Government buys education services from teachers, who pay their dues to a union. Government also buys cars and tanks from General Motors, whose workers contribute to a union. It buys telephone and internet services from AT&T and Verizon, whose employees pay dues to a union. It also buys world-shaking supercomputers from IBM, and desktop computers from Dell, and rocket launch services from ULA and SpaceX – none of whom are unionized (except maybe some ULA folks).
All of these companies (or unions) can then turn around and spend the money they’ve earned selling goods and services to the government on lobbying for more government contracts for those goods and services, regardless of the public’s actual appetite or need for them.
Furthermore, the “negative feedback loop” isn’t limited to people who sell directly to government. Disney earns billions of dollars on its copyright-created monopoly on Mickey’s likeness and old movies, and then it turns around and uses some of that money to lobby for longer and stronger copyright protections. Verizon earns money selling over-priced handsets and uses that money to lobby Congress to prevent the FCC from applying the Carterphone decision to wireless networks, thus preventing potential handset competitors (like Motorola or Dell) from selling directly to consumers.
This is how lobbying works. This is money in politics. The public employees unions are not special except in their willingness to take to the streets (IBM doesn’t do that). They’re an albatross around our neck, but we’ve got dozens of those. Let’s focus on the big picture problems, people, not just the political enemy du jour. Forest vs. trees, etc.
—
P.S. Thanks Carl.
Government buys education services from teachers, who pay their dues to a union. Government also buys cars and tanks from General Motors, whose workers contribute to a union. It buys telephone and internet services from AT&T and Verizon, whose employees pay dues to a union. It also buys world-shaking supercomputers from IBM, and desktop computers from Dell, and rocket launch services from ULA and SpaceX – none of whom are unionized (except maybe some ULA folks).
Here’s the difference Block. All those businesses can switched. If GM is lobbying for business too hard, I can hurt it by going with another vendor. Political-based endeavors have considerable risk associated with them. If someone gets out of line, you can punish them by canceling their contracts.
Combine that with the fact that private markets are generally pretty big too and far less subject to the whims of whoever is in office, then you have a recipe for businesses that don’t play the political game for public funds. They may still play to protect themselves from adverse regulation and such, but that’s typically far less involvement without the public funds transitioning into politician wealth.
But if a teacher’s union gets too ambitious and aggressive who’s going to stop it? They don’t have contracts to take away. Taking away its right to negotiate is the nuclear option, but there’s no smaller sanction. The Wisconsin government can’t hire a different union for those jobs.
Karl, I appreciate those differences exist. I appreciate that public employee unions are particularly harmful in certain ways. But they do not “force” taxpayers to support Democrats; once you exchange money for services at a given price, what the other guy does with the money is none of your business.
If I bought a kebab from a street vendor who secretly provides Al Qaeda with financial support, is he “forcing” me to support terrorism? That’s stupid. I just bought a kebab.
Brock, the union negotiates as a monopoly with the people they helped elect. They get the money no matter what. We don’t get to switch from Boeing to Airbus. As for your kabob, if you knew the vendor was supporting Al Qaeda then yes, you would be supporting terrorism. We know the union supports Democrats almost 100%. Yet, we can do nothing about it because they’re the only game in town. Even if you send your kids to private school, you still pay. If you can not see this, you’re being obtuse.
Well would say one thing the union provides stability to the occupation. Without them you have the volatility of the private sector ever changing every election cycle and even worse without the chance of big rewards. Making the vocation less desirable.
Without the union what prevents the administrators doing cost cutting by firing laying off senior teachers for cheaper younger their really no way to quantify the worth of a teachers labor or other public labor. Depending on the level/location they just polish the 20-150 turds on the conveyor belt called school that been polished before and will have more polished added afterward by someone else every year.
Unfortunately its a catch 22, there is definitely a intrinsic worth for a general education for all but there no real way of quantifying the worth of effort of those who provide it.
Adding to what Tom W. wrote, that teachers are forced to join the union as a condition of employment, a certain percentage are likely to be committed Republicans or Independents who resent having one thin dime of their dues relegated to funding the election campaigns of Democrats, regardless of the symbiotic relationship previously noted.
Ideally, members would be polled, and campaign contributions allocated to various parties accordingly.
Karl,
I don’t have any choice in military contractors like Lockheed-Martin either, and when it comes to the purchase of advanced fighter jets there’s just as much choice in this market as the teacher’s union market. And neither do Lockheed’s employees have any control over how the management spends the money.
I agree that public employee unions are bad and should be abolished; I just don’t see this “forced contributions” issue as unique to them.
Carl Pham Says:
“Uncalled for, Jeff — Brock is not a shallow thinker”
The Brockster has dealt out some pretty savage insults and ad hom attacks himself,. So…if he’s going to dish it out he’s expected to take them.
Bill Maron Says:
“Brock, the union negotiates as a monopoly with the people they helped elect. They get the money no matter what.”
But is this true? The “no matter what” part?
Right now the sound bite you hear from the Governors is that the State is going bankrupt. Their state can no longer support these plush deals.
So maybe there is a limit just like there’s a limit with private corporations: the unions don’t want to bleed the corp dry or they lose their jobs too.
What might be true is that the limit is slower to make itself known, in the public case.
” We don’t get to switch from Boeing to Airbus. We know the union supports Democrats almost 100%. Yet, we can do nothing about it because they’re the only game in town. Even if you send your kids to private school, you still pay.”
This is the crux of the issue as I see it. But what is the best solution?
Disallowing public unions rubs against my “Freedom of Association” viewpoint. Making union membership mandatory REALLY violates my sense of liberty. But even if you changed that, it still means that anyone who joins the unions and agrees that their dues can be sent to Democrats forces the taxpayer to support Democrats even if they don’t want to. I can’t prove it but it seems to me that the evolutionary processes of unions results in one major union representing the group – the UAW represents car builders and there are no unions competing with the UAW for members.
Polling members as to whether or not they want any of their dollars used for lobbying/political purposes etc. gives more liberty to the union member but doesn’t fix the problem that I, the taxpayer, do not want my tax money forcibly sent to the Democrats (should *any* union member decide to give it to the Dems).
You could disallow public unions to spend any of their money on politics/lobbying. But that doesn’t strike me as congruent with liberty either.
I agree something must be done because it’s wrong to force the taxpayer to support a party they may not want to support. But I’m not sure what the best solution is. This is NOT a simple problem, in my view, and the soundbites from either side do not do it justice.
There’s a pretty good opinion piece in the Washington Examiner by Timothy P. Carney which points out that the underlying question is: what is this fight really about?”, and that the underlying populist motivation here is anti-elitism – anyone gaming the system and getting fat deals from immoral rackets are what’s causing the angst:
“Union-funded lawmakers take money from taxpayers and give it the government unions, who kick some of it back to union-funded lawmakers. It’s not too different from banks or defense contractors donating to politicians who bail them out or give them no-bid contracts.
As long as Democrats think they’re on the side of “the people” because the unions agree with them, they’re politically lost.
What about the Republicans? What is their fight with the unions really about?
Is Krugman partly right? Are Republicans just trying to defund a Democratic piggy bank? Or are GOP politicians really trying to bust up immoral rackets?
If the latter, Beltway Republicans’ next target should be subsidy sucklers and bailout bandits. Recent House votes striking at ethanol subsidies and the military-industrial complex are a good first step. Killing other green-energy rackets, export subsidies, and all forms of corporate welfare should be the goal, for both Congress and Republican presidential hopefuls.”
P.S. May seem obvious but just for completeness sake:
You can never eliminate forcing a taxpayer to support a party they don’t want to support, via public funds. Any public employee is perfectly free to send part of their paycheck to the party of their choice. Therefore all taxpayers are bound to fund that party, like it or not. Only way to eliminate that is to eliminate public employees, which I do not think is possible.
I agree that public employee unions are bad and should be abolished; I just don’t see this “forced contributions” issue as unique to them.
Ok, Brock, I’ll buy that. But I want to point out that the forced contributions issue doesn’t get much worse than it does with public unions. Even for defense or other government contracts, most such contracts have competitors. And most such contractors have private business that they often rely on in place of government funds.
If I bought a kebab from a street vendor who secretly provides Al Qaeda with financial support, is he “forcing” me to support terrorism? That’s stupid. I just bought a kebab.
I see it more as a vendors who pays kickbacks to purchasing agents at a business. If I have one of my employees making bad business decisions because they’re getting bribes from a vendor, then that becomes my business.
Gregg, even if Governor Walker is just defunding a Democrat piggy bank, that is a significant contribution to liberty.
Making union membership mandatory REALLY violates my sense of liberty. But even if you changed that, it still means that anyone who joins the unions and agrees that their dues can be sent to Democrats forces the taxpayer to support Democrats even if they don’t want to.
The crux of the matter in Indiana is that, in a “right to work” state, mandatory union membership is illegal. Unions complain that it creates a free-rider problem, but, as I said above, if free-riders cripple a union to the point it is insolvent or inefficient, then that’s a pretty clear market signal that the union’s services in collective bargaining are deemed as not valued or not needed by the members.
So, if “right-to-work” proposals scare unions, it seems to me that they know the jig is up, and that they have no real value in the market.
Of course, in Wisconsin, the proposal takes this a bit further than just creating a “right-to-work” atmosphere, and actually eliminates collective bargaining for some employees (University of Wisconsin employees, specifically), and changes the bargaining rights of other employees (non-safety-sector public employees), by reducing labor agreement periods from two years to one year, forcing an annual certification of the union representative, and disallowing extensions of labor agreements. Basically, it forces the union to the table EVERY year, which the unions obviously see as a bad thing, if they can’t just sweet-talk their way into a bi-annual extension, and if their representative is subject to change year-after-year. It completely de-stabilizes public unions and also drops some of the “sweetheart” deals that some public employees receive, with the stated goal of bringing the budget into line.
There’s a lot more to the bill than that, of course, but it’s easier to just read through it than to read through someone else’s re-telling of it.
Full disclosure: I’m a public employee (non-teacher), in a right-to-work state, and I’m non-union. We were told in 2010 that we would be limited to a 3% “performance evaluation” raise because 5% “seemed excessive, given the economy and given that other people are laying off workers.” That cap went back to 5% this year. I can’t say for sure that I actually “earn” my paycheck twice a month, but guilt-ridden money spends the same as non-guilt-ridden money when I have bills to pay.
From Gregg:
“Polling members as to whether or not they want any of their dollars used for lobbying/political purposes etc. gives more liberty to the union member but doesn’t fix the problem that I, the taxpayer, do not want my tax money forcibly sent to the Democrats (should *any* union member decide to give it to the Dems).”
There are any number of things I’d prefer that my taxes not subsidize, but, in the case of union members, the portion of union dues donated to the Democrats is deducted from their wages. As a taxpayer, should I decide how union members spend their wages, or should they? Campaign contributions are often referred to as an exercise of free speech. Why are union bosses allowed to usurp members’ voices when it comes to politics?
That right wing bastion Mother Jones disagrees with ya Brock…
“Organized labor requires government support to thrive … The relationship was symbiotic: Unions provided money and ground game campaign organization, and in return Democrats supported…”
I have a post with the link.
But they do not “force” taxpayers to support Democrats; once you exchange money for services at a given price, what the other guy does with the money is none of your business.
Up to a point, yes, Brock. And as I said I don’t think the money issue is the right place to take a stand. It will come back to bite you later, when the lefties want some other restriction on campaign donations based on percentages going to a particular party from a particular industry.
But I think you’re overlooking the point Karl and others have raised that it’s fundamentally different when you are forced to exchange your money for services with an exclusive vendor. People must buy their education from the public school teachers with their tax dollars, and they cannot show their displeasure at the amount of money demanded (in salary or bennies) or the social behaviour of the recipients, by taking their dollars elsewhere.
(I assume when you say what the seller does with my money afterward is none of my business, you are being a little hyberbolic. Surely as a human being I should not be unconcerned to what use is put the money I use to buy a stolen car or gram of crack or snuff video.)
If I bought a kebab from a street vendor who secretly provides Al Qaeda with financial support, is he “forcing” me to support terrorism? That’s stupid. I just bought a kebab.
Yes, but Brock, if the government forces you to buy the kebab from that vendor, whether you want to or not — exactly the way it forces you, the taxpayer, to pay the salaries of your local public school teacher — and the kebab dealer sends the money openly to al Qaeda, isn’t it reasonable to say the government is forcing me to support al Qaeda? Surely laundering the money once isn’t enough to change things.
once you exchange money for services at a given price, what the other guy does with the money is none of your business.
Absolutely true when done freely.
they do not “force” taxpayers to support Democrats
Absolutely false. It’s not just Democrats that tax dollars are being funneled to. It’s also terrorist organizations including Al Queda and the Muslim Brotherhood and sub groups.
Brock there is no way I can believe that you believe that what the government does with tax dollars is none of the tax payers business?