Entitlement programs or, more specifically, reforming them before
they bankrupt the nation, is considered the Third Rail of
Politics. We now have, however, a Fourth Rail, just as
pernicious, doing just as much damage to our national financial
well-being and perhaps threatening our liberty even more than
Social Security and Medicare. That Fourth Rail is the growth of
the public sector work force, i.e. employees of federal, state,
and local governments, and the massive money- and power-hungry
unions which represent them.
Supporters of unions have long argued, and with good
reason, that in the early days of industrializing America, unions
helped eliminate child labor and forced companies to create safer
working conditions for employees. Do workers at the DMV, IRS, or
your town’s Public Transit Board (or their children) have
substantial risk of working 16 hour days in dark, dangerous
environments? It’s hard to imagine the founders of the AFL
thinking that unions would devolve into organizations whose
primary goal is to make it impossible to fire bad workers, to
argue for an ever-increasing number of vacation days, and to
eliminate secret ballots which are not just a staple of union
election history but also a fundamental underpinning of liberty.
The purpose of public sector unions is now simple: Maximize the
unions’ income and political power by working against
every possible increase in government efficiency. And they’ve
been wildly successful.
In the last few years, government employment — and thus
the taxes required to fund it — has been growing while private
businesses across the nation have had to cut back to survive. As
THIS chart from Americans for Limited Government shows, since
December 2007 the private sector has lost over 7 million jobs
while government has added about 100,000 jobs.
But even this growth of government employee headcount,
which is about 85% at the state and local level, understates the
problem. In addition to government hiring more workers, it’s also
increasing their total compensation at a much faster rate than is
found in the private sector. (See chart on page 3 of the Cato
Institute’s Chris Edwards’ analysis of “Public
Sector Unions and the Rising Costs of Employee
Compensation”.)
Until the late 1960s, private sector workers tended to earn
slightly more than government workers — an appropriate situation
given the job security that tends to come with a government job.
For about the next 15 years, until the early 1980s, public and
private sector average compensation was about equal. But
beginning in 1982, compensation patterns diverged, with state and
local government workers getting much larger raises than private
sector workers.
The growth of federal (civilian, not military) compensation
is even more pronounced, as
another Edwards study shows. In 2000, the average federal
civilian worker made two-thirds more than the average private
sector worker. By 2008, the federal worker was making double —
yes double — the private sector worker.
You’ll forgive me if I sound like an infomercial salesman
here when I say “But wait, there’s more!” These figures include
what is actually spent on government employee compensation, not
what is promised. Government workers’ pensions tend to be
“defined benefit” rather than the now-typical “defined
contribution” plan in the private sector. This means that
government will owe retirees fixed payments regardless of the
value of the investments or savings in which the government
deposited its contributions for those workers’ sunset years.
Across the country, state and local governments have consistently
underfunded pensions and future health insurance liabilities,
even before the stock market sell-off of 2008.
According to a
new study by the Pew Center on the States, “A $1
trillion gap… exists between the $3.35 trillion in pension,
health care and other retirement benefits states have promised
their current and retired workers as of fiscal year 2008 and the
$2.35 trillion they have on hand to pay for them.”
So, the growth of government head-count and compensation is
not only costing taxpayers over a hundred billion dollars a year
now, but it’s also burdening our children with massive future
liabilities.
But it’s not just in terms of finances that this growth of
the public sector is hurting America. The unions which represent
government workers, including the Service Employees International
Union (SEIU), the American Federation of State, County, and
Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and the American Federation of
Government Employees (AFGE), are accumulating power, money, and
influence, especially over Democrats, and using these as a
self-reinforcing mechanism to acquire more.
The unions pushed (and fortunately failed, albeit just
barely) for the Senate approval of Craig Becker to the National
Labor Relations Board. Becker, an associate general counsel to
the SEIU, is a radical pro-labor activist attorney who believes,
among other things, that “employers should have no right to be
heard in either a representation case or an unfair labor
practices case.” Although Mr. Becker’s approval was successfully
filibustered in the Senate, it remains an open question whether
President Obama will give Becker a “recess appointment” that
would allow Becker to hold the NLRB job for nearly two years over
the Senate’s prior objection.
The AFGE is filing a petition to be named “the exclusive
union representative for 40,000 Transportation Security
Officers.” Barack Obama’s most recent nominee to head the TSA,
Errol Southers, who had to withdraw his nomination after having
been found lying to Congress, was being blocked by Senator Jim
DeMint because Southers refused to disavow wanting to unionize
the TSA. The last thing our nation needs is the stultifying
influence of unions on airport security. If there’s one area
where we must not allow unions to prevent the firing of
incompetent workers, it’s where the safety of our citizens is so
clearly at stake. And yet, given the symbiosis between unions and
the Obama administration, this outcome remains all too
likely.
Last month, the Labor Department reported union membership
numbers showing that for the first time in American history,
there were more public
sector union members than private sector union members: “More
public sector employees (7.9 million) belonged to a union than
did private sector employees (7.4 million), despite there being 5
times more wage and salary workers in the private sector.” And
what’s the impact of this trend?
In 2008, unions
contributed $74.5 million to political candidates, of
which $68.2 million went to Democrats. Since 1990, unions
have contributed over $630 million to Democrats (more than 12
times their contributions to Republicans.) But even that
understates the magnitude of the union-Democrat symbiosis since
it doesn’t consider independent expenditures such as campaign
advertising not coordinated with candidates, as well as
get-out-the-vote efforts.
According to the
Center for Responsive Politics, “In the 2008 election cycle,
labor unions reported spending nearly $80 million on independent
broadcast advertising, mail and internal advocacy to help elect
or defeat federal candidates.” In other words, money spent by
unions to help Democrats is even greater than the money donated
by unions directly to Democrats. As
Michael Barone puts it, “Public-sector unionism tends to be a
self-perpetuating machine that extracts money from taxpayers and
then puts it on a conveyor belt to the Democratic
Party.”
If there is any good news to be found, it’s that the public
is rapidly moving away from support of unions. A survey released
Tuesday by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press
describes “Favorability Ratings of
Labor Unions Fall(ing) Sharply.” For the first time since
1985, Americans’ unfavorable opinion of unions, at 42%, is higher
than the favorable rating, at 41%. Also, the 41% favorable rating
is by far the lowest level of public approval of unions in the 25
years of Pew’s surveys. The trend toward union disapproval is
consistent among men and women, blacks and whites, and is clear
across Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. Currently only
Democrats now show more favorable than unfavorable views of
unions but by a much narrower margin than three years ago.
It remains the standard tactic of liberals, government
workers, and other leeches off your earnings to demonize anyone
who wants to reduce the cost and intrusiveness of government by
saying that teachers and policemen will lose their jobs. A few
responses are in order: First, both education and law enforcement
organizations could reduce bureaucratic bloat if they were forced
to cut their budgets. Second, why should it be unacceptable for a
teacher or cop to lose his or her job? There is no evidence that
hiring more teachers has improved educational outcomes. Indeed
some of the most expensive school systems in the nation (on a
per-student basis), such as Chicago and Washington, D.C., produce
spectacularly bad academic results. Similarly, it can’t be that
each additional policeman adds proportionately to our safety…but
they add disproportionately to our costs. When times are this
tough, America can’t afford to have sacred cows.
The growth of the number of government workers and the cost
of each worker threatens not just Americans’ economic future but
also our liberty. It is time for citizens to force government at
all levels to live within our means. The good news is
that much of the problem is at the state and local level, where
small numbers of citizens can have bigger impact than on the
federal level. Cutting back the metastasizing public sector is
the Fourth Rail of politics. It is time for a few well-grounded
politicians and citizens to step on that rail before we turn into
France — or even worse, into Greece.
