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A Further Perspective
The Walker Vote Earthquake
The beginning of the end for public employee unions at the state and local level.
“Walker Survives Wisconsin Recall Vote,” read the tepid headline in Wednesday’s New York Times. Governor Scott Walker, however, did much more than survive. He defeated his rival, Tom Barrett, convincingly. His lieutenant governor did the same in her recall election. Significantly, this election marks the beginning of the end for dominance of state, county and city budgets by public employee unions.
Lost in the Wisconsin coverage is the fact that Tuesday’s election brought overwhelming votes elsewhere in favor of reducing overly-generous public employee pensions. In California, voters in two large cities decided enough was enough. San Jose voters passed Measure B by 71-to-29 percent. In San Diego, they endorsed Proposition B by 67-to-33 percent. In recent years both cities had been forced to cut back on libraries, recreation centers, fire and police services in the face of galloping pension liabilities. San Diego saw its annual contribution to pensions go from $43 million in 1999 to $231 this year, soaking up 20 percent of the city’s budget. In San Jose it went from $73 million in 2001 to $245 million this year — equal to 27 percent of the budget.
These events offer the necessary will to elected officials across the nation to pass reforms that will bring public employee pensions and health care contributions into line with private ones.
The process has already begun. In California, signatures have been gathered for a voter initiative, “Stop Special Interests,” on the November ballot that, if passed, would break the umbilical cord between the state treasury and union treasuries. In California, among others, the state deducts union dues from public employee paychecks and sends these directly to the unions, thus saving them the need to persuade public employees to sign up to let the union bosses use their money in elections. This is the umbilical cord and the California unions have used it to become the most powerful special interest in Sacramento, having great influence over the Democrat-controlled state legislature.
What happens when the umbilical cord is broken? It happened in Wisconsin last year as part of Governor Walker’s reform legislation. Dues stopped flowing from the state treasury to the unions. They had to sell their services to the workers.
Result: dues paying is down to 28 percent of the Wisconsin public work force.
Across the country, voter discontent has been building against overly-generous public employee benefits. Declining revenues in the recession sharpened public focus, along with the realization that, in many cases, these benefits had become far greater than they are in the private sector. In short, it began to look as if the taxpayers were working for their own employees.
What will the public employee unions do? Reeling from this loss, it is unlikely they will try another vengeance move such as the Walker recall. They also face a daunting task if many legislatures, county boards, and city councils propose reform measures, especially ones on the ballot for voters who are in no mood to continue “business as usual.”
About the Author
Peter Hannaford was closely associated for a number of years with the late President Reagan, beginning in the California Governor’s office. His latest book is Presidential Retreats.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (31) | Leave a comment
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TSD| 6.7.12 @ 7:06AM
Common sense wins, saving our nation move forward one election at a time.... we still may have hope to bring us back.
TLP| 6.7.12 @ 5:38PM
I miss Clint, and Purp, and Post American.
I HATE this new system, where we must LOG IN to express our beliefs on a Web Site that is supposed to be about the free expression of ideas, no matter what.
If a JACKASS, like Doctor Dumb@ss, can voice his insipid inanities? Then those other guys should be allowed, as well.
I'm just saying.
Anybody else notice the DECLINE in comments, lately?
chuck| 6.7.12 @ 9:32PM
I really don't see what the big deal with the new log in is. Jackass is still here. Clintie could still be here, but I think he was really that gay-porn guy from Canada who was sending body parts to people, and he's locked up in Berlin now.
Appleby| 6.7.12 @ 7:14AM
Now people can see that it can be done; Oz the Great and Terrible is a big gas filled balloon, and we are a nation picking up our giant hatpins. Unlike here in Canukistan, where the beaten down proles whine "what can you dooooooo?", Americans have been shown what they can do.
Now let's see you do it.
Jack in Wi| 6.7.12 @ 7:23AM
As one of the happy Wisconsinites who worked for Scott Walker's reforms, it gives me pleasure to see this happen, all over the country. I come from a family of many civil servants, mostly teachers, policemen, and public health nurses. My uncle by marriage, was the medical directer of the largest public charity hospital in the state of Wi. He told me that in the 50's he was the higest paid official in Milwaukee county. his salary 25000 dollars a year.
All these relatives of mine used to get decent wages and retirements, long before unions were allowed for public employees. Wisonsin was the 1st state, by law, to allow unions for public employees. That was in 1959. Since then this cancer has spread to many other states. It has been shown that once public employes get unions productivity goes down and expenses sky rocket.
There were many good reasons why public employess werenot giveen bargining rights. It was felt that it would lead to exactly what happened. Public employees would use their new power to extort from the taxpayer. The money elected officials spend is not their own. The way local officials cowered before corrupt unions bosses, made any sane taxpayer want to vomit. It is time we put the civil back in the Civil Service. The public employees had civil service protection long before unions. They still have it. That is enough for them.
Von Mises Jr| 6.7.12 @ 7:39AM
Herb Stein famously quipped "If something is unsustainable, it will stop."
So it is not a question of this situation being corrected. It can be done as Scott Walker did by ending the corruption and reigning in the gravy train. Or it can collapse. New Jersey had a pension liability of about $107B and $67B in health care premiums owed to retirees with about $47B in the fund. At 27% funding, it was going to implode by 2018.
If the pensions implode, the most likely outcome is that they wind up absorbed by the federal program where I think the payout would be about thirty cents on the dollar. Otherwise, they would have to raise property taxes significantly.
The public unions will either have their plans reformed, or they will get a taste of what it was like to be a Chrysler or Greece Bond Holder. That $0.30 per $1 seems to be a pattern in Obamanomics/Euronomics.
mmercier| 6.7.12 @ 7:47AM
I never kick people when they go down. Let them get up so they can kick the crap out of each other.
TLP| 6.7.12 @ 8:19AM
Oh, there was a time when you could Buy a House through the GI BILL. you could get a New Car, every coupla years, cause they were only about $1,500. (I know, because I've never forgotten the $1,600 Sticker Price on the window of my Parent's brand new 1971 Plymouth Sattelite Station Wagon.)
I remember the Vinyl Record (45 & 78 rpm) the 8 Track Tape, the Cassette, and the Pac Man Games, in every Bar, and Pizzarias.
VHS, Betamax, Compuserve, and Dialup. Yahoo and Microsoft. The Buggy Whip and My Space. I'm using my IPad, and my Unplugged, and never to be used again Desk Top, is already as as faded a memory, as the Land Line Phone, we no longer have.
Labour Unions have lost their place, like the Police Phone Box, or the Pay Phone. One by one, the things we enjoyed (Pontiacs, Oldsmobiles, Plymouths, and Muscle Cars) have gone the way of the Wooden Skate Board, and the Wooden Sled.
Meanwhile, our Young Muslim Leader, has done his job, only too well. The HAVES are fed up with being Shaken Down, for the Benefit of the So-called HAVE NOTS, let alone, those Public Sector Unions that HAVE MORE.
He has achieved his Goal, of Divide and Conquer, and in the end, this will be his undoing.
WE OUTNUMBER THEM.
A lesson he was just taught, night before last.
Learning is hard.
Gr0w1er601| 6.7.12 @ 9:19AM
My only experience with unions came as a card-carrying member of the NALC (National Association of Letter Carriers) working for the USPS. I got to see (up close and personal time and again) union stewards literally bend over backwards protecting workers that in any other corporation would have been fired, fined, jailed, or all three. I had friends, as union stewards themselves, not being part of the upper leadership 'clique' get shouted down in union convention meetings! Immediately after returning from that convention, they resigned their memberships. As for the hard-working rank-and-file, well, we were on our own dealing with management. Yeah, in my humble opinion, unions are useless as tits on the proverbial boar. Anyone who says otherwise either has never been a union member (all you liberal college airhead elitists) or is a union 'clique' crony yourself.
Alan| 6.7.12 @ 3:47PM
I had plenty of experience with Unions in my earlier days. United Auto Workers, Two locals in the United Steel workers, Seafarers International, and the National Maritime Union. Working in an auto plant in the early 70's for a half year was something I could write a book about. Unions had their day, they transformed from legit organizations that had some purpose to basically legal protection rackets. Give us what we want and we will protect you from ourselves. The Wisconsin fight was in fact one of the most idiotic fights they could have picked and those in the know told them to let it go and fight another day. But NOOOOOOOOOO, like the good brain dead drone follow the leader unionistas they are, they charged up pork chop hill and got gunned down en-masse. Unionistas just Looooove to martyr themselves for the cause. The more the merrier.
Don't ever associate die hard unionistas with brains, they are in serious short supply.
Alan| 6.7.12 @ 3:55PM
And to Hoffa and his "Street warriors", go F yourself and while your doing that, that Marxist clown(Obamamao) standing behind you that you think has your back, heres some news intake for you. He's a coward that will sell your @ss so far up the river for his own hide your need a travel ticket on a cruise liner to get your @ss back down the river. Guess the dude don't have any comfortable shoes to walk the pickets with his comrades Tuesday did he?
MikeBee| 6.7.12 @ 9:56AM
Walter Reuther, the great union organizer (who has a freeway named after him in the Detroit area), held that public employees should not be able to unionize. He felt that this was wrong, and that it would amount to the people organizing against themselves. The taxpayers are the owners of governments; how could they organize against themselves? Reuther had it right. It's about time public unions became a thing of the past.
The city of Detroit is going the way of Greece because of the many public employee unions who really run the city. No matter how hard past Detroit mayors have tried to set the city of Detroit on solid ground, they have been flummoxed by the multiple city unions there.
My wife, a public school teacher, tells me that her union is useless. The last time she saw a raise was seven years ago. In fact, two years ago, she received a 10% pay DECREASE, after five years of being behind inflation. She is now effectively working for the wages that teachers received in 1998, fourteen years ago.
The state legislature of Michigan recently voted to disallow the withholding of union dues from public workers' paychecks. That $800 plus annually will simply go unpaid, until these unions can convince my wife that they have value for her.
Riff Raff| 6.7.12 @ 11:04AM
I agree completely. Government employee unions are an inherent conflict of interest.
Also, I agree about the teachers' unions across America, especially here in California. Teachers' unions have to be the most IN-effective unions on the planet, as teachers work for low wages. However, teachers' unions have great power over the State Legislature, but then, political power is the primary focus of the teachers' unions anyway. Quality of education is not a union concern. As one union boss put it a few years ago, "I'll care about students when they start paying union dues." Real class there.
Teaching should be a profession, not a union job. Teachers should be paid a professional salary, not union scale. And, most importantly, teachers should be held to professional standards, not coddled through life by union shop stewards. Professional teachers, held to professional standards, would vastly improve the quality of public education, but it is the UNION that is holding teachers back, keeping them at low wages, keeping them from professional status. The teachers' UNION is the problem. It is time this leech were separated from taxpayers' money.
Anthony| 6.7.12 @ 10:26AM
We're fearse, we're conservatives, and we're in your face!!!
Bob K| 6.7.12 @ 11:29AM
I suspect that if this trend continues it will be felt in the bowels of that great tentacled bureaucracy centered in Washington DC whose arms entwine around everything we Americans do out here in flyover country.
If the people we send there to represent us don't take strong actions to reduce that monstrous governmental Cephalopods power and influence, including it's wages and benefits, they will be there for only a short time and others will be sent there to "disarm" it!
JayDick| 6.7.12 @ 11:48AM
One of the best things the Republicans could do for this country would be to diminish the power of union bosses.
The Supreme Court decided that employees cannot be forced to pay unions for political activities they don't support. But the decision is ignored. It needs to be enforced with a strong federal law enforcing it's requirements. That would diminish union power a bit.
A better step, but much more difficult, would be a national right-to-work law. No one anywhere should be forced to join a union or pay any money to a union as a condition of employment.
soljerblue| 6.7.12 @ 12:20PM
The Alabama legislature flipped from solid Democrat to solid GOP in 2010. One of the first things the new state House and Senate did at the 2011 session was stop collecting dues for the 400-pound-gorilla of the Alabama teachers union. So far the union bosses have lost money -- they refuse to say how much -- and their court shenanigans have come to naught.
straight| 6.7.12 @ 12:21PM
You guys are in desperate need of a copy editor. If pensions in San Diego really dropped from 43 million dollars to231 dollars, this story doesn't make much sense. I see typos, redundancies, dropped words and other mistakes daily in your stories.
Truth to Power| 6.7.12 @ 12:37PM
You are in desperate need of a life.
straight| 6.7.12 @ 3:37PM
That's pretty harsh, Truth to Power. I've worked in journalism and PR for nearly 40 years, so it is probably an occupational hazard that I recognize such things more than most people. Still, the fact is that American Spectator is one of my favorite sites, and I don't think they are doing themselves any favors by having the sloppiest editing that I've seen anywhere online.
TLP| 6.7.12 @ 3:54PM
You also didn't put a space between "to" and "231".
Perhaps, you are not as SMART as your Mom tells you, you are.
Idiot.
straight| 6.7.12 @ 5:21PM
Oh for heavens sake. Obviously no one expects a writer to take the same care in a posting or an email message that should be taken in a professional column that will be scrutinized and likely quoted. But never mind. If Truth to Power and TLP are representative of other readers, I apologize for raising an issue I thought might improve The American Spectator.
TLP| 6.7.12 @ 8:04PM
You "raised an issue" that you, yourself, was in violation of.
Living in Hussein's NANNY STATE, we don't need a SPELLING NANNY, here.
Capiche?
Lia | 6.7.12 @ 5:21PM
Action speaks louder than words, Straight. Why don't you back up your harsh statements with a piece you've written? Either that or use your real name when you criticize!
ObamarStomper| 6.7.12 @ 1:43PM
In most states that have Unionied public employees, they are either near or approaching bankruptcy. I want to know WHY I have no pension other than what I provided for myself, yet some Putz in the Motor Vehicle Department, with an IQ of 90 and NO EDUATION will earn 80K per year when he/she retires? In my county, the guy who operates the backhoe at the county cemetery has totally PAID FOR Health Insurance, paid by ME. I have my own coverage, but the grave digger pays NOTHING for my coverage. This is INSANITY, but it's Liberal Socialism in practice.
TLP| 6.7.12 @ 3:59PM
There's a REASON that the RIGHT TO WORK STATES don't have any DETROITS in them.
There's a REASON that TEXAS is GROWING by leaps and bounds, while California is HEMMOHAGING people.
You can't be this Stupid.
Can you?
I'm guessing, you can.
Derek Leaberry| 6.7.12 @ 1:50PM
Rahm Emmanuel once used the phrase "a crisis is a terrible thing to waste." He stole the line from Stanford professor Paul Romer. And so it is with the crisis of massive deficits and over-spending. The bureaucratic regime must be whittled down in this time of austerity. Bad economic times dictates that the government apparatus must be pared down if not dissolved.
wolf| 6.7.12 @ 1:57PM
how i wish california was a state in reality .. instead of being a liberal state of utopia..never mind that we are broke and spending and taxing more..if the feds can get a 15+ trillion debt..why can't CA...and unions are tax exempt by the way..same as religions are..wait...in CA unions are a religion..the other 49 states can get rid of unions..CA will just say..ohh you guys are so silly..paying union dues is a constitutional right..
Lia | 6.7.12 @ 5:15PM
I'm sure other cities will follow the lead of San Jose and San Diego. I hope to see similar measures on the ballots of CA cities that are in dire need of CUTTING THE CORD to unions!!
Ruckweiler| 6.7.12 @ 5:36PM
Finally, the public sector unions are defeated. AFSCME and all the others are seeing that the taxpayers are fed up with gold-plated salaries and benefits. Their response is probably that we deserve these and, after all, we signed a contract/agreement. There isn't any money anymore for this sort of nonsense. Good. Sanity reigns.
gazinya | 6.9.12 @ 6:20PM
Now that The Conglomerate Obama has so successfully exposed the entire Democrat agenda it should be easier to get rid of most if not all the other boondoggles. Like Social Security has become an emaciated cash cow for illegals and thousands of people who have tired of working before age 50. Both parties have spent the SS fund into obliviation. The young worker needs to have a 'vested' interest in their own retirement. they must have their own name on that account. If a person immigrates and two years later becomes 'disabled', so sad they can live off their sponsor or go back to 'the old country'.
Medicare and Medicaid need to be completely overhauled. These and all the rest need to go the way of the buggy whip. Compassion does not work when people are forced to give it through government coercion.