How Public Unions Took Taxpayers Hostage

I recently read a blog by Arthur Conley which gave a very good history of the labor movement in America and its connection to the democrats. In the blog he indicated that the chaotic years of the 1960s and '70s are best known by the leading attraction of the news which was antiwar, civil rights and women's rights movements. But there was another "rights" movement, largely ignored by the lying news media, that was a large factor for American labor movement. The looming public-pension crisis that threatens to bankrupt city, county and state governments had its origins in those same years when public employees, already protected by civil-service rules, gained the right to bargain collectively.

Liberals at one time were opposed to public-sector unionism. In 1937 FDR stated that "a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable."

Private-sector unions were also opposed to the idea of public-sector unions. George Meany argued that it was "impossible to bargain collectively with the government." Private-sector unions were very concerned that public-sector labor would be extracting taxes from a public that included their own workers. However, the late 1950s, with the failure of the private-sector labor movements organizing campaigns they gave in and insisted on the necessity of winning the right to organize public employees. While the private-sector was waning the public-sector was increasing in membership.

The first to seize on the political potential of government workers occurred in New York City. A prominent New Deal senator had authored the landmark 1935 Wagner Act, which imposed on private employers the legal duty to bargain collectively with the properly elected union representatives of their employees. New York City, forced by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (Afscme), gave city workers the right to bargain collectively in 1958.

Democrats turned to a new force, the public-sector unions, as their political machine. This re-election technique caught on at the Kennedy White House and staffers began to develop plans. Kennedy looked to mobilize public-sector workers as a new source of Democratic Party political support. In mid-January 1962, he issued Executive Order 10988, which gave federal workers the right to organize in unions.

The scene in downtown Manhattan during a sanitation workers' strike, 1968. Two young and militant public-sector unions, the American Federation of Teachers and Afscme, both strong supporters of the still nascent civil rights movement, seized the opportunity. Union leaders saw both teachers and African-Americans as second-class citizens fighting the old-line political bosses. They called a brief teachers strike in 1960, and called another strike in 1962 that shifted the balance of power from principals to teachers, where it has remained down to the present.

In 1958, there had been but 15 public-employee strikes nationwide, involving a handful of workers. By 1968, after the old guard in Afscme had been deposed by the so-called young leaders, more than 200,000 union members, mostly in local and state government, were involved in 254 strikes. In 1968, amid rioting, civil rights and antiwar protests, Martin Luther King Jr. backed an Afscme strike by poorly paid, mostly African-American sanitation men in Memphis, Tenn. After King's tragic assassination, the city quickly settled with the union.

In the 1970s, government-worker unions became a political setting for New Leftist, feminist and black activists hoping to carry on in the militant spirit of the 1960s. The divisions within organized labor over the Vietnam War allowed the public-sector unions to take on the declining private unions of the AFL-CIO, whose leaders backed the war. Public-sector unions leadership become a key player in George McGovern's 1972 presidential campaign, and public employees have had a lead role in Democratic Party politics ever since.

Public-employee unionism seemed to gaining membership; Afscme was gaining a thousand workers a week, until the summer of 1975. At that point there was a surge in strikes, and the government unions began to threaten Democratic officeholders. In 1975 New York sanitation workers walked off the job, allowing garbage to pile up in the streets and the city was already in the throes of fiscal crisis. In short order, cops objecting to furloughs imposed by the city's liberal Democratic Mayor shut down the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge, with marchers carrying signs that read "Cops Out, Crime In" and "Burn City Burn."

On that same year 76,000 Pennsylvania state workers went on strike against the liberal Democratic Governor because of the Governors austerity measures. Afscme's leader in Pennsylvania told his members "Let's go out and close down this God-damned state." And in Seattle, the fireman's union initiated a recall ballot on July 1 directed against the one-time union favorite, Mayor Wes Uhlman, who held back pay hikes in the midst of rising deficits.

Mr. Uhlman narrowly survived and he, like other democrats, calmed the situation by largely caving in to the striker's demands. But a line had been crossed: With New York's near-bankruptcy a visible marker, the peril posed by public-sector unionism became a problem for Democrats as well as Republicans. The fiscal burden of public-employee unions briefly became visible again in the early '80s, when many warned of a looming public-pension crisis. That crisis was averted by the stock market boom that began in 1982-83 and lasted until 2007-08.

It is now back with a vengeance. Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and many other states now are in a desperate financial situation because the democrats have given these public-sector unions anything and everything that they have desired!

Restraining the immense clout that government-employee unions have accumulated over the past half-century will be difficult, but not impossible. Civil rights for African-Americans and women was a fulfillment of the principals of the American promise as expressed in the Declaration of Independence. Collective bargaining by public employees was not rooted in deep-seated American tradition.

Instead, the decision to grant this privilege was a political decision designed to enhance the power of a pressure group whose interests, even many liberals assumed, would be at odds with those of the general public. Political decisions can be reversed and in this case conservatives should bring this colossus down.

When public-sector unions act as if they deserve more, than what hard working men and women in the private-sector receive, during this "Great Recession" then we need to take action. The largest percentage of public labor union support has always gone to democrats and because of this fact democrats have always voted for the labor unions. However; the more important fact is that tax payers are forced to pay for these services and benefits without representation!

Politicians need to write a bill that would allow an increase in the government sector pay and benefits only with a vote of the people. This process already occurs in some states and it needs to occur in all states! Otherwise, the tax payer is left out of the equation and the politicians are left with the ability to use this power as a bargaining chip to stay in office.