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The Government Workers Union Albatross

The Government Workers Union Albatross

Phillip K. Howard examines how union bosses for government workers are fleecing the taxpayers: The indictment of seven Long Island Rail Road workers for disability fraud last week cast a spotlight on a troubled government agency. Until recently, over 90% of LIRR workers retired with a disability—even those who worked desk jobs—adding about $36,000 to their annual pensions. The cost to New York taxpayers over the past decade was $300 million. As one investigator put it, fraud of this kind "became a culture of sorts among the LIRR workers, who took to gathering in doctor's waiting rooms bragging to each [other] about their disabilities while simultaneously talking about their golf game." How could almost every employee think fraud was the right thing to do? The LIRR disability epidemic is hardly unique—82% of senior California state troopers are "disabled" in their last year before retirement. Pension abuses are so common—for example, "spiking" pensions with excess overtime in the last year of employment—that they're taken for granted. Governors in Wisconsin and Ohio this year have led well-publicized showdowns with public unions. Union leaders argue they are "decimat[ing] the collective bargaining rights of public employees." What are these so-called "rights"? The dispute has focused on rich benefit packages that are drowning public budgets. Far more important is the lack of productivity. "I've never seen anyone terminated for incompetence," observed a long-time human relations official in New York City. In Cincinnati, police personnel records must be expunged every few years—making periodic misconduct essentially unaccountable. Over the past decade, Los Angeles succeeded in firing five teachers (out of 33,000), at a cost of $3.5 million. Collective-bargaining rights have made government virtually unmanageable. Promotions, reassignments and layoffs are dictated by rigid rules, without any opportunity for managerial judgment. In 2010, shortly after receiving an award as best first-year teacher in Wisconsin, Megan Sampson had to be let go under "last in, first out" provisions of the union contract. Even what task someone should do on a given day is subject to detailed rules. Last year, when a virus disabled two computers in a shared federal office in Washington, D.C., the IT technician fixed one but said he was unable to fix the other because it wasn't listed on his form. Making things work better is an affront to union prerogatives. The refuse-collection union in Toledo sued when the city proposed consolidating garbage collection with the surrounding county. (Toledo ended up making a cash settlement.) In Wisconsin, when budget cuts eliminated funding to mow the grass along the roads, the union sued to stop the county executive from giving the job to inmates.
Barack Obama, President of the SEIU

Barack Obama, President of the SEIU

Barack Obama is an effective president, unfortunately not of the United States but of the SEIU argues Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer: Unions — particularly public-employee unions — support illegal immigration because it serves their interests to have a permanent class of people who are financially dependent on the government. The sad secret about private-sector unions is that they are dying.  All they do now is drive up the cost of doing business, thereby preventing their own members from getting hired. Arizona is what we call a “right to work” state. As mandated by the Arizona Constitution, Arizonans are free to join a union or not — it’s their choice, not some union boss’s command. And interestingly enough, when employees are given the choice of whether or not to join a union, they increasingly say no. These workers understand that the rigid workplace rules and regulations that unions promote are bad for growth, bad for competitiveness, and bad for jobs. More and more workers recognize this. That’s why in the private sector, where employees have a real stake in the success of the businesses they work for, only 7.5 percent of workers are unionized. By contrast, more than 36 percent of public-sector workers are unionized, and more than 42 percent of local-government workers. That’s because public-sector workers in the federal government don’t have to worry about unemployment. Ever. In many federal agencies, the primary threat to job security is actually death. Democratic-party bosses love government workers because each of those workers must rely upon the health and growth of government to pay his salary and guarantee his benefits. If the government contracts or shuts down for any reason, those workers are out of a job. And public-sector unions love the Democratic bosses because they keep on growing government. The more people the Democrats can put on the payroll, the more voters they can lock up for their candidates. That gives public-sector unions like the SEIU (which includes huge numbers of public employees) unbelievable leverage. Because the party bosses want to keep government workers employed and happy, they’ll give the unions just about anything they want. And the best part (for them) is that it doesn’t cost them a thing. The taxpayers pick up the tab. Liberal politicians spend taxpayer money to grow government; the unions keep voting for (and contributing to) Democrats, and the Democrats stay in office so they can spend more of the taxpayers’ money growing government. It’s a simple, corrupt, mutual back-scratching circle. How does illegal immigration play into this? Most illegal aliens work hard. That is not in dispute. But the unfortunate fact is that most illegal aliens are also unskilled and uneducated. Unskilled workers have higher unemployment rates and lower earnings. Many rely on government programs to help support them and their families. Much of this access to the welfare system by these households is gained through their American-born children, who are U.S. citizens. That means more government, which means more public-sector-union members. Even if, in the short term, more illegal immigration means fewer union jobs, the unions are okay with that. It is a strategic cost they are willing to bear. Because they know that if the Democrats keep winning, they will give the unions subsidies, grow government, and employ more union members.

Department of Labor Sells Out Union Members for Big Labor 1%

The Department of Labor's efforts to destroy financial disclosure rules designed protect union members and inform them about the spending habits of the union bosses is selling out the 99% to help the 1%, in the parlance of the Occupy Wall Street movement: The Department of Labor (DOL) doesn’t need to loosen financial disclosure for union bosses to take advantage of union members’ dues. Yet, this is exactly what the Obama administration has done. On October 26, DOL published a regulation that would weaken union members’ protections against fraud and corruption by union leadership. Under the new regulation, DOL’s union financial reporting document, the Form LM-30, will no longer require financial disclosure reporting by union stewards, leave for workers performing union activities while being paid by their employer, financial dealings with credit institutions (such as loans), and union officials’ payments from union trusts. It’s not as if these requirements served no purpose. Numerous major cases of union corruption last month bring the timing of the rulemaking into question. Here’s a quick rundown for October: In Chicago, former Chicago Federation of Labor President Dennis Gannon, along with two union lobbyists, were found to be double-dipping pensions. They secured six-figure pensions from the city of Chicago, based on calculations from their inflated wages for carrying out union activities, rather than from their wage from government service. Union bosses were found greasing the wheels on the Long Island Railroad Workers’ billion- dollar disability pension scam. Ten NYPD officers, who are union officials in the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, were charged for their role in a widespread ticket-fixing scam. The United Food and Commercial Workers’ New York local president, former president, and treasurer were arrested for racketeering, extortion, money laundering, and witness tampering. The LM-30 was designed to make union finances transparent and hold union bosses accountable to their membership. As stated in Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act, “[T]he Department [of Labor] established the Form LM-30 … to make public any actual or likely conflict between the personal interests of union officers and employees and their obligations to the union and its members.” With this fresh list of corrupt union activities, does loosening union financial disclosure and relaxing compliance procedures protect the hardworking, middle-class union member? No. Unfortunately, the opposite is true.

ObamaCare's Big Labor Bailout Provisions

The Investor's Business Daily reports on a new government report detailing a $5 billion slush fund that was included in ObamaCare, $2.7 billion of which has been handed out to the union bosses: How do you funnel billions of dollars to your union pals at a time when the government is running record deficits? Easy, you just tuck the money into ObamaCare. According to a new Government Accountability Office report, the federal government has so far handed out $2.7 billion out of a $5 billion program squirreled away in ObamaCare. The Early Retiree Reinsurance Program is advertized as a way to "stabilize the availability of employer-sponsored coverage for early retirees," according to a Health and Human Services memo. The argument goes that companies are increasingly dropping retiree health benefits, leaving those who retire before becoming eligible for Medicare in a jam — either they face exorbitant rates for insurance or expose themselves to potentially catastrophic health costs. The little-noticed ObamaCare program was supposed to encourage companies to continue offering this benefit until 2014 — when ObamaCare fully kicks in and will solve everything — by reimbursing companies for a chunk of their retiree health costs. But lift the hood a little and this program looks more like a slush fund for Friends of Democrats. Almost as soon as the program was announced, thousands of well-connected unions and government agencies rushed in to apply for the free money. As a result, the agency running the program had to stop accepting applications in May or risk running out of funds. And just look at who made the cut. According to figures obtained by IBD, 10 of the top 12 recipients are either unions or public employee groups. In fact, the biggest single recipient was the UAW Retiree Medical Benefits Trust, which alone grabbed more than 8% of all the funds handed out so far. Other union beneficiaries include the United Food and Commercial Workers, the United Mine Workers and the Teamsters. The problem is that these groups are the least likely to drop their retiree health benefits, calling the lie to the Obama administration's whole "stabilizing" excuse.In fact, over the past 10 years, the share of state and local governments offering retiree benefits increased — climbing to 83% from 80% in 2001, according to an annual Kaiser Family Foundation health benefits survey.

ObamaCare's Big Labor Bailout Provisions

The Investor's Business Daily reports on a new government report detailing a $5 billion slush fund that was included in ObamaCare, $2.7 billion of which has been handed out to the union bosses: How do you funnel billions of dollars to your union pals at a time when the government is running record deficits? Easy, you just tuck the money into ObamaCare. According to a new Government Accountability Office report, the federal government has so far handed out $2.7 billion out of a $5 billion program squirreled away in ObamaCare. The Early Retiree Reinsurance Program is advertized as a way to "stabilize the availability of employer-sponsored coverage for early retirees," according to a Health and Human Services memo. The argument goes that companies are increasingly dropping retiree health benefits, leaving those who retire before becoming eligible for Medicare in a jam — either they face exorbitant rates for insurance or expose themselves to potentially catastrophic health costs. The little-noticed ObamaCare program was supposed to encourage companies to continue offering this benefit until 2014 — when ObamaCare fully kicks in and will solve everything — by reimbursing companies for a chunk of their retiree health costs. But lift the hood a little and this program looks more like a slush fund for Friends of Democrats. Almost as soon as the program was announced, thousands of well-connected unions and government agencies rushed in to apply for the free money. As a result, the agency running the program had to stop accepting applications in May or risk running out of funds. And just look at who made the cut. According to figures obtained by IBD, 10 of the top 12 recipients are either unions or public employee groups. In fact, the biggest single recipient was the UAW Retiree Medical Benefits Trust, which alone grabbed more than 8% of all the funds handed out so far. Other union beneficiaries include the United Food and Commercial Workers, the United Mine Workers and the Teamsters. The problem is that these groups are the least likely to drop their retiree health benefits, calling the lie to the Obama administration's whole "stabilizing" excuse.In fact, over the past 10 years, the share of state and local governments offering retiree benefits increased — climbing to 83% from 80% in 2001, according to an annual Kaiser Family Foundation health benefits survey.