Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind (6 page)

Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, makes almost $400,000; Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, makes over $425,000 in salary annually, almost ten times what an average teacher earns.
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And over half the union officials at the headquarters of the two teachers unions make over $75,000 a year. Even a pro-labor commentator complained about bloated union boss salaries, “With union members everywhere getting squeezed by employers, fat salaries for top officials only widen the gap between elected leaders and the rank and file.”
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The left—including the unions—proclaims that it’s unfair for Wall Street executives to make huge salaries, and that the 1 percent are living off the rest of us. But the true 1 percent includes the union bosses, who rake in the money, dine at the White House, and live it up on the backs of their members. By any measure, workers should be striking against the union bosses themselves!

Government’s where it’s at, and the government employee unions have one goal: grow government, unionize more government workers, and charge the bill to the taxpayers. And that’s just what’s happened. Anytime you see potential government growth, you should suspect that the government employee unions are behind it.

Many other unions also represent government workers, including National Treasury Employees Union, United Steelworkers, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, International Association of Machinists, United Auto Workers, Communications Workers of America, and others.

* These unions have many additional employees at the state and/or local level with salaries over $75,000 but only the employees of the national union are given here.

All union official compensation and membership numbers from union reports to Office of Labor-Management Standards (OLMS), Center for Union Fact, and official union websites.

If you were hired today as a police officer in California, a teacher in New York, or as a government bureaucrat in Illinois, you would be told that there is a specific union that will represent you in matters with your employer. You will also be told that you will be paying dues or fees to that union for the privilege of representation.
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And if you refuse to pay these union tithes, you will be fired. Simple enough.

But how did that union get all this power? Clearly,
you
have no say in the matter, but what about Old Joe, who’s been here for the last twenty years? It turns out he doesn’t know how the union got there, either. It was here when he was hired. Old Joe never voted to bring in the union or to keep it there. It just seems that the union has always been there since the dawn of time.

Actually, most government employee unions gained control over government workers sometime in the 1960s or early 1970s, when many states passed laws allowing monopoly collective bargaining over government workers. A state might have done this because it was a trend sweeping the nation at the time—all the cool states were doing it. Or, more likely, the unions had made enough pro–labor union “friends” in the legislature and had supported the governor in his election to make it happen. Now, unions exercise collective bargaining power over at least some state and local government workers in forty-three states, plus the District of Columbia.
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In any case, when these laws were first passed, a bunch of different labor unions made a beeline for your state, like flies to honey, and tried to unionize every group of government workers in sight. First, the unions as a group would have had to convince at least 30 percent of the workers in a bargaining group, say the police officers in San Diego County, to sign cards asking the state to hold a union election. Once the unions had collected enough cards, the state held a secret-ballot election. That is when it got ugly. For a few weeks or months, the various unions fought tooth and nail—and kneecap—for every last worker, spending hundreds of dollars per worker trying to get their vote. When the election was held, whichever union won the majority of votes from police officers voting in the election was certified as the representative
for
all
police officers in the county. The other unions licked their wounds and went away to organize other workers in other jurisdictions.

What if you voted against the union because you wanted to be able to negotiate your own pay and benefits individually with the department? Too bad. The union became your exclusive representative, too.

The newly installed union would now negotiate detailed contracts with the county or locality. The first contract would be a “union security contract” giving the union power to represent workers and collect dues; the second contract would cover employment terms for the officers.

The union’s highest priority in negotiating its own contract is always a “forced dues” provision that allows the union to collect dues and fees from every worker it represents, union member or not. This is the gold mine that fuels the government employee union movement. The represented workers aren’t forced to actually join the union—but even if they don’t join, they are forced to pay “agency fees” to the union, which unions more gently call “fair-share” fees. Because the nonmember fees are the same or almost the same as union dues, most workers join the union. With union membership, you get some extra insurance coverage, some other benefits—and most of all, the union thug outside your office door or hovering over your cubicle will go away. So if you can’t beat ’em, you might as well join ’em.

For unions, forced-dues contracts are a home run—they get to extract money from your wallet without your permission or say-so. Forced-dues provisions are permitted in twenty-seven states and in union contracts in at least twenty-two states.
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Generally, more than three-quarters of the dues income that government worker unions collect is from forced-dues states. In fact, over half the unions’ total dues income comes from just six states: California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New Jersey.
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So, what services does the union provide you in exchange for your dues? The union gets between you and your employer in matters involving your job. Your union negotiates an employment contract that
controls every aspect of your working life—from how much salary you get (where permitted by law) to how early you can retire, from how much vacation you can get every year to how many bathroom breaks you can take every day.
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Union representatives will also handle any complaints that you have against your employer, or your employer may have against you, and on and on. You will not generally deal with your employer on matters concerning your employment—only via the union representative. If you have a fight with your boss, instead of sitting down with your boss directly, you get your union representative, your boss gets his lawyer, and they have a chat.

And the union gets some goodies, too—the government must pay union officials for the time that they spend on union matters—called “official time” or “release time”—and give the union the right to be present physically in your government workplace, to keep other unions out of your workplace, to use your workplace mail system, to keep other unions from using your mail system, and other benefits. It’s a great deal for the union.

When contracts are renegotiated, the members of your union get to decide whether or not to accept the union contract, which is generally coupled with automatic recertification of the union until the next contract is put into place.
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Very few members vote in these matters—very often, less than 10 percent—probably because union members realize that this is just rubber-stamping. And so life goes on, with the union having a virtual lock on a group of workers until the end of time.

So you get a government job forty years after the union was certified in your workplace. You don’t get to decide whether you want this particular union to represent you—or whether you want a union to represent you at all. And you don’t get to decide whether you want to pay union dues. You just get to decide whether you want to take the job—isn’t that just a whole lot simpler?

One of the craziest things that our government does is actually pay union officials to work for the union
during their paid workday
—called “official time” (or “release time”). Union officials and “volunteers” are actually paid for time that they spend at work on union matters. And some
government employees can even work on union matters all the time for decades, without performing any actual work for the government, and still get paid their government salary, benefits, and longevity raises.

Official time is one of those key provisions that unions demand in their collective bargaining agreement with the government. As James Sherk of the Heritage Foundation explains, “Official time is a public subsidy for private matters. If federal employees value their union representation, then they should pay for it with their dues. If they do not value that representation enough to pay for it, taxpayers should not subsidize it.”
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But we do.

The federal government permits official time under federal law, but is not required to keep track of how much it costs taxpayers. But the past few years, they checked on it for chuckles, and found out that federal employees spent over 3 million hours in 2010 on official time, representing over 1,700 man-years of work and costing taxpayers about $137 million.
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Our federal, state, and local governments combined pay for over 23 million hours of official time annually, representing around 13,000 man-years of work and costing taxpayers over $1 billion per year.
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One commentator cleverly noted, “Official time allows union representatives to conduct routine union affairs and file frivolous grievances during working hours. Like an open bar at a wedding, there’s no cost to the guest (the union) but great cumulative cost to the bride’s father (the taxpayers).”
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In most private businesses, you bargain for yourself—no group has the monopoly power to bargain for you. If you get an offer to be an insurance broker at a business on Main Street, you will negotiate with the owner of the business over your starting salary, relocation expenses,
health insurance contributions, company car, and other benefits. Then, a year after you have taken the job, when a rival firm makes you an offer to jump ship and go work for them, you renegotiate with your original employer for better terms. You’re responsible for setting your working conditions with your employer. Nobody does it for you.