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© 2011 The Union Label Blog & Grassfire Nation
By Andrew Biggs and Jason Richwine
Many government employees are paid up to 30% more than those in the private sector.
Leaders across the country are proposing restrictions on public employees’ pay and benefits in order to put their budgets on a more sustainable path. The political left’s counterattack is that government workers aren’t overpaid compared to those in the private economy. Who’s right?
Consider a study released last October by the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the University of California, Berkeley, which concluded that Golden State public employees “are neither overpaid nor overcompensated.” The Economic Policy Institute has generated reports arguing that government workers are underpaid.
These studies are misleading. Public-private pay comparisons vary from state to state, but a full accounting shows clearly that large, union-dominated states tend to overpay their workers. California is a good example.
The Berkeley study begins by studying salaries, where its methods are solid. Using individual-level data from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, it compares public and private wages while controlling for differences in age, education and other earnings-related characteristics. Using essentially the same methods, we found that California state and local government employees receive wages about 4% lower than those received by similarly skilled workers in large private firms, which offer the most generous pay and benefits. But if we compare public employees to all private workers, the 4% penalty becomes statistically zero….
Read the rest at the Wall Street Journal…
As in Wisconsin, Ohio is seeing a similar uproar to its Collective Bargaining Rights bill: Senate Bill 5 (SB5) Full Text Here. And I DO mean uproar! My family, largely conservative, is up in arms because their unions have portrayed this bill as an Armageddon to their very existence. I will try to provide a basic primer on what the bill does and what it does not do.
WHAT THE BILL DOES
It would abolish collective bargaining rights for state workers. (UPDATED: except in for basic pay) H/T NBC4i.com
It would restrict teachers, firefighters, police, university employees and local workers in their bargaining abilities.
Unions would lose the ability to negotiate salary schedules and step increases.
Unions would have to negotiate according to merit pay increases.
Unions would be barred from requiring non-members covered by their contracts to pay dues.
WHAT THE BILL DOESN’T DO
It doesn’t abolish the collective bargaining rights of local employees.
Many/most local contracts will remain unchanged by the passing of the law.
Bust unions.
SO WHAT IS THE BIG DEAL?
Basically, it establishes a framework that would put the power to decide what is best for local economies in the hand of the local people and not union bosses. This has the unions going into full panic mode. Starved for power, they are putting out high alerts that this bill will cause their work conditions to deteriorate overnight, educational systems turned into forced labor camps, and prisons sliding into an abyss of chaos. I will follow this as it goes into next week and through eventual passage. (No, Ohio Reps and Senators can’t leave our state to prevent passage) Right now, the unions provide a racket. They force union dues, use those dues to get people elected, force those same people to increase pay/benefits/healthcare, use the deals as leverage for increased dues, repeat as necessary. Glad to see Governor Kasich is striving for some fiscal sanity to attack a budget deficit of over 8 BILLION DOLLARS.
…but it aint my problem. That about sums it up.
To put things in perspective:
A public employee in Ohio making 48,724/yr actually takes home (before taxes) 41370. To pay that amount, it cost the state 60,393! IF we went to retirement matching and HSAs and non-union with that same $60,393 the actual salary would be $55,523 (a 13% raise). The take home before taxes would be $47883 (a 15.8% increase). That includes full health and investing 5000/year. Also keep in mind that is with the state putting 5000/year into the individuals HSAs. These roll over from year to year, so, if your family is healthy for 3 years you will have 15k in the account with your deductible at 5k. These HSAs are able to be passed to your children on death.
If you started at 22 and worked 30 years at an investment of 5,000/year, you would have over $950,000 at retirement with interest income of around 70,000/year. Unions give the compounding interest to the state, and NO medical account for your children either. That is with keeping the state contribution the same. If we kept the salary the same, the state would save that 15% and ensure that no one got furloughed or layed off.
But aside from the economics of what unions are costing workers and the flexibility they are costing administrators across the state, there is an issue of fairness. Just because the tax base “CAN” support increases in pay doesn’t mean that they should be obliged to and that leads us to the main reason why Governor Kasich and Ohio Republicans stood in support of SB 5, a bill in Ohio to eliminate collective bargaining in most instances for public sector employees.
-By Warner Todd Huston
You might recall that with great fanfare and the slobberingly positive coverage by the Old Media, President Obama made Reagan-like and claimed that he thought it was time to get rid of the regulations strangling American business. Since that time he’s met with businesses and pretended to suddenly be a pro-business, pro-economic growth president. His actions, however, give the lie to his sudden turn around from anti-business to pro-business man. Thankfully the GOP is making to help the president become what he’s selling himself as, despite his best intentions.
One of those ways that the GOP is assisting Obama to become business friendly — no matter how much Obama hates the idea — was announced last week by John Kline and the Republicans of the Education and the Workforce Committee of the House of Representatives.
Subcommittee Chairman Phil Roe, M.D. (R-TN) announced the closer scrutiny that the GOP intends to level upon the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal entity that is supposed to act as a mediator for disputes between labor. That closer scrutiny is a result of Obama’s appointees moving the NLRB from mediator between business and labor to outright advocate in favor of Big Labor.
Showing what he truly thinks of the business sector, Obama’s NLRB has been punishing businesses as much as possible and attacking worker’s rights in the process. By making labor friendly rules changes and using the office as an activist tool to take business to court to force them to accede to labor demands, all things that has never been done on such a scale before.
Obama’s NLRB has made several key rules changes that the GOP members of the committee say shows that it is, “eager to tilt the playing field in favor of powerful special interests against the interests of rank-and-file workers.”
Here are just a few of the things that the NLRB has done since Obama stocked the office full of former Big Labor employees and their lawyers.
- Essentially ended the decades old ban on “secondary boycotts” by allowing banners to be placed in front of businesses not involved in any labor dispute. A secondary boycott is when union agitators picket and attack the business of someone for whom they do not work but who does business with their employer. The goal here is for the union attackers to make associates of their own employer want to cease doing business with the union member’s place of employment to pressure their employer to accede to their demands. Sort of a guilt by association attack on the innocent, unconnected business. This used to be illegal until Obama’s labor hacks infested the NLRB.
- The NLRB decided that it now controls the child care centers of churches and religious institutions. No law change or act of Congress needed. They just decided out of hand that they now control all the kids in Churches.
- The NLRB wants to allow unions to try to organize a business not just by company but by job type. Instead of having to convince an entire company to unionize or not, the NLRB wants to allow unions to come in and unionize as few as 3 employees who happen to have the same job title and/or duties. This will allow unions to piecemeal a business to death and will make it far easier to organize when you don’t have to convince hundreds of employees to vote yes, but only need 2 or 3 to say yes and the place is automatically unionized.
- Changed rules to force employers to act as a union information outlet by making employers inform employees all about the union options they have.
- The NLRB wants to change rules to force “card check” on workers, a rule that will take away their right to a secret ballot while voting for or against unions. This is the very law that Congress rejected because voters are against it. So, since Obama didn’t get his way through legitimate legislation, he’s doing it through his powers to make rules by fiat.
- Changed rules to shorten the election time that unions have so business has less time to mount a defense against unions.
- Just last month the NLRB announced that it intended to sue any state that passed state legislation guaranteeing that workers can have a secret ballot election. So intent is Obama on taking away worker’s rights to a private vote in union elections that he’d even sue whole states to prevent them from guaranteeing the ages-old democratic right.
- The NLRB even wants to make a new rule that would have girl scouts and kid’s sports teams thrown out of businesses all across the country. Obama is demanding that if businesses allow girl scouts to sell cookies on their property, then they will also have to allow unions to flood their business to solicit for members.
When I said above that these are just a few of the Big Labor approved rules changes that Obama’s NLRB have changed or are in the process of changing, I mean that. There are dozens like this all aimed at hurting business and giving paybacks, sweetheart deals, and extra help to Big Labor.
Of course, now Obama and his comrades on the board want to wildly increase the budget of the NLRB. Obama seeks an increase of $71.2 million over the NLRB’s 2001 levels of funding. And yet, the agency has seen a steep drop in its caseload because unions have fallen to less than 7% of the private-sector workforce. Even as Obama wants a 33% increase in NLRB funding the agency has seen a 45% drop in its case load because of falling union numbers.
So why are we spending millions more for an agency that has less on its plate every year? Only so that Obama’s NLRB can have the funding to turn activist in order to increase union membership and create more rules and regulations that could hamper business.
Obama specializes in ladling on the sort of soothing rhetoric that makes it seem as if he desires a tack to the center. He’s the “reasonable” guy. But his actions never, ever reveal the “reasonable.” They always reveal a hard left ideologue that stands ready to use his power to regulate to hurt business and help unions.
Republicans are not powerless here, though. Last week Georgia Congressman Tom Price showed us how we might put a dent in the anti-business plans of Obama’s jobs-crushing NLRB by adding an amendment to the current budget negotiations that would totally defund the NLRB for the rest of 2011.
Price hopes to take away the resources that the NLRB hopes to put to its anti-business climate. His amendment reads, “None of the funds made available by this Act may be used to pay the salaries and expenses of personnel to carry out and implement the National Labor Relations Act.”
Price needs to be supported in this amendment and many more of its type needs to be (and are being) added to the continuing resolution budget process.
The left has specialized in sending forth blizzards of such changes, amendments and regulatory alterations, so many that it is impossible to stop them all. The GOP should emulate that in these budget cut proposals.
In the end, we all know that the government is spent out. But something as badly misused by Obama as the NLRB is a perfect target for savings.
-By Warner Todd Huston
With Democrat state legislators in Wisconsin and now Indiana fleeing their states so that they don’t have to do their job — just call them fleebaggers — it would be easy to assume that Democrats are cowards. If not cowards, then petulant children throwing temper tantrums because voters did not give them a power-lock majority. But while cowardice and petulance both factor into these running donkeys their main motivation is greed. You see, if public employees lose their power then they will have no more money to give Democrats for their campaign coffers.
By far unions are the largest donors that Democrats have all up and down the line from local and state to federal. Unions spent over 50 million dollars on Barack Obama’s campaign back in 2008 and they spent another 50 million for the 2010 midterm elections.
Most specifically pubic employee unions are Democrats biggest supporters. In the last week of the 2010 election, for instance, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) spent over a million dollars to help elect Democrats. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) spent almost $400,000.
So when these Democrats run away and try to hide in a neighboring state it is because their biggest donors are demanding that they “do something.” And since Democrats in these states have lost all power due to the will of the voters, they feel that their last ability to stop legislation that hurts donor’s interests is to shut down government.
There is no parallel for this in the actions of Republicans who have spent decades as powerless onlookers in state government. No blocks of Republicans have run away like cowards to nearby states to avoid doing their jobs. Republicans have been essentially powerless in the face of unions since World War II yet in that almost 80-year span where Democrats have been in the pocket of Big Labor no blocks of Republicans have wallowed in such childish petulance. Republicans continued to go to work in their state capitols despite being virtually powerless to affect unions.
At long last voters are sick and tired of government union members getting paid twice as much as they are, getting up to 95% of their helathcare provided for them, for being allowed to retire at a young age to spend decades at leisure all at the cost of the taxpayers. Voters are also fully aware that Democrats are in the back pocket of these greedy, profligate unions, too. The two are inextricably tied together in the minds of the voters.
If Republicans know what is best for them, they will take this climate to strike against public employee unions.These are the first steps toward taking public employee unions down and if Republicans do not take advantage of this they will have allowed the first, best opportunity to strike a blow against these thieves.
Meanwhile the Republican Governor’s Association has started a campaign to support Wisconsin’s Gov. Walker.
Go to www.StandWithScott.com/ and check it out.
UPDATE: Please vote in the poll below!
In case you missed it, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels backed down in the face of the Right-to-Work fight happening in the Indiana legislature.
There is a deep debate happening now about what this all means for Mitch Daniels. Most believe he came down on the wrong side of the issue and it will badly damage his chances of a Presidential bid.
Many, however, don’t subscribe to that line of thinking and are
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Eric Odom (Media Director)
Warner Todd Huston