The Orange County treasurer, who rose to fame 12 years ago as the first to warn that the county’s investment portfolio was in danger of collapse just before the county slid into bankruptcy, is running for a seat on the county Board of Supervisors. [John] Moorlach has been warning of late that Orange County’s government, like many local jurisdictions, has over-committed itself to pension and health care obligations for its retirees. The county employee unions are going all out to keep him off the board, spending about a quarter-million dollars so far. If they succeed in defeating him, it will force second thoughts on any other public official who tries to bring attention to this looming problem.On June 12, Rick Reiff, then-editor of the Orange County Business Journal, would opine: “John Moorlach not only weathered a vicious assault by the public employee unions, he beat it back with a vengeance, winning seven of every 10 votes to gain a seat on the county Board of Supervisors.”
Today, just about every Democrat that holds public office is beholden to the support and funding of public employee unions. Most Republican officeholders are also amiable with these unions, or they will face a well-funded Democratic opponent in their next race. Why are there so few Republicans in public office in California? Look no further than public employee unions, the most powerful special interest in the state and nation. They have successfully selected their bosses on city councils, school boards, supervisorial boards and legislative offices. They own their employers, something that does not remotely exist with private sector unions, and this massive conflict of interest explains the poor fiscal status of too many municipalities.
To make this awkward and unsustainable situation understandable, you need to read Philip K. Howard’s newest book, “Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions.” This concise scholarly work by the author of the New York Times bestseller “The Death of Common Sense” reads like the travails of my career in public life. He acknowledges that “only a few officials have been willing to endure a holy war with public unions.”
I like to do technical reading and underline key points and highlight important segments. Believe me when I say that hardly a page was lacking from my pencil’s touch. The introduction doesn’t mince any words: “Accountability is basically nonexistent in American government. Performance doesn’t matter. Many public managers [say] they’ve never seen a public employee dismissed for poor performance.”
Howard gets it. “The conflict of interest by public employees in negotiating against government is notorious and unavoidable and requires a constitutional bright-line test against public sector union political activity.”
The history of authorizing collective bargaining in the public sector, something President Franklin D. Roosevelt strongly advocated against, is provided; “[The] employer is the whole people ... Upon employees in the Federal service rests the obligation to serve the whole people.”
Howard notes that “the big break came with [President John F. Kennedy’s] Executive Order 10988, authorizing collective bargaining in the federal government. The order stated that its aim was to promote the ‘efficient conduct of public business.’ But the actual motivation was political, and historians have concluded that the Executive Order 10988 was payback for union support.”
The nonsense hasn’t stopped since the 1960s. And reformers have been squelched for the last 60 years. When former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed a pilot program to grant tenure to new teachers based on the test scores of their students, the unions went to the New York state legislature “and got it to pass a law prohibiting any district, anywhere in the state, from using test score data as even one part of the tenure evaluation process.”
Two notable victories are worthy of mention. In 1981, President Reagan broke the air traffic controllers’ strike by terminating over 11,000 of them and temporarily using supervisors and military controllers. And in 2011, former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker “proposed a ‘budget repair bill’ that required public employees to contribute to pension and health plans (reducing take-home pay by 8 percent), limited collective bargaining to wages (no more work rules, seniority, and other controls), and required public unions to be authorized by their members each year.” The rest of the nation watched as the unions first were disruptive, then after the legislation passed, mounted an unsuccessful recall. But the reforms made a positive impact, with the state realizing savings of $5 to $7 billion per year, creating some 42,000 jobs, and improving school test scores where merit pay was instituted.
“Each public union seems to operate out of the same playbook – to turn elected officials into union dependents.”
In 2001, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association spent $7 million on candidates, and 104 of the 107 they backed won their elections. Now they are paid 40 percent more than prison guards in the other 49 states. The Golden State is a union state, and this explains why it is in the bottom ten states from a fiscal standpoint, along with nine other red states controlled by public employee unions.
We’re no longer talking Democrat or Republican, conservative or liberal, we’re dealing with a powerful money machine—but it does back Democrats more than 90 percent of the time.
“What happened is that the interests of public unions and political leaders aligned to create a kind of bureaucratic kleptocracy. Campaign support plus bargaining power opened a wide door for mutual advantage.” And, therefore, “political activity by public unions should be ruled unconstitutional.”
