California's Unions Are A Major Contributor To The State's Problems
California’s budget is still out of balance more than 6 months after the start of the fiscal year. Even worse, there doesn’t appear to be any deal in sight. The State is now issuing IOUs do it’s debtors rather than reducing expenses and all of the State’s constitutional officers have refused to furlough their employees 2 days a month. Essentially everyone is doing the exact opposite of what should be done to fix the budget. So who is to blame? Many people have a hand in making the problem, but no single group of people have been as destructive to the budget process as the California Public Employee Labor Unions.
California is no longer living in a bubble as it used to be. Employers who find that California’s laws are too restrictive or expensive for their tastes can take their jobs to other localities like Arizona or Mexico and truck their products into California. The only jobs that stay in California are those that have to stay in California (for example, Public Servants). Unions have one purpose– to further perpetuate the existance of unions. They are a major source of waste of government money.
Using the initiative process to develop ballot box budgeting propositions, the labor unions pursue their own agendas under the auspice of helping schools or children’s hospitals. Rather than allowing the elected officials to choose how much money goes to California’s programs they pass mandatory spending laws designed to “protect education” that ultimately lead to further budget gridlock. Even with mandatory spending already on the books, these organizations ask for a piece of the financial pie beyond what they already have established as their share by law.
Whenever an elected official opposes the Unions, or even tries to make reasonable decisions about union issues these organizations make an effort to recall or impeach that person– just as the California Correctional Peace Officers Association did to Arnold Schwarzenegger when he said the state didn’t have the money to give the Prison Guards a raise. They called him corrupt and intentionally withholding at the time. Knowing what we know now about the financial state of California, its seems Arnold was merely doing the responsible thing by not giving them their raise.
They also contribute to the extreme polarization of the political parties by choosing to back the most liberal of candidates that have no regard for California’s financial solvency. They have grown California’s government so much that we are now the most expensive state in the Union and cannot pay our bills even with the highest tax rates of any state in the country.
Their interests don’t stop with Union matters either. In 2008 the California Teachers Association, the largest public employee union in California contributed over $1.2 million to the No on Proposition 8 Campaign. Proposition 8 was about gay marriage– an issue that had nothing to do with education or benefits for educators.
Unions had a place in the United States when public employees (and private employees for that matter) were being abused, but those are atrocities of the past. With the highly diversified and intrusive media and the rapid expansion of information sharing on the internet employers simply cannot get away with the same things they could 30 years ago. The major effect these organizations have nowadays is to give non-union states and countries a competitive advantage over California.
Unions are a tricky subject anywhere. In Ottawa, the city is essentially being held hostage by the transit union who went on strike 36 days ago. Unions have become a business enterprise where they no longer fight for fair rights and wages for their workers, as per their early intent, but are instead fighting for the greedy interests of the career unionists. In the case of the Ottawa bus strike, the Union is demanding the right to schedule their own hours and holidays instead of the city, which of course no employee at any company anywhere gets.
While some of your concerns may be valid, you have spoken only of things that unions do in the public eye. In doing so you mentioned that there was a time that their existence was justified, namely, when worker rights did not exist. However, you neglected to consider the important role unions continue to play in protecting workers rights.
Consider the role unions play in representing workers who are mistreated. The alternative is that workers would have to represent themselves against large and complicated government institutions and multimillion institutions. This would quickly erode the gains that workers have made throughout the years.
When deciding where to cut budgets(both private and public) management tends to look at cutting worker’s salaries and benefits, while keeping their extravagant salaries intact. Unions help ensure that there is some fairness in these decisions. I would contend that if you look at the enormous difference in the amount executives and rank and file workers make, you would find that in this regard the role of unions remains crucial.
To Igor,
While I do agree that executive salaries are enormous and they are overpaid, cutting their salaries is a drop in bucket compared to the salaries and benefits are the union members. You could cut executive salaries to zero and it would still not make a dent in the overall education budget or really any larger company or public sector budget.
Public Sector Unions must be banned. I know a lot of teachers and they are a useless lot who chose to be teacher to have summers off, work exactly 1/2 of a year (do the math) and get paid full-time with benefits. By the way a normal work year is 2000 hours and if you add up teacher time off they work 1000 hours.
I agree that California Unions are a big problem and getting bigger. Is there any organizations that are attempting to counter this BS?