Talk Elections

Yes, by about 55% or something so this article (http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/301501/wisconsin-unions-decline-robert-costa) says. Sure some of that may be due to layoffs, but per another article (http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/05/dramatic_drop_in_union_membership_among_wi_public_employees.html#ixzz1wUmEkdVC) on this from the WSJ, it appears that the bulk of it was due to the law change that members needed to agree that their dues would be deducted from their paychecks. With that change, it appears that a majority of the members (or close to it) said no, we don't want our paychecks docked for dues, and in the case of one union, it then proceeded to kick those members out.

It is not surprising that both sides view the Wisconsin recall as ground zero. This is a potential game changer. One poll says 55% of Wisconsin voters now agree with Walker's union reforms. At stake is one of the Democrats' major, if not the major, sources of funds.

California will have a somewhat similar initiative on the ballot this November in essence. Dues can't be used for political campaigns without the permission of the member.

Union successfully smashed. Next.


The next battleground is in California.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304821304577438452821346064.html


The showdown in San Jose (pop. 958,789), California's third most-populous city and the 10th-biggest in the U.S., has its roots in the late 1990s when California lawmakers expanded benefits for workers in the state-run pension plan. To keep up with nearby cities during the dot-com boom, San Jose sweetened its offerings. Police and firefighters got the largest retirement benefits, which climbed to as much as 90% of a worker's highest salary, excluding overtime, before retirement, up from 75%.



Well that was quite stupid.

Ah, yes. Further weakening of workers' rights and increased dependence of politics on corporate money is just what we need. The slump to parliamentarian plutocracy accelerates.

The world is becoming globalized, but cosmopolitanism is being hijacked by the Davos Man. What choice is left besides nationalism? The thought is terrifying, to be honest.

All part of the plan, of course.

I read this in the WSJ the other day. Definitely made me feel a little uneasy. The Democrats are already far enough to the right.

I guess we had better get used to Andrew Cuomo & Friends, since they're clearly going to be the future of the Democratic Party.

Then I might as well be D-NY.

Hopefully the country won't go down the toilet too much over the next 8 years so I can leave the decrepit ship of state before it sinks. I'm thinking Canada.

Neoliberalism is the most dangerous political movement since National Socialism.

At least National Socialism made it comically obvious that it was evil and dangerous.

Um...why?

It's more effective at making poor even poorer when compared to your normal free-market.

Divide and conquer. Success.

Except you're not socially liberal.

Unions overreached and have now had their hands slapped by the people....lets see how they react.  Defensive and angry like the posters in this thread is my guess.  You can't expect people like that to learn from their mistakes.


(now comes the part where they try and explain that excessive retirement benefits aren't overreaching or mistakes...oh and insults, always insults)

Weakening workers rights?  How so when the workers were given a new right to vote?

"it appears that a majority of the members (or close to it) said no, we don't want our paychecks docked for dues"

So approximately the number of Republicans(40%) in the Unions decided to vote this way. That will probably change once they lose their union benefits.

Workers still have the right to unionize.

lol. A right that exists only on paper and is eviscerated by reality. Not that the pre-Walker status quo provided unions with enough to even sustain themselves in most instances.


What right to vote? Vote for what?

Unionism depends on collective action. Of course no individual will choose to make the sacrifices necessary to bargain collectively by themselves. It doesn't make sense. That is the whole premise behind unionism.

But ah, they still have the 'right to unionize', without the right to effectively act collectively, without the money to defend their power. That is like saying you have the right to vote freedom of speech, on the condition that your larynx is surgically removed.

     With their prodigious tendency to waste taxpayer dollars, public sector unions are better off in the junk heap of history. Would that they'd hasten thither.

Strong unions are necessary to keep the stratifying effects of capitalism in check. And since private sector unions have already historically expired, if public sector unions followed then that would be the end of it altogether.

While I agree in general with Beet here (shocking everyone) in that strong unions are an excellent check against sh**tty working conditions, strong unions are their own worst enemy.  They don't care about the repercusions of their actions, they don't care about corruption inside their own organizations and the people in charge don't even care about their own members.  I certainly don't want unions to die, I think they have their place in a free market system, but they need to be restrained less they kill the golden goose and make toilets out of the eggs.

No, corporations are the unions' worst enemy. You say you think strong unions are a check and have a place, but a 55% fall in membership in one year isn't restraint; it's disembowelment. Actually, I was pretty complacent about Walkerism until seeing this article Torie posted. I haven't always been the friendliest to unionism myself in the past. But this is shocking.

And all this is considering, as I said, unionism is already dead in the private sector. It's already dead in the south. Pretty much the only place it's still alive is in states like Wisconsin and in the public sector. And now, Walker will most likely win the recall leaving the unions totally eviscerated. The Democrats in the future will turn to the Koch Brothers to fund their campaigns.

Its seems that this right is rather theoretical for most US workers in the private sector given the way corporations treat people trying to organize.

Unions are still strong (for now) in the North East no?  Still kind of strong in the rust belt (what's left of it).  The teachers unions are still strongish nationally.  If the people still felt the unions were serving them this sh**t wouldn't pass, but the unions have burned any and all the good will they had by constantly doing things the people find heinous.  The jokes about lazy union members didn't come out of a board room of a Fortune 500 company, they came from people observing lazy unions members.  The jokes about corruption and ties to organized crime didn't come from a guy in a suit, they came because unions have historically been corrupt and had ties to organized crime.

Public opinion on the workers in question in Wisconsin however are largely positive. The problem isn't 'lazy' union members, the problem is the pension funds. Secondly, if there's corruption and organized crime then by all means, go after that. This has nothing to do with that. However it should be noted that there is inevitably going to be some corruption within unions just as there are in Fortune 500 companies. Large human organizations, especially those with a political side, always have some corruption from time to time. But it's better than the alternative of not having them, or having them only pro forma with no real power.

The only successful large developed country right now is Germany. Guess what, Germany has strong unions, deeply embedded within the structure of the economy. Historical experience with the US has shown that the middle class benefits well going with a large public and private sector union base that is strong across the major economically significant areas of the country. Weakening union membership since the 1970's has been associated with stalling of wage-growth, stall in the decline of the poverty rate, income inequality, political polarization, corporate money in politics (a.k.a. corruption at a higher level), and recently, jobless (or job-loss) recoveries and economic instability. This is because of the breakdown of the social contract that unions implicitly represented.

Couldn't I refute your last point by pointing out other places with strong unions that aren't doing as well as Germany?  I know I'll probably get called a racist or something, but perhaps Germany is doing well because it's full of Germans?

This is so hackish and absurd that it hurts.

Pure neoliberalism should not be the ultimate goal since elements of a social-market economy are a necessary corrective to negative aspects of a free-market system, but at the same time it must be stated very clearly that some of the values we all enjoy - democracy, individual freedom and prosperity for an overwhelming part of a country's population - can only be achieved in a society that is in principle a free-market society.

Yes, membership does tend to decline if you change the rules in order to make it decline...

I'll also point out that the German system is set up so that the unions have a vested interest in the well-being of their employers, unlike the US system which deliberately pits them against each other (and heavily favors the former).

Public employee unions are a very different thing than private company unions in my mind. Taxpayers are footing the bill for the former. The higher the cost of government services, the less the amount of services. That does not foster equality. It exacerbates inequality. In addition, almost uniquely these days, public employee unions have the defined benefit pension plans which tend to be off balance sheet, or have unrealistic assumptions, leading to a fiscal meltdown when the off balance sheet liabilities go on balance sheet, and there is a cash flow crisis. That can lead to bankruptcy, and all the dislocations and mass layoffs attendant thereto.

I just thought I would toss that into the mix, since it seems the distinction has not been mentioned in the above polite fisticuffs.

So your argument is that Americans are inferior to Germans? Are it a sentiment widely shared among the American right?

Not if salaries become so low as to be uncompetitive with the private section, in which case you get people not qualified to do their jobs.

True, but at the moment, public sector employees make about 40% more or something vis a vis private sector equivalents on average, with a lot more job security. When it flips the other way, get back to me.

On average?  Yeah, probably ever so slightly so.Probably not.  I'm not all that "right" though.  What with my hardcore support of making victimless crimes legal and not voting for the GOP and what not.

Liberals are hardly ones to talk about "public servants" being "not qualified to do their jobs" given how they become hysterical at any proposal to fire said "public servants" if they are unable to do their jobs well.

Got a link?

It's funny how widely studies differ on this subject because of number massaging on both sides. Everything I've read says that public sector employees are dramatically underpaid compared to private sector employees based on their level of education.

Here's my recollection of what I read: at low levels of education, salaries are equivalent, but benefits make public employment a better deal. At higher levels of education, public service can't come close to competing with private sector employment. So jobs requiring good skills are tough to fill. Torie, I'm guessing you never considered becoming a public defender for the 40% higher salary. ;)

I just knew that you were going to ask that. :) Well here is one paper to look at (http://reason.org/news/show/public-sector-private-sector-salary).  And here is another one for Ohio (http://www.dispatch.com/content/downloads/2011/09/BRT-Public-Sector-Comp-Study.pdf). I heard the 40% figure from a pretty reliable guy on the phone, actually. Yes, I should have verified it. There is of course a lot of debate about just who is doing what to whom. Some places may be far more out of line than others. CA in particular seems to be a cesspool.

I told you about the Glendale situation didn't I (about 100 policeman and fire fighters there make over 200K per year (a few over 300K), before factoring in the value of fringe benefits)? That one I have seen from a pay sheet of all the employees who make over 100K per year, before factoring in the value of fringe benefits) from the city of Glendale itself.  About 450 Glendale employees make over 100K in take home pay, or something like that. The list was very long.

In all of this comparison analysis, one needs to be sure to factor in the value of fringe benefits. For fire fighters and policeman in CA, that is about equal to either 40% or 70% of their take home pay, I forget which now. That figure I got from a guy who makes his living dealing with that issue now.

Oh, and here is another one (http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/income/2010-08-10-1Afedpay10_ST_N.htm) for federal employees. The USA Today article says that for federal employees, they make twice as much as the private sector equivalents.

No, but in the private sector, some lawyers are far more equal than others. I fooled enough folks into thinking that I had skills that were worth paying $350 per hour for, and there were times when I was stuck in trial for a month (it was hell), where I billed about 300 hours in a month. What can I say?  :)

It's worth noting that prosecutors are paid considerably more than public defenders too (and probably compete with prison guards for highest percentage of persons with Antisocial Personality Disorder).

Actually, the worst enemy of the unions is the government.  When the government provides that there will be an eight-hour work-day and 40-hour work week, when unemployment insurance comes via the government rather than your craft union; when government mandated safety rules are in place, etc.  then a lot of the impetus towards belonging to a union is gone.  Unions have remained relevant in Germany because they made certain that they maintained a role in all of those things and more.  In the United States, the unions got lazy and transferred to the government a number of the reasons why a worker would want to be in a union without keeping a hand in the benefits that were formerly secureable only via union membership.

It doesn't say equivalents - it says compared to private sector workers as a whole.

Given what federal agencies do and where they're located, we'd need to know education levels and cost of living. Washington D.C. is among the best-educated metros in the country for a good reason. The federal government has a lot of scientists, regulators, specialists, doctors, etc. The private sector has a mix of doctors, lawyers, burger flippers, and Wal*Mart greeters. Many of the federal government's employees live in places like Montgomery Co., Maryland where they could easily be snapped up by a private company at a higher salary. Despite Sen. Byrd's best efforts they aren't living in cheap cost-of-living private-sector metros like Kansas City or Fresno.

That link says there's a big double-digit discrepancy, but when you factor out for education, it declines to single digits.


This paper, put out by the Ohio Business Roundtable (do you think they have a dog in the hunt), also concludes that salaries are equal, but that public servants get better benefits. This is what I said originally. They also have greater job stability, which I don't think anyone would disagree with.


Yes, there are always some people who make out like bandits. Nassau County police in N.Y. are another example. And we've heard about the public officials in Bell, California. Research the Quinn Bill in Massachusetts if you want to get your blood boiling. The question is, how representative is this of the average public employee? How much of it has to do with them starting out in high salary jurisdictions (what's the median house cost in Glendale, BTW) and then escalates with people abusing the system. These shock stories are good, they are corrective. But how illustrative are they?

CA may well be non-representative, too, as you said.

The DMV doesn't need Torie-quality employees to get the job done, but the SEC and federal courts might...

Obama needed me to argue for the Constitutionality of the mandate before SCOTUS actually. That Solicitor General is a beta. :P  I can't disagree with anything that you said, but you didn't mention the federal employee thing. I gave you a trifecta of articles. The best things come in threes. Just ask any interior decorator.  :)

Of course federal employees aren't unionized!  So in a legal brief, I would have to play that card rather carefully wouldn't I? So many sand traps, so little time. Life is at once beautiful and complex. I love it. :)

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The private-sector and public-sector unions can be at odds on a number of projects. For instance, there is heated debate here over a privately-operated federal detention center (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/31/for-profit-immigrant-detention-center-chicago_n_1561084.html). The trade unions want the construction work and the public-sector unions want the jobs to stay at county jails where they are.

Oh you did look at the federal employee story. My bad. Well then the headline sucks, because it says "counterparts."  Anyway, it says that as to the delta function, since 2000 federal employee pay has zoomed up while private sector pay has stagnated. Is that because the skill and education gap has grown ever larger during that period?

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Wow, the heat in here is amazing. I'm trying to fight a desperate rearguard action in favor of a deeply unfortunate status quo, to prevent an even more unfortunate future. Lined up against me are a battery of right-wing posters, including the most formidable debater on the forum, and I'm trying to put my days of deep debate behind me. What shall I say?


But what places were you going to bring up? Many countries are dealing with problems stemming with being in a currency union with Germany, that have nothing to do with unions per se [ unions preventing structural reforms yes, but the only reason why those 'reforms' are so critical is because of the currency union ].


Are you suggesting that Germany has no workplace safety laws, except for unionized workers? Union density is actually not astronomical [although nearly double that of the US] but their political power is much stronger. If what you said were true, most German workers would not be covered by workplace safety laws, which is hard to believe. The Germans are the ones that invented government-provided unemployment insurance. Until Hartz IV, it had one of the most generous unemployment insurance programs in the world. Germany also has a limited work week of about 37 hours, although in practice most Germans work around 40 hours a week. These are set by governmental policy, although unions have a strong hand in the negotiations. The role of unions in Germany is social and political. It is seen as part of the post-WWII model and accepted by business.

Torie: There are a couple of problems with your links. Firstly, in the Ohio link, the reason why the public sector workers are deemed more highly compensated as opposed is less, is entirely due to benefits, and the discrepancy within benefits is entirely due to the defined benefit retirement plans (the AEI finds that it is worth a whopping 45% of salary, compared to just 3% of salary for the private sector). See my post earlier in this thread, where I already agreed that the problem is the pension plans. Secondly, with your USA Today link, the link points out that the Federal government has subcontracted the majority of work it buys and directly employs only at the highest levels. It is not uncommon for a single Federal worker to manage a team of dozens of contractors and subcontractors. The Federal worker has much greater skills, education and responsibility than the contracted workers, and so he is paid more. As a matter of fact there are thousands of Federal positions, requiring all kinds of skills in language/diplomacy, security/cryptography, engineering/patent review, research/biotechnolgoy and others that the government cannot fill. On top of that, many federal positions require an extensive background check, and the number of candidates who both meet the requirements and can pass the background check process is exceedingly low. Unlike the private sector, the Federal government cannot just compensate for the dearth of skilled workers by picking up some Chinese H1B to throw into a military contracting role. Your final link, from Reason.com, is speculative in its conclusions. The main study they rely on, by their own definition, "does not account for differences in worker education, job experience, or job duties", and that "after controlling for the aforementioned variables, public sector workers actually earned 11-12 percent less than comparable private sector workers". In response to this they throw at the reader growth rates of public vs. private workers' benefits and growth rates in public vs. private sector jobs.

Never mind that since the study's data points ended in 2009, the private sector has gained about 4.1 million private sector jobs and lost 500,000 public sector jobs-- the whole premise of using the contemporary private sector as a baseline should be problematic. Ironically in fact, all of the imbalance between public and private sector workers in terms of jobs and income growth occurred under the Bush administration, and none of it under the Obama administration. I mean, isn't Mitt Romney's whole campaign essentially based on the fact that the private sector job market is broken? Private sector job growth since 2000 is well below what is needed for full employment, and private sector wage growth since 2000 is negative, which is a stunning reversal from historical norm. Has there ever been a single decade since 1790 where the jobs record for this country was abysmal as it was during the decade of the 2000s? I'm not sure even the 1930s was worse (perhaps barely), I would have to go back and check. The point is, the private sector's wage and job growth cannot be used as a baseline for what is acceptable. Simply pointing out that the more unionized public sector has performed better for workers than the un-unionized private sector proves nothing, except perhaps that unions are effective in bargaining for the people they represent. The problem is with the private sector, not the public sector.

     The reactionism of public sector unions also wastes money on useless stuff that benefits the union members & hurts everyone else. When the prison guards in California don't want to let people take money out of the prisons, it seems to me that their interests are juxtaposed to those of everyone else, who would rather the state not liquidate.

Hey Dead0man, you just got a compliment!  :)

I will deal with you later Beet. I need to get some chores done, and well those paragraph of yours were looong.  Sometimes it is better to have short punchy ones, with multiple little knife thrusts, rather than just take a big swing, hoping to hit one out of the park. jk.

Yes, that is correct. Unions are inherently selfish; they go after what benefits their own members at the expense of everyone else. Just as corporations do. Your conclusions would be correct if the prison guards' union were the only union in existence. However, when you have many unions acting in concert to raise the prevailing wage level and exert political pressure on behalf of workers', then the net effect of all these self-interested activities, up to a point, is greater worker security, benefits and influence across certain sectors of the economy. I do not think this applies in the case of industries in the infant or early growth stage, but it applies in the late growth and mature stages (of which prisons, which have been around since probably the time of Hammurabi, almost certainly are one). Think of it like Adam Smith's invisible hand.

One of things that has hurt the public sector unions in IL is that Gov Blago encouraged heavy unionization of the state workforce. The number is quoted to be in the 98-99% range. It's at the point where the governor's political liaisons to the legislature are in a union. The Dems are trying to walk that one back now that the conflict is obvious, but the impression left with the public is very poor.

While I'll simply point out that, embedded in the state (and way too removed from their prospective members, way too undemocratic, much weaker than they were, in ways quite resembling the American experience) as German unions are, I do not recall them ever winning the "closed shop" in [either pre-33 Reich or post-45 West] Germany.

How has the right to unionize been squashed?  The laws have merely made it so that unions have less control and workers have more rights over whether or not they want to join said unions.

     I can agree that unions have a place in society (though not as prominent a place as most leftists would like). The problem is that while private-sector unions work to pressure corporations, public-sector unions, as an unintentional result of fighting for their own interests, also work against taxpayers in general, which includes many lower- & middle-class persons as well as the super-rich. In this way, they have a complicated relationship with other people.

     As it happens, I think the left-of-center would better serve their cause by promoting a resurgence of private-sector unionization rather than fighting to the death on the hill of public-sector unions. I don't know how feasible that is now, though.

It's not like Adam Smith's invisible hand, because there is not a free market in labor but rather a centrally-planned one.  (And that's just referring to private-sector unions - public-sector unions are about as far removed from the free market as one gets).

Why is it supposedly an inherently bad thing if government workers are paid more than private sector workers?  After all, if basic capitalist theory is correct, higher pay encourages better qualified people to seek out those jobs.  Shouldn't we want the people working in government to be at least as well qualified as an average employee, if not better?

Higher pay is not a problem unless government is unable to weed out employees who are not qualified for the pay they are receiving.  And that is problem no matter what level of pay they receive.

Lol @ the notion of free-market labor

Indeed.  Yet another area where unions fail the people.

The amount of reactionary right-wing hackery in this thread-posts that demonstrate ignorance of history and contempt for the organizations that have been the main reasons for any sort of public welfare, which benefits ALL people (rather than "the market" that, left to its own devices, always punishes the many for the privilege of the few)-is quite breathtaking.

But then again, bourgeois individualism has always bred arrogance and hubris.

Defense of what's happened in Wisconsin is right-wing hackery?  Yet calling those hacks arrogant and prideful isn't hackery?