Public employee unions under fire again
And not just from Republicans.
Public-sector workers are under fire again — and not just from Republicans.
Three years after Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker curtailed collective bargaining and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie cut pension benefits for public employees in the name of budget austerity, state and local politicians once again are moving to curtail public-sector unions.
Story Continued Below
The most aggressive moves are coming from Illinois’ newly inaugurated Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner. On Monday, Rauner issued an executive order prohibiting unions from collecting so-called fair share fees from non-union members. These mandatory fees come from government workers who choose not to be union members but are nonetheless represented by unions in contract negotiations. In effect, Rauner’s order by fiat makes Illinois a right-to-work state for public employees — a measure that, opponents argue, requires legislation.
But some Democrats have lately put public-employee unions in the hot seat too. For Democrats, the target is typically teachers unions, whose frequent opposition to education reforms has proved infuriating to big-city mayors.
Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has spoken of removing “ineffective teachers” and expanding charter schools, prompting the New York State United Teachers to launch a media campaign to “fight back” against the governor’s agenda. “Education is our life. For this you have made us the enemy. This is personal,” a group of teachers said in an open letter to Cuomo printed Monday in the Times Union of Albany.
Emanuel and Rauner, it happens, are friends and former business associates from Emanuel’s time at the investment firm Wasserstein Perella in the late 1990s. Although Emanuel endorsed Rauner’s opponent, incumbent Gov. Pat Quinn, in November’s election, and though the two disagree on many issues, Emanuel and Rauner are, one Democratic strategist told the Chicago Tribune in August, “cut from the same cloth.” One point of agreement is a keen frustration with the CTU.
In addition to differences over education reform, Democratic politicians have sometimes clashed with public-employee unions over pensions that are squeezing state budgets. Here, too, Illinois features prominently, because nowhere does the state pension problem weigh more heavily. The state’s Democratic attorney general, Lisa Madigan, is arguing in court for emergency powers to trim state pension benefits.
“As expenditures on benefits increase,” writes Daniel DiSalvo, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative nonprofit, in his 2015 book “Public Union Power and Its Consequences,” these expenditures “‘crowd out’ government spending on parks, education, public safety and other services on which the poor and middle class rely. In short, government costs more but does less.” Such pressures are felt by Republicans and Democrats alike — indeed, so much so that some Democrats now openly pronounce themselves anti-union. In his book, DiSalvo quotes San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed, a Democrat who’s clashed with public-employee unions, saying, “There’s a difference between being liberal and progressive and being a union Democrat.”
Mostly, though, recent challenges to public employees have come from Republicans. Walker, who halted fair share fees in Wisconsin through legislation,
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/02/public-employee-unions-states-115090.html#ixzz3RSFJtdL3
