Posts tagged public employee unions
Federal judge refuses to block law currently restricting Florida unions
June 28, 2023 // A federal judge Monday refused to block key parts of a new Florida law that places additional restrictions on public-employee unions, turning down a request from teachers unions that argue the law violates First Amendment and contract rights. Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker declined to issue a preliminary injunction, ruling that the Florida Education Association and other unions had not shown they had legal standing. The 12-page ruling came after Walker held a more than three-hour hearing Friday. The unions sought the injunction against parts of the law that require union members to fill out new government-worded membership forms and prevent union dues from being deducted from workers’ paychecks.
Secretive Su: Biden Admin Won’t Release Records of ‘Transparent’ Labor Secretary Nominee Julie Su
May 4, 2023 // Meanwhile, Su notably had zero meetings with business leaders as deputy labor secretary. It was Romney noting this fact last month that prompted Su to tout her "transparency." Su’s calendars also showcase her commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. For example, she participated in a meeting about "equity in procurement"—to ensure that government contracts go to business owners who are not white or straight—and a panel about incorporating gender and race into workplace safety.
Opinion: Julie Su Keeps Failing Up, and Biden Doesn’t Care
April 10, 2023 // How in the world did Julie Su get nominated to run the federal Department of Labor? Su is a former civil rights attorney, former head of the California Department of Labor under Gov. Gavin Newsom, and head of California’s Department of Labor Standards Enforcement under former Gov. Jerry Brown. She was deputy director of the federal DOL and now is acting director as she awaits a tough Senate confirmation in the next few months. I had immediately thought that the Peter Principle might explain it. Coined by Canadian sociologist Laurence Peter in his 1968 book of the same name, it postulates that the tendency in all organizations is for “every employee to rise in the hierarchy through promotion until they reach a level of respective incompetence,” as Investopedia put it. But that surely can’t explain Su, who already reached that level in her previous employment. Investopedia also mentioned the Dilbert Principle, named after the comic strip: that big organizations promote people precisely because of their incompetence. In other words, they promote them to get them out of the way. Su was California’s top labor official and ultimately responsible for the Employment Development Department when a major scandal rocked that unemployment insurance–disbursing bureau. “California has given away at least $20 billion to criminals in the form of fraudulent unemployment benefits, state officials said Monday, confirming a number smaller than originally feared but one that still accounts for more than 11 percent of all benefits paid since the start of the pandemic,” according to a 2021 Los Angeles Times report.
Puerto Rico was ruined by public unions | Opinion
March 7, 2023 // He writes that public employee unions are, in fact, unconstitutional. “The operating machinery of American democracy is now in the grips of public unions. Voters elect officials who have been disempowered by union controls.” This, he writes, violates the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits elected officials delegating, giving away (in this case to unions) sovereign powers to govern. My short career as a “union leader” led me to the conclusion that the Puerto Rico government and the Puerto Rico economy have deteriorated so badly primarily because of the huge mistake of giving enormous power to public employee unions.
Opinion: Collective Manipulation; Whether in courts or in legislatures, public employee unions need to be reined in.
February 22, 2023 // The book contains countless examples of collective bargaining agreements effectively allowing employees to get away with gross misconduct and preventing managers from sanctioning them for lackluster work. An EPA employee was caught surfing porn in his cubicle at work and was paid for nearly two years before agreeing to retire. An IRS agent systematically denied benefits to African immigrants, repeatedly made discriminatory remarks in the office, and tried to run another employee off the road. His union lawyers got him a deal that left him with a clean personnel record when he left the agency, allowing him to get a job with the Forestry Service. “As a practical matter,” Howard writes, “almost no public employee can be dismissed without a massive managerial commitment,” and even that commitment does not guarantee success. California has 300,000 teachers and only about two or three a year lose their jobs because of poor performance. At the federal level, more employees die at work than face termination for poor performance. Public sector unions provide more than direct financial contributions to political campaigns. Howard recounts how they recruit and train candidates, manage phone banks, lead door-to-door canvassing drives, staff campaigns, and run ads. Such union political activity makes them larger and more influential than other political interest groups. The protracted legal battles former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker faced after he proposed reining in public-union power supports Howard’s thesis that union power is formidable. Walker beat a union-led recall effort against him, but union opposition to modest changes led to electoral annihilation in New Jersey in the 1990s.
Opinion: Imagine there’s no public employee unions
February 21, 2023 // But try as President Joe Biden has, it just hasn’t been enough. Automation (including not only factory machinery but also the gig economy), trade, high-profile union corruption cases, failing pension funds, and a string of adverse court rulings are among the many factors rendering private sector unions irrelevant to workers in most modern fields. This has led the unions to desperate measures, such as organizing esoteric, low-income professions, including graduate student teachers and video game testers. Yet the story is quite different for unions in the public sector. The unionization rate of public employees remains robust, at more than 33% of all government workers nationwide. Local government workers are the most likely to be unionized, at a rate of nearly 39%, and public sector union members are concentrated in states that mandate collective bargaining. The states with higher rates of unionization seem to correlate with the nation's least functional state governments: California (54.5%), Illinois (48.7%), New York (66.7%), and New Jersey (59.3%) among them. As their private sector cousins starve, public employee unions are fat and happy — a strange development, given that there was no public sector collective bargaining at all 70 years ago, when unions were at their apex.
Opinion: Public employee unions corrupt our system of government
February 14, 2023 // For an editorial in the Orange County Register at the time, I called Chapter 224 head Ronda Walen, who wrote the above statement on the union website. I asked if it was fair for the union to elect “our own bosses.” “Yes, I think it is,” she replied. “In a democracy, we have the right to do that.” Actually, using the voters’ own tax money to push candidates and positions on them is a violation of democracy, which is rule by the people — all of them. Not just a few union bosses living off taxes forcibly taken from everybody else, and funding pro
Oregon senators want taxpayers to stop paying long-distance commuting costs of remote workers. Union leader says think again
February 13, 2023 // Oregon lawmakers are wrestling with whether to continue paying state workers who’ve chosen to live in far-flung states including Hawaii to travel back to the state for periodic in-person check-ins. Before the pandemic, it was not unusual for a small segment of state workers to live just outside Oregon’s borders, in Washington, Idaho, California and Nevada. But they were expected to show up at state workplaces on their own dime.
City Workers Losing Patience With Slow Crawl to Union Contracts
January 31, 2023 // Most city employees are now working under expired labor contracts that lapsed as far back as 2020 — frustrating rank-and-file union members whose anticipated pay raises are tied up in an escalating battle over proposed changes to retired colleagues’ health coverage. Nearly all of the city’s roughly 300,000 unionized staff are working under expired collective bargaining agreements. They include members of the city’s largest public sector unions, District Council 37 (DC37) and the United Federation of Teachers (UFT). Administrative workers, school crossing guards, teachers, police detectives, sanitation workers and health technicians are among those eager to bargain for raises as well as potential new benefits, such as flexibility to work remotely.
Philip Howard’s Not Accountable Focuses on Reform of Public Sector Unions
January 24, 2023 // Philip K. Howard, chairman on the nonpartisan, nonprofit reform group Common Good, examines the phenomenon of public sector unions and how they rose to power in his new book Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions. The short answer is that public sector unions are shielded from the market forces that keep private sector unions in check—a government agency is not in danger of going out of business. Public sector unions also have an in-built advantage when it comes to bargaining. Management is typically an elected official who needs the union’s help at election time and fears having it as an enemy. Public sector unions can in effect be represented at both sides of the bargaining table, Howard notes. Unions have these advantages to insulate themselves from any criticism or challenges to their power while warping public policy to their will. It’s a sobering read. The unions pressure the government to devote more public funding to bolstering the workers, diverting funds that would otherwise go to public services or maintenance of public infrastructure.