Halting State: How state employee unions stole California

[unixronin]

Police officers and firefighters are widely regarded as underpaid.  So how come police captains in Vallejo, California can make $300,000 a year, then retire at 50 on 90% salary, adjusted for inflation, for life and the life of their spouse?

The camera focuses on an official of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), California’s largest public-employee union, sitting in a legislative chamber and speaking into a microphone.  “We helped to get you into office, and we got a good memory,” she says matter-of-factly to the elected officials outside the shot.  “Come November, if you don’t back our program, we’ll get you out of office.’

City Journal's Steve Malanga details the history of how public-sector state employee unions bought California's state government lock, stock and barrel. Their bought-and-paid-for politicians repaid the favors by bankrupting the state, looting the budget to fund ever more lavish salary and pension plans for public sector union employees.

Comments

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

I boosted the signal via FB, thanks!

[polaris93.livejournal.com]

Dear God! Now I'm more glad than ever that I left California for good 23 years ago this June! "Appalled" is the understatement of the century as far as my reactions to this go.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry, no, whatever its faults, SEIU did not break California. What broke California was over 30 years of tax cuts without budget cuts, a real estate bubble, and a huge recession, which led to a huge fall in tax revenues. A right-wing faction in the legislature that refuses to write an honest budget is aggravating the problems.

I am struck, too, by how often we are told to hate people who get decent deals for themselves.

BTW, City Journal is published by the right to far-right Manhattan Institute. Sources, sources.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Some of those union contracts are decent deals like a Ferrari F60 is a nice car.

As observed below, yeah, there's no single cause.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Not most of them, though. The claim that most union employees are dishonest, lazy, greedy, and incompetent is a lie. The unions didn't cause the fiscal problems of California, and breaking the state's government employee unions, as the right advocates, won't fix the state's fiscal problems. Breaking the unions, however, would probably comprehensively wreck the state's educational system, from primary all the way through university. It would also enormously reduce the quality of public services in the state. Conservatives claim to support law and order, education, family, and so forth. Let them, then, support them.

[johnkzin.livejournal.com]

It's hard to cut the budget, when there are laws with mandated spending amounts for that given project/service. Cutting the budget of such an item would actually be illegal.

From my observation, that's the biggest problem (but I could be wrong).

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

The state can afford the mandated spending, but it requires a 2/3s majority of the legislature to fund it, and the party of no--Republicans--has been steadily blocking the necessary spending and there has been no vigorous opposition. California, even now, is a rich state--its citizens can afford to pay for what their majority wants. But a minority of its legislators have created a fiscal disaster.

[echristo.livejournal.com]

Agreed. SEIU is most assuredly not the problem - Prop 13 is the problem more than anything else combined with people who don't realize that stagnant property taxes from 1978 aren't going to pay the bills in 2010. Gerrymandering of districts combined with term limits ensures that only radicals are elected without any need or reason to ever compromise with anyone else to do anything.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Well, the real truth is there's no single cause, but a lot of contributing causes. Prop 13 was well-intentioned, but no question it was poorly thought through. Add in the various bubbles and busts, soaring real estate costs and high taxes driving employers out of the state ... it all adds up.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Howard Jarvis started as a lobbyist for The Los Angeles Apartment Owners Association. The intention of prop 13 was to protect landlords from property tax rises. The public was persuaded otherwise, but there was no goodwill in the work at all, and it did little for small property owners.

Refs: wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Jarvis#Alleged_impact_on_rent_control_laws). Sorry--I don't want to spend the time to dig more up. More than one book has been written on the subject, but it would take a days work to sort it all out and put the pieces together.

[jmkelly.livejournal.com]

SEIU? Give me a break. Just a small one, because it is a kick-ass union with impressive organizing, but if you think it has the California legislature wrapped around its little finger, think again. The only union that came anywhere near that was the correctional officers' union, and the legislature (with help from Governor Schwarzenegger, I think) revolted and threw off its yoke years ago.

I suspect that when SEIU's official laid down the law to the legislature, the response was something like, "Thanks for sharing. Now please hand the microphone to our friends from PG&E, Chevron, and Bechtel."

As for Vallejo, that's a town that had a flood of Navy money pouring into it for decades. It felt it could afford to write contracts like that, and the police officers' union knew that, and took advantage of it, that being its job. As it turned out, Vallejo negotiated a contract it couldn't afford, and declared bankruptcy to get out of its obligations to its employees. Exactly how the union is the villain in this story is not clear to me.

If public-employee unions are so all-powerful in California, why does the University of California its own section of the labor code, written to its specifications? It's the only employer in California that can pay nearly all its employees monthly; everyone else has to pay semi-monthly. Why are school districts getting away with replacing union-represented employees with private contractors?

Fact is, the decline in union membership and representation has coincided with a decline in working people's wages in both the public and private sectors.

I wonder why you're not looking at this the other way: if public employees' unions got them such great contracts, wouldn't private-sector employees be well-advised to organize? The union that can get a police chief in a mid-size town a deal like that sounds like a pretty good ally for a working man.

[lebo-superman.livejournal.com]

There is one thing missing from all the arguments about whether the unions are good/bad. That is the simple fact that the state legislature made one of the biggest goofs of basic financial planning.

They negotiated contracts to acquire/deliver services with money they didn't yet have available to spend.

None of the rest of this would ever have been that big of a deal if the State of California had, first and foremost, never gone into debt to deliver the services it did. We, the taxpayers, should require changes to the law that MANDATE that all levels of government have the money in the bank before they agree to spend it.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

They negotiated contracts to acquire/deliver services with money they didn't yet have available to spend.

Yup, that was one of the biggest blunders of all.

[rain-manpnw.livejournal.com]

In related news, the biggest opponents to drug reform are ... the various LEO unions, especially the one for prison/jail guards.

Having rational drug policies would cut into their membership and political power, you see ...

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

No big surprise. :(