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

[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.