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

[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.