School districts. Healthcare systems. City general funds. The Courts. They always seem to be broke, and then their unionized workers strike against them demanding greater salaries and benefits. The agencies say they can’t afford the union demands, and so the stalemate goes. We should be used to it by now.
But the question remains, why is it that these bureaus and agencies are always so financially strapped? The U.S. is a vastly wealthy nation. Our taxes are very high, and constantly being pushed higher by legislative bodies. So why is everyone so desperate for cash?
The answer is pretty simple: unions. Every bureaucracy that’s been struck lately, or is considering striking, is heavily unionized: the unified school districts of Oakland, Alameda and San Francisco. Kaiser Permanente. The city of Oakland. County workers. These stories make the nightly news routinely, but the public seems to shrug, figuring the two sides will eventually agree and all will be well. But why does it keep happening?
Because the unions demand more than employers can provide. For the unions, they always want higher wages, more benefits, more sick leave, more vacation time. That’s only natural: the unions are like little babies sucking at the teat of government. If they don’t get what they want, they cry—and if you’re a union, the only way to cry is to strike and hurt everyone, including the general public. The unions, realizing that the public usually sympathizes with them (at least, in a leftist town like Oakland), keep up the pressure, knowing that public agencies can’t resist them for long. And so employers end up compromising. But since there’s not enough money to meet all the union demands, a way has to be found to raise more money. And there’s only one source for that: your money. It has to be taxed.
This is the gridlock we find ourselves in because we’ve allowed unions to have almost unlimited power. Once upon a time, they didn’t have the ability to bring our lives to a halt and cause damage; or, if they did have that ability in theory, they hesitated to use it because it would have mobilized public opinion against them. Unions have always depended on this sympathy from the public to get their way, and the public has always given unions their support.
But something happened to the unions over the last several decades. They became more and more involved in political issues and less concerned about the general welfare. This didn’t happen everywhere, but it happened in places where minority ethnic and racial groups were in the majority. Those people were not well-educated and were not particularly interested in acquiring skills needed to get good-paying jobs. They were willing to work—barely (think of the D.M.V.)—but most private companies were reluctant to hire them, given their limited abilities. That’s when the unions saw their golden opportunity: if they could cause public employment to mushroom, they could funnel these people into those jobs, unionize them, acquire political power, and perpetuate that power indefinitely. And the more public bureaucracies they could propagate, the greater their power would be. We ended up with things like SEIU, which actually is a counter-weight to government itself. SEIU runs Oakland, not the City Council and Mayor. Or, to be more precise, the City Council and Oakland run Oakland, but they are owned by SEIU. We thus get unelected, shadowy individuals—“union organizers”--with sketchy political ideologies who determine how much we are taxed and where the resulting money goes.
I suppose you can’t really blame SEIU because the system allows for this extortion and back room dealing. That’s why the system has to be demolished. We need to enact laws that destroy the ability of unions to run our cities. We need to drive SEIU out of the government business. They can continue to exist, as unions have for the last hundred years. But they cannot be allowed to continue the crooked game of campaign contributions that elect unsavory people (like Carroll Fife), who then work tirelessly to protect union power at the expense of the welfare of the people. We need to make union campaign donations illegal and then enforce that law.