Last week, we posted the increase in the number of government jobs (to over 2 million — not counting contractors) and the increase in unionization of government employees (to over 37% of the government payroll). Here’s why you should care.
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Excerpted from: DC Examiner: Public-Sector Unions Bleed Taxpayers to Help Dems, February 8, 2010
But union membership is growing by leaps & bounds in the public sector. Last year, 37.4 percent of public sector employees were union members. For the first time in history, a majority of union members are government employees.
In my view, the outlook for both private- and public-sector unionism is problematic.
Public-sector unionism is a very different animal from private-sector unionism. It is not adversarial but collusive.
Public-sector unions strive to elect their management, which in turn can extract money from taxpayers to increase wages and benefits — and can promise pensions that future taxpayers will have to fund.
The results are plain to see. States like New York, New Jersey and California, where public-sector unions are strong, now face enormous budget deficits and pension liabilities. In such states, the public sector has become a parasite sucking the life out of the private-sector economy. Not surprisingly, Americans have been steadily migrating out of such states and into states like Texas, where public-sector unions are weak and taxes are much lower.
President Obama is … doing his best to increase the power — and dues income — of public-sector unions.
Democrats have used the financial crisis to expand the public sector and the public-sector unions. One-third of last year’s $787 billion stimulus package was aid to state and local governments — an obvious attempt to bolster public-sector unions.
And it was a successful one: While the private sector has lost 7 million jobs, the number of public-sector jobs has risen. The number of federal government jobs has been increasing by 10,000 a month, and the percentage of federal employees earning over $100,000 has jumped to 19 percent during the recession.
Unions contributed something like $400,000,000 to Democrats in the 2008 campaign cycle. Public-sector unionism tends to be a self-perpetuating machine that extracts money from taxpayers and then puts it on a conveyor belt to the Democratic Party.
But it may not turn out to be a perpetual-motion machine. Public-sector employees are still heavily outnumbered by those who depend on the private sector for their livelihoods.
The next Congress may not be as willing as this one has been to bail out state governments dominated by public-sector unions.
Voters may bridle at the higher taxes needed to pay for $100,000-plus pensions for public employees who retire in their 50s. Or they may move, as so many have already done, to states like Texas.
Obama’s But voters seem to be saying, “Enough.”
Full article:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/02/08/public-sector_unions_bleed_taxpayers_to_help_dems_100206.html
The Homa Files 