Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind (39 page)

10
Tad De Haven, “Federal Employees Continue to Prosper,”
Cato @ Liberty
(blog), August 10, 2010,
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/federal-employees-continue-to-prosper/
, accessed April 2012.

11
Cauchon, “Some Federal Workers More Likely to Die Than Lose Jobs.”

12
See Edwards, “Public Sector Unions and the Rising Cost of Employee Compensation.”

13
Edwards, “Employee Compensation in State and Local Governments.”

14
DeHaven, “Federal Employees Continue to Prosper.”

15
Lachlan Markay, “CFPB ‘Invitations Coordinator’ May Get More Than $100,000 Per Year,”
The Foundry
(blog), Heritage Foundation, January 6, 2012,
http://blog.heritage.org/2012/01/06/cfpb-invitations-coordinator-may-get-more-than-100000-per-year/
, accessed March 2012; “Job title: Invitations Coordinator,” USA Jobs,
http://www.usajobs.gov/GetJob/ViewDetails/306225500
, accessed March 2012.

16
Edwards, “Employee Compensation in State and Local Governments.”

17
Barbara A. Butrica et al., “The Disappearing Defined Benefit Pension and Its Potential Impact on the Retirement Incomes of Baby Boomers,”
Social Security Bulletin
69, no. 3 (2009),
http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v69n3/v69n3p1.html
, accessed March 2012.

18
Only one in ten private sector workers receives employer contributions to his pension exceeding 6 percent of his salary. Andrew Biggs and Jason Richwine, “Why Public Pensions Are Too Rich,”
Wall Street Journal
, January 4, 2012.

19
Shane Dixon Kavanaugh, “Fire Department Pensions Near $90,000, Data Show,”
Crain’s New York Business
, October 6, 2011,
http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20111006/POLITICS/111009924
, accessed January 2012.

20
“Calculate Your Public Pension,”
http://www.calculateyourpublicpension.com/
.

21
See Frederic U. Dicker, “Andy Rocks the ‘Bloat,’ ”
New York Post
, March 19, 2010,
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/andy_rocks_the_bloat_with_budget_lNwYmtYfeNXlApwskbEV7J
, accessed March 2012.

22
Edwards, “Employee Compensation in State and Local Governments”; Brad Heath, “States Act to Curb Double Dipping,”
USA Today
, December 3, 2009,
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-12-03-states-double-dipping_N.htm
, accessed March 2012.

23
Paul Van Osdol, “Team 4: See How Govt. Employees Waste Time On Web,”
WTAE.com
, February 1, 2008,
http://www.wtae.com/r/15197025/detail.html
, accessed January 2012.

24
Lily Garcia, “Weighing the Pros and Cons of a Federal Job,”
Washington Post
, June 4, 2009; Lily Garcia, “Uncle Sam Is a Boss You Can Rely On,”
Washington Post
, June 21, 2009. The union approach to sick days is that they represent extra paid time off. For example, the NY-NJ Port Authority Police Union forced an agreement that management could not check on “sick” employees until after several days.

25
Steven Greenhut,
Plunder!
(Santa Ana, Calif.: Forum Press, 2009), p. 101.

26
Performance awards were changed under the Obama Administration to be limited to 5 percent of salary for senior executives and professionals, and 1 percent of salary for other employees. See “Administration Limits Performance Award Spending,”
Federal Computer Week
, June 13, 2011,
http://fcw.com/articles/2011/06/13/administration-announces-limits-on-performance-award-spending.aspx
, accessed January 2012.

27
Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Union Affiliation of Employed Wage and Salary Workers by Occupation and Industry,” table, January 27, 2012,
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.t03.htm
, accessed January 2012.

28
Barry T. Hirsch and David A. Macpherson, “Union Membership, Coverage, Density and Employment by Occupation, 2010,” chart,
Unionstats.com
,
http://www.unionstats.com/Occ_U_2010.htm
, accessed January 2012. See also Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Percent Distribution of Workers in Service Occupations by Bargaining Status, 1997,” chart, January 27, 2012,
http://www.bls.gov/opub/cwc/tables/cm20030623ar01t3.htm
(the latest data available are from 1997).

29
Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Union Members—2011,” press release, January 27, 2012,
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm
, accessed January 2012.

30
Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Union Affiliation of Employed Wage and Salary Workers.”

31
“Some Postal Jobs Open,” Federal Jobs,
http://www.jobsfed.com/fjdpaper/Jumps4_11_03/JumpSpec1_4_11.htm
, accessed January 2012.

32
Eighty-five percent of career postal workers are unionized. Postal workers are represented by different unions depending on their job function, but their rate of unionization is very high across the board. The American Postal Workers Union represents clerks, maintenance employees, and motor vehicle service employees; the National Postal Mail Handlers Union represents mail handlers and processors; the National Association of Letter Carriers represents letter carriers; and the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association represents rural mail carriers.

33
Douglas A. McIntyre and Charles Stockdale, “America’s Ten Largest Employers,”
24/7 Wall Street
(blog), April 24, 2011,
http://247wallst.com/2011/04/24/americas-ten-largest-employers/2/
, accessed March 2012.

34
“Postal Facts,” U.S. Postal Service,
http://about.usps.com/future-postal-service/postalfacts-2011.pdf
, accessed January 2012.

35
A recent report on privatizing the Postal Service notes, “Although the USPS is structured to operate like a self-supporting business, this model is on borrowed time.” Tad DeHaven, “Privatizing the U.S. Postal Service,”
Downsizing the Federal Government
(blog), Cato Institute, November 2010,
http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/usps
, accessed March 2012.

36
U.S. Government Accountability Office, “United States Postal Service: Strategy Needed to Address Aging Delivery Fleet,” report no. GAO-11-386, May 17, 2011. The report states, “Over the past 4 years, capital investments declined from $2.7 billion in fiscal year 2007 to $1.4 billion in fiscal year 2010. According to USPS officials, most capital expenditures since fiscal year 2008 have been for investments that are expected to provide cost savings, such as automated mail sorting equipment…”
http://www.gao.gov/htext/d11386.html
.

37
Bill McAllister, “Postal Service Seen as Crippled by Animosity,”
Washington Post
, October 28, 1994.

38
Tad DeHaven, “USPS Sinking under Union’s Weight,”
Downsizing the Federal Government
(blog), Cato Institute, October 19, 2010,
http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/postal-service-sinking-under-unions-weight
.

39
Tad DeHaven, “Postal Union Wants More,”
Cato @ Liberty
(blog), September 7, 2010,
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/postal-union-wants-more/
, accessed January 2012. And the postal union demands for greater compensation for postal workers seems to have borne fruit. James Sherk of the Heritage Foundation concluded that in addition to earning 15–20 percent more than comparable workers in the private sector, postal workers earn greater benefits than other federal workers in some regards. Sherk, “Inflated Federal Pay: How Americans Are Overtaxed to Overpay the Civil Service,” p. 30.

40
Iain Murray, “Air Traffic Control Reform: Good for You, Good for the Planet, Bad for Bureaucrats,”
Washington Examiner
, May 15, 2009,
http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/examiner-opinion-zone/2009/05/air-traffic-control-reform-good-you-good-planet-bad-bureaucrats
, accessed January 2012. While this book was being written, the President signed a bill authorizing conversion of some existing radar-based systems of air traffic control to GPS at some of the nation’s busiest airports, but this is just a modest step down the path toward a national GPS-based air traffic control system.

41
And apparently, NATCA has also done a great job for them in negotiation—the contract that union negotiated for the air traffic controllers was so rich that the president of NATCA gloated, the contract “is such thievery we should all pick up our pay checks with a mask and a gun.” Quoted in “FAA Responds to NATCA’s False Claims about Controller Pay,” Aero News Network,
aeronews.net/ANNTicker.cfm?do=main.textpost&id=c5e2958f-2329-4057-8f2f-a2c94774c78a
, January 27, 2006.

42
Murray, “Air Traffic Control Reform.”

43
Marcus Baram, “FAA Launches New Plan to Keep Air Traffic Controllers from Sleeping on the Job,”
Huffington Post
, July 14, 2011,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/14/faa-air-traffic-controller_n_898830.html
, accessed January 2012.

44
Steven Greenhouse, “The Labor Movement’s Eager Risk-Taker Hits Another Jackpot,”
New York Times
, February 27, 1999.

45
Kyle Olson, “Sunlight on SEIU Part I: Marxist Andy Stern’s Compensation Would Have Karl Marx Spinning in His Grave,”
BigGovernment.com
, April 12, 2010,
http://biggovernment.com/kolson/2010/04/12/sunlight-on-seiu-part-i-marxist-andy-sterns-compensation-would-have-karl-marx-spinning-in-his-grave/
, accessed January 2012.

46
All union official salary figures are from the Center for Union Facts, accessible at
http://www.unionfacts.org
, which summarizes data from union financial disclosure.

47
“Public Employee Pay, Pensions and Collective Bargaining,” AFSCME,
http://www.afscme.org/issues/workers-rights/resources/document/AFSCME-FactSheet_PublicEmployeePayPensionsBargaining.pdf
, accessed November 2011.

48
See James Sherk, “What Do Union Members Want? What Paycheck Protection Laws Show About How Well Unions Reflect Their Members’ Priorities,” Center For Data Analysis Report #06-08, Heritage Foundation, August 30, 2006, footnote 7,
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2006/08/what-do-union-members-want-what-paycheck-protection-laws-show-about-how-well-unions-reflect-their-members-priorities
, accessed January 2012.

49
Mark Brenner, “Bloated Salaries Limit Organizing, Leave Members Cynical,” Labor Notes, January 25, 2007,
http://labornotes.org/node/513
, accessed November 2011.

50
Technically, the union is not operating either a closed shop or a union shop over government workers, but this is really a distinction without much of a difference. A
closed shop
is when the employer agrees to hire only union workers and was made illegal under the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947. Similarly, a
union shop
, which is a workplace requiring employees to join the union when they are hired, is considered to violate the U.S. Constitution. But in reality, government employee unions in non-right-to-work states are usually basically union shops. The slight difference is that the workers are not required to join the union—just to pay agency fees more or less equivalent to union dues for representation. And they can be fired for refusing to pay them.

51
The federal government and thirty-four states expressly allow unions to create monopoly bargaining arrangements over some or all of their government workers and require the government employer to negotiate with the union in good faith. Nine additional states allow the government employer to certify a union to represent government workers, but do not require the government employer to bargain with the union.

52
Forced-dues collection is expressly prohibited only in the twenty-three right-to-work states, but for various reasons it is also not practiced in several of the remaining states.

53
Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Union Members—2011.” From official figures, we know that half of all union members, public and private, come from these six states. It follows that at least half of all union dues comes from these states. In fact, since salaries are higher in these states than in the other forty-four states
and dues are based on income, probably much more than 50 percent of dues income is collected from these states.

54
For example, bathroom breaks are covered on page 24 of the Collective Bargaining Agreement Between Stockton Unified School District and Stockton Teachers Association, 2002–2005, on file with the authors.

55
When union members vote to ratify their employment contract, they will also generally confirm their union’s representation of them at the same time. Once a group of workers is unionized, they almost never organize themselves to decertify their union. When a union is decertified, it is usually because a well-funded and well-organized rival union comes in and poaches workers, causing a union turf battle. Sometimes, the upstart union will be able to replace the existing union through decertification.

56
James Sherk, “Who Pays for ‘Official Time’ and Why Americans Should Be Concerned,” WebMemo #3447, Heritage Foundation, January 12, 2012,
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2012/01/official-time-of-federal-employees
, accessed January 2012.

57
Ibid. Figures for 2010 can be found in the U.S. Office of Personnel Management’s “Official Time Usage in the Federal Government Fiscal Year 2010 Survey Responses,”
http://www.opm.gov/LaborManagementRelations/OfficialTime/OfficialTime2010.asp
, accessed March 2012.

58
We are not aware of any comprehensive accounting for “official” time at the state and local level, although individual cities and states have made calculations. For example, the city of Phoenix has estimated that the city pays for 73,000 hours of “release time” for city workers annually, at an estimated cost of $3.7 million each year. Mark Flatten, “Phoenix Sued over Paying for Union Leaders’ Release Time,” Watchdog,org, December 7, 2011,
http://watchdog.org/12289/phoenix-sued-over-paying-for-union-leaders%E2%80%99-%E2%80%98release-time%E2%80%99/
. To estimate the total amount of official time at the combined federal, state, and local levels, we used data for union representation from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for 2010, and we assumed that the rate of official time per union member is the same at the state and local levels as it is at the federal level (for which we have official time data for 2010). See Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Union Affiliation of Employed Wage and Salary Workers,”
http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2011/ted_20110125_data.htm
.