Spit Take: Andy Stern Says Unions Don’t Cost Taxpayers A Dime

by Bret Jacobson

The most dangerous place in D.C. may well be between retiring SEIU president Andy Stern and a microphone, but the next-most-dangerous place may be as a taxpayer paying for his work. Now, in an exit interview with the Washington Post’s respectable liberal blogger Ezra Klein, the ever-controversial Stern has added one more wopper to confuse public dialogue, saying of organized labor: “It is the greatest middle-class, job-creating mechanism that we have ever had in America that doesn’t cost taxpayers a dime.”

Emphasis added, because let’s not kid ourselves: Stern’s statement is technically true enough, if the literal meaning is organized labor costs billions and billions of dimes. And that’s just in the private sector, which reason.tv has addressed admirably:


1. They cost too much. As USA Today recently noted, federal employees make on average almost $8,000 more than their private-sector counterparts. When you add in benefits, the gap spreads to about $30,000. State and local government workers make around the same as private-sector counterparts, but their health and retirement packages mean they make significantly more in the end.

2. We can’t fire them. The private sector has shed positions in response to slackening demand and the economic downturn. That sort of adjustment is painful but necessary, as it allows the economy to adjust to changing circumstances and workers and employers to move into new activities. Because it is guaranteed certain amounts of tax revenue and has a non-market mind-set, the public sector is largely insulated from such forces and keeps or even adds workers despite changed conditions. The result? We keep paying for things that we don’t use, need, or want.

3. They create a permanent lobby for expanded government and higher taxes. Look at California, where teacher unions have spent over $211 million dollars on elections in the past decade. One result is that 40 percent of California’s budget must be spent on education, regardless of the number and needs of students. Over the last 10 years, taxpayer contributions to public-sector pension funds has increased by 2000 percent! Such sort of tax-based gladhanding is just getting started. For the first time in history, the number of public-sector union employees is greater than those in the private sector, so expect to see even more lobbying for the sorts of mandatory raises and permanent job security that most of us can only dream of.

Those, of course, are among the direct costs to taxpayers — to say nothing of bailouts for the politically connected but economically maniacal UAW and failing union pension funds.


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Posted Apr 19th 2010 at 8:27 am in Big Labor | 64 Comments