When Governor Rick Snyder (R) and Republicans in Michigan’s state legislature implemented reforms to the state’s broken public school system last year, the Michigan Education Association (MEA) cried foul. The tone of MEA “leaders” trying to bolster their Middle Class credentials should sound familiar to anyone from Wisconsin or Ohio:

[MEA President Iris] Salters joined about 1,000 union members protesting at the state Capitol on Tuesday, saying the bill is “again a way to say to labor, you don’t count. It’s a way to say to employees, get back. I believe it’s just like being in the slave days.”

Why such desperate race-baiting against reforms that would modestly limit public union power? MEA bosses, following the example of higher-ups at the National Education Association, extract a tidy living from their members’ pockets.

Michigan occupational averages are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. MEA staff and officer pay comes from the Department of Labor. While the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers estimate average annual wages in Michigan at $43,280, average pay for MEA staff and officers is $96,373.

Crazy, isn’t it, how angry public unions get about reforms that would threaten their monopoly? MEA bosses must truly care about their underpaid, unappreciated members!

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The National Education Association (NEA) and its state affiliates push an agenda that benefits union bosses at taxpayer expense. In America’s 28 forced-unionism states, teachers in NEA-organized schools who opt not to join must still pay dues, creating a huge pot of money for NEA to spend portraying teachers as victims and union bosses as their only friends.

NEA calls its political action committee “The NEA Fund for Children & Public Education.” Subtle, right? But NEA doesn’t stop at spending tens of millions on Progressives who will shovel money at public education without demanding reform for broken tenure and compensation policies. The nonpartisan materials on NEA’s member-funded website include, to sample a few recent items:

• Why School Choice Fails
• The ‘Right to Work’ Assault on the Middle Class
• The Case Against Vouchers

Given the union’s claim to stand for Middle Class workers, a casual observer might expect the salaries of NEA officers and staff to resemble the average working stiff’s. That casual observer would be very, very wrong.

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However they market themselves, public unions are political by nature, brimming partisanship that goes beyond their skewed campaign spending. Every Republican teacher, public safety worker, and government employee forced to pay “fair share” dues should be outraged.

My state’s National Education Association (NEA) affiliate, the Ohio Education Association (OEA), takes millions in fees from non-members each year. Operating on NEA’s model, OEA insists all teachers be forced to pay for the union’s non-political business. This would be well and good, if OEA conducted any non-political business.

From the union’s mission statement:

OEA believes that for those whose business is public education, activism is an obligation.

OEA has the same definition of “activism” as every garden variety leftist group: Demand bigger government under the guise of fairness and equality. For example, ACORN’s 2005-06 Political Program (hat tip: Publius’ Forum) lists OEA as a “Coalition Partner” -

We see the combination of these efforts as key to maintaining and expanding the level of electoral participation by more progressive voters in the state, along with playing a role in pushing voter alignment along axes of community concerns and economic security.

In other words, OEA worked with ACORN to push the entitlement mindset and get entitlement-minded voters to the polls. For… the children?

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Like the proponents of Ohio’s Issue 2 tried to point out before the November vote, keeping the status quo for Ohio public union salaries, benefits, and pensions was unsustainable.

A yes vote would’ve kept Ohio Senate Bill 5 as law, and tried to reign in the runaway spending and debt being heaped on the state. Unions spent over $50M to defeat Issue 2, as evidenced by the utter proliferation of “No on 2″ signs that sprouted all over the state.

As was warned, the budget realities must now be faced. Cities across the state are running out of money and are now being forced to lay off fire and police employees (e.g. Portsmouth, Lancaster, Middletown). Without SB5, the only options left to the cities are higher taxes or less employees.

The main scare tactic by the “No on 2″ crowd was that fire and police employees were going to lose their jobs and communities were going to be less safe. As it turns out, not ALL of the police and fireman are getting fired (as the dire warning went during the run up to the vote), just the ones on the bottom of the seniority totem pole.

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This week’s defeat of Ohio Senate Bill 5 is just a preview of what can be expected during the 2012 elections, as Ohio voters rejected public union limits.

Big Labor, realizing that it had to protect its public unions, showed its solidarity as it spent almost $30 Million dollars and filled the streets with foot soldiers to ensure Senate Bill 5 was defeated (see Public Unions: Last Hope for Big Labor at America’s Expense!, Off-year Ohio election posts highest turnout in 20 years and Unions Target New Ohio Law). In a foreshadowing of the 2012 elections, the gasping dinosaurs showed they are not going down quietly!

Conversely, it was evident that Governor Kasich and other Ohio republicans were not prepared and did not understand the labor machine or their corporate campaign playbook, and they were subsequently steamrolled by these tactics (as described in Corporate Campaigns: Vehicle to Forced Unionism and Political Payback). Obviously, they did not learn from Wisconsin, where massive changes to collective bargaining laws were successful and, as a result, the state is now headed towards a balanced budget (as seen in A Win in Wisconsin! Next, the Rest of the Country). The difference in these two situations was that Wisconsin’s Governor had a plan and was prepared for Big Labor’s scorched earth attacks. (more…)

Cross-Posted: TobyToons.com (Conservative Political Cartoons)

Last week, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels (R-IN) reviewed the reforms Indiana has instituted since he took office in a wide-ranging speech at The Heritage Foundation. From education reform to challenging public employee unions, Daniels has strived to make government work well. In an interview following his speech, Daniels discussed the reforms he made to state government, the Democrats’ walkout from the legislature this year, and what the federal government can learn from Indiana.

And the effort seems to have paid off. As we discussed in the interview, a recent Manhattan Institute poll revealed that 77 percent of Hoosiers rate Indiana’s government as “efficient.” That’s the highest percentage of any state surveyed and a stark contrast to neighboring Illinois’ 23 percent.

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Now this is the sort of corruption we are used to seeing in Illinois, eh? This week the Chicago Tribune and WGN TV have found up to 23 retired union operatives that are collecting millions in taxpayer dollars because they had pals in government tweak the state’s pensions laws to favor them.

These former government workers that were government union members got pliant politicians to alter the pensions laws to say that their pension remuneration would be calculated not on the lower pay they received when they retired from government, but from the much higher salary they received when they worked as union operatives. These folks worked as union bosses at the same time as working on the clock for government.

The “luck” of former union boss and Dept. of Streets and Sanitation worker Thomas Villanova is a typical example. Villanova last worked full-time for the city in 1989 and made $40,000-a-year. But he was also a union big wig making $198,000 annually upon his retirement in 2008 at age 56. His city pension, it appears, was calculated on the union salary of $198,000 instead of his real salary of $40,000 — itself obviously a no-show job in the first place.

Villanova stands to make millions off the taxpayers.

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From the Chicago Tribune:

All it took to give nearly two dozen labor leaders from Chicago a windfall worth millions was a few tweaks to a handful of sentences in the state’s lengthy pension code.

The changes became law with no public debate among state legislators and, more importantly, no cost analysis.

Twenty years later, 23 retired union officials from Chicago stand to collect about $56 million from two ailing city pension funds thanks to the changes, a Tribune/WGN-TV investigation found.

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In honor of the Fourth of July holiday, Broadside Books hosted an on-line symposium asking the question, “Where and How Should Conservatives Attack Liberalism Next?” An excerpt of my answer follows:

The famous philosopher Pogo once observed, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Reviewing the greatest threat to liberty today, I offer a corollary; “We have met the enemy and we are paying for him.” Our liberty is challenged not so much by political forces as institutional ones. Until we begin dismantling the racket that is Public Sector, Inc., we will never again enjoy the liberties and freedoms our grandparents took for granted.

The current budget crisis has shined a light on the out-sized pay and benefits earned by public sector employees in state and local government. The traditional implicit bargain where government workers accepted slightly lower pay in exchange for job security and decent benefits has been up-ended, with government workers now enjoying high pay and platinum benefits in addition to life-time employment.

The showdowns in Wisconsin, Ohio, New Jersey and other states have shown how difficult it will be to reverse course on this. But even getting public sector pay and benefits back to historic averages is just the tip of the iceberg, or, rather, treatment of a minor symptom of a virulent disease. Balancing government employee pay with resources is a fiscal challenge; balancing our liberties against ever-expanding government is a herculean fight against a massive institutional infrastructure.

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From the Associated Press:

Riot police fired tear gas at youths hurling rocks near the Greek finance ministry Tuesday, trying to quell the anger unleashed by a general strike as parliament debated new cost-cutting measures.

The latest austerity measures must pass in two parliamentary votes Wednesday and Thursday if Greece is to receive bailout funds from the EU and the IMF to stave off a possible default in July. If the votes don’t pass, Greece could become the first eurozone nation to default on its debts, sending shock waves through the global economy.

The clashes with police came at the start of a two-day strike called by unions furious that the new euro28 billion ($40 billion) austerity program will slap taxes on minimum wage earners and other struggling Greeks. The measures come on top of other spending cuts and tax hikes that have sent Greek unemployment soaring to over 16 percent.

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Glenn Reynolds in today’s The Washington Examiner:

So the public employee unions have been on the defensive across the nation, and they’ve been losing battles in state capitols from Wisconsin, to Ohio, to Tennessee.

Although there have been some violent incidents and death threats, overall, despite the talk from many right-leaning pundits about “union goons,” the actual danger posed by the union members appears to have been very small by labor-historical standards. Apparently, you just can’t get good goons nowadays.

And that makes sense. In the old days of the labor movement, the unionized industries were, you know, actual industries, involving miners, steelworkers and the like. And those are trades that foster exactly the qualities you need in good goons.

Why? Because they’re very dangerous activities that put a premium on teamwork. (Even in totalitarian countries, people know that it’s dangerous to get the miners upset.)

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It seems Gov. Scott Walker’s ideas are catching on, even in Massachusetts. From Boston.com:

House lawmakers voted overwhelmingly last night to strip police officers, teachers, and other municipal employees of most of their rights to bargain over health care, saying the change would save millions of dollars for financially strapped cities and towns.

The 111-to-42 vote followed tougher measures to broadly eliminate collective bargaining rights for public employees in Ohio, Wisconsin, and other states. But unlike those efforts, the push in Massachusetts was led by Democrats who have traditionally stood with labor to oppose any reduction in workers’ rights.

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In yet another union-styled outrage, Democrats backed by union thugs in Wisconsin are using the personal information of voters found on recall petitions to harass them because they signed a petition to recall Green Bay Democrat State Senator Dave Hansen.

Over the last few weeks thousands of Wisconsin voters signed a recall petition in Green Bay to recall Hansen and when voters sign such petitions they must give their address and phone numbers so that authorities can verify the voter’s signature in order to approve the petition. Now it seems that the Wisconsin Democrat Party has gotten hold of these petitions and have begun a telephone harassment campaign against the individual voters that signed the petitions.

The Wisconsin GOP has discovered this disgusting campaign and have found that the Democrats are using a fake phone number and a fake caller ID in order to get voters to answer the phone only to be harangued about having signed the recall petition.

The Democratic Party has targeted for harassment people who signed recall petitions against Senator Hansen, making calls on beginning on Monday April 25th using a fake phone number and caller ID that showed up on phones as “Bay Care Aurora,” a well-known Green Bay area medical center. Once recall supporters answered the phone, they were told they were speaking with a Democrat Party of Wisconsin operative, and were questioned about signing a petition to recall Hansen.

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There’s seriously nothing more you can say about unions given everything that happened in Wisconsin and Ohio- that speaks for itself, and volumes at that.

Now, in Washington, a mob of SEIU protesters were arrested for bringing their thuggish demeanor to the House of Representatives. Notice how they always play the outdated ‘victim’ card time and time again. Committing actions such as these then crying foul is not going to win over sympathy from anyone.

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These People Are Disgusting…
The far left is using a woman’s suicide to attack Governor Scott Walker.

The Progressive, a liberal website in Wisconsin, reported this week that a Wisconsin teacher committed suicide because of Governor Scott Walker’s union bill. The website says she was “distraught” to learn that she was going to have to pay 12.6% instead of 6% of her insurance premium cost?
Really?… Really?

Jeri-Lynn Betts, an early childhood teacher in the Watertown, Wisconsin, school district, died on March 8 of an apparent suicide.

A colleague says she was “very distraught” over Gov. Scott Walker’s attacks on public sector workers and public education.

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Below, you’ll find a compilation of 20 days worth of the death threats, vandalism, and intimidation practiced by pro-union thugs opposed to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s budget repair bill. Wisconsin is my home state. I lived there until I was 27 years-old in 1993 and most of my family, including my parents still live there. For that reason and because the issue of education and teachers unions has been a passion of mine for going on two decades, I’ve been following this story very, very closely. My original intent was to compile all of this earlier in the week, but after reading Lee Stranahan’s superb editorial I decided to wait and see if that might have some effect on the national and local Wisconsin media in moving them towards giving the ongoing violence, intimidation, vandalism, and overall thuggery occurring at the hands of union activists and their supporters, the coverage it needs and deserves.

Actual note slid under office door of a Wisconsin legislator

Not only should the local and national media be amplifying their coverage of this ongoing scandal because of the bar they themselves set with the Tea Party for what rises to the level of of racism, “predominantly white” protesters and troubling behavior — but in the wake of the tragic shootings in Tuscon you would think direct threats on elected officials would rate a little outrage. Well, obviously not when those threats come from the Left.

Politics aside, what’s happening in Wisconsin is downright frightening because, as you’ll see below, these incidents are growing in number and intensity. Furthermore, other than the Right, no one is calling for calm or civility. The local media is, at best, wrist-flicking these incidents, Democratic legislators have not called for calm, President Obama is AWOL, and worst of all, Public Union employees not involved in the thuggish behavior taking place in their name, have been complicit with their silence.

This is more than a disgrace, it’s dangerous. Conservative radio talk show hosts and Governor Walker can talk all they want, but I fear that until the media starts a campaign of shame by focusing on these incidents, and responsible pro-union types begin to police their own side, someone is eventually going to get hurt.

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From the Associated Press:

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has officially taken away nearly all collective bargaining rights from the vast majority of the state’s public employees.

Walker signed the bill to do so privately Friday morning. He planned an afternoon news conference in the Capitol.

The explosive measure passed the Assembly on Thursday following more than three weeks of protests that drew tens of thousands of people to the Capitol in opposition. The Senate cleared the way for passage with a surprise move Wednesday that allowed them to vote on the bill without 14 Democratic senators present.
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Cross-Posted: TobyToons (Conservative Political Cartoons)

I keep hearing the narrative that somehow, as though it were written in stone, collective bargaining is a right for public sector unions. I would disagree entirely: collective bargaining is a privilege, not a right, for public sector unions. And you know what? About 50 years ago, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. agreed with me. The union’s Executive Council in 1959 said: “In terms of accepted collective bargaining procedures, government workers have no right beyond the authority to petition Congress — a right available to every citizen.”

And it is a privilege that has been badly abused for years; U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics show that public sector employees, many of them unionized, make nearly $40 an hour in combined wages and benefits versus roughly $27.50 for those in the private sector.

So I applaud what Scott Walker is doing in Wisconsin, but I actually feel he didn’t go far enough. All his Budget Repair Bill is doing is addressing the public sector unions’ right to collectively bargain over pensions and health care. I think it would have been nice to address the right to collectively bargain for wages, and here’s why: at the end of the day, the public sector unions are not collectively bargaining for a greater share of earnings, as do the private sector unions. They are bargaining to get a bigger slice of the pie of tax dollars, which the government has taken from the American taxpayer.

Now to be clear: paying a certain amount of taxes is a part of being involved in an organized civilization. If you want to make sure you have roads and national defense, you’re going to have to pay taxes. But that being said, taxes are removed through a threat of force from the taxpayers by the government (yes, I mean force. Try not paying property or income taxes and see what happens). So the government is run off of money earned in the private sector. Government does not create jobs; when there are reports of more jobs, but they’re all government jobs, the government is not creating anything: it is merely funding even more government jobs off the backs of the private sector. Which compounds the problem because by taking capital from the private sector to create government jobs, you’re not creating jobs that create more capital, as private sector jobs do.

So, public sector unions, unlike their private sector union counterparts, are not creating more capital. Do they provide services for the public good? Absolutely. Are they creating capital? Absolutely not.

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