I’m not talking about private-sector unions. In the private sector, unions lost 10% of their membership in 2009. That’s 771,000 fewer workers to have dues deducted to support Democrats. Total membership is 15.3 million. Lot’s of influence for 5% of the population. Once they were 35% of the population.
It’s the public sector unions doing the big damage. Sure, the UAW destroyed GM and Chrysler, but the public sector unions can destroy the entire country. Local, state, and federal government workers are now 51.5% of all union workers. They grew in 2009.
Look at every local, state, and federal plan to cut expenses. Almost none ever address reducing union employees. In Arizona they are closing state parks rather than lay off union workers. California and Chicago reduced hours, but no layoffs. Are we to believe there is no waste, redundancy, or unnecessary jobs in the public sector? Any businessman could cut 25-50% of the public jobs and you would see no difference in services. Politicians threaten to cut police and fire first. Businessmen would never cut there first.
The teacher’s unions in America are taking our once proud educational system and turning it into Chrysler. Fighting charter schools and accountability testing and hiding behind tenure, they handle education like it was done 60 years ago. Duplicate school board, excessive Superintendents, and administrative staff creates huge waste. No one can lean on a shovel longer than any public works employee.
In California the pensions for retired union workers is killing the budget. The same is true for local pension obligations. In California the average retired state union worker is getting $100,000 a year in pension payments.
Does any of this begin to sound a little like GM? The cost of retired workers at GM was adding so much cost per new car built than the company couldn’t compete.
How can this work? You can’t fire existing union workers to balance federal, state, and local workers. And you can’t afford the bill for the ones who have already retired. Both are overpaid. Revenues are down and the only way to balance the budgets is to cut essential expenses rather than deal with the real problems.
Another problem we will leave to our grand kids to fix?
