Public Sector Collective Bargaining

Having spent nearly 13 years in public employment as a manager - specifically as an advocate in contract and disciplinary arbitrations and on the negotiating team for three rounds of collective bargaining with public employee unions - and another dozen working for unions in a similar capacity, I can say with some authority that collective bargaining rights are perhaps the most stabilizing part of labor relations in the public sector. To this day, I still find it odd that so many of us view people who work for a democratically elected government to be worse than private sector employees who answer only to shareholders of corporations or, in truly private enterprises, to no one but their bosses.

Teaching is a good example. I think many of us forget that teacher salaries - with some exceptions - have traditionally lagged behind those of occupations requiring the same (or less) formal education and the real bargain most teachers made at the time they were hired was to get job security, good benefits and a decent pension in exchange for accepting less salary. Some - particularly the brightest, best educated women in the 1950s through the early 1980s - had few choices if they chose to work outside the home. Less than 10% of women earned a bachelor's degree in the late 1950s. Their choices were generally limited to teaching, nursing or secretarial work. Let's not forget that Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman on the Supreme Court, graduated at the top of her law school class at Stanford University in the 1950s. The only private sector work she could get at a top law firm was as a secretary. She had more opportunities in the public sector, took them, worked hard and became the most important swing vote in the Supreme Court for over 20 years.

The same is true for other types of public employment. It's a fair trade. If we now want to to change that social contract that has existed in some states for more than 50 years and individualize negotiations with every teacher, whether a new hire or a 30 year veteran, your kid's art teacher will make a lot less than the math teacher even if your child wants to be an artist, not an accountant. Your football coach will make a lot more than your English teacher even if you see a budding poet at your dinner table. Those who think that is acceptable often speak about unregulated market economies being the perfect 'invisible hand' that ensures compensation matches the value of the employee to the enterprise. If that is true, why did so many of us decide that multi-million dollar bonuses to people employed in finance were grotesque? There were no relevant regulations on compensation for most finance jobs. Those employees knew that they either performed and contributed to creating profits or were out on the street. Personally, and I have said this before in other posts, I think it is silly, insulting and counterproductive to broadbrush an entire industry as being filled with incompetent, undeserving employees, whatever the industry. There will always be bad teachers. There will always be bad finance employees. In most teaching jobs, there is a three year probationary period before achieving tenure. You can tell pretty quickly if a newly hired teacher can deliver and terminate them at will if they cannot get up to speed. It may take a bit longer to locate the bad hires in finance and, other than a severance package, they have few rights to challenge their termination even after 20 or 30 years of employment.

You can bet on one thing: if you attempt to strip non-managerial public employees of their right to collectively bargain and get a due process hearing before firing them, there will be chaos and it won't be primarily of their making. If you think your teacher earns too much, shadow them for a day. Having grown up with one, I can tell you that good teachers get up at 5:30, are exhausted by 4:00 p.m. and after dinner, most are not watching television. They are grading papers, fine-tuning lesson plans and do not get to sleep by 10:00 p.m. It is certainly true that I experienced some really terrible teachers in junior high school and high school. The blame rests squarely on the school administration for not identifying them early and terminating them or being squeamish about seeking their termination and letting an arbitrator decide whether their decision holds water or doesn't. Not for nothing, but my mother's salary went a long way towards helping me end up in a tax bracket most Americans would find pretty satisfactory. I have paid more federal and state taxes than many people my age and although I don't consider myself wealthy, I do not think I deserve a tax break.

This last couple of years is so full of craziness and shifting allegiances it's hard to get one's arms around the whole thing. First, demonize the finance industry. Three cheers for the common man! Then, let's go after public employees. They are lazy, stupid and are not like the rest of us. Three cheers for the people who toil in the private sector with no job security! Mandated health care coverage for people in their 20s and 30s? They'll never use it and just subsidize those who are older and use too many resources. Three cheers for the young and healthy!

If people care about other hardworking people or those who have very limited choices and few resources, agree to cough up a little more in taxes or raise taxes on people who can best afford it. This is not about charity and don't forget that most families making under $50,000 per year effectively pay no federal taxes at all.

The vast majority of us would have to admit that we want excellent public services, no matter what our income. There is nothing wrong with that. There is something wrong when we're not willing to pay for it or negotiate with a union over the ability to pay for increases in salary or benefits.

Please don't tell us you did not realize that many states were headed toward a fiscal crisis long before the recession hit. They were borrowing money to pay for day-to-day expenses with no assurance that tax revenues would rise quickly enough to pay it back. Meanwhile, our sage leaders decided to grant wage increases and improved benefits to themselves and public employees. New York State counted on free flowing tax revenues from those working in finance to cover the State's obligations. Forget party affiliation. The worst spending blunders came from a Democratic-controlled Assembly and a Republican-controlled Senate. I certainly love the term "tax and spend" liberal a lot more than "borrow and spend" conservative. They are the ones who say 'vote for me, I won't increase your taxes'. What they don't say is that eventually taxes will have to be increased or your garbage won't be picked up, your streets won't be plowed, your schools will have outdated textbooks and your teachers will end up spending hundreds of dollars of their own salaries to subsidize your child's education. Honestly. Who is more responsible? Is it the candidate who says we have to pay as we go or the one who says we have to borrow as we go?

How about some common sense: To States: Borrow to build your bridge (even if it goes nowhere). Pay cash for services. Not enough money to pay cash for essential services? Increase taxes or find a way to make delivering services more efficient. Tell the union at negotiating time that you are broke and can't afford wage or benefit increases and propose cuts. If the union screams about it, make sure you have a system where a neutral arbitrator is appointed with a legislative mandate that he or she cannot impose a contract that has a potential to bankrupt the state. Impose layoffs if you have to but understand the consequences of doing so which include, among other things, paying unemployment benefits and filling up emergency rooms with people who lack health insurance for primary care.

It's no different from the advice a rational family would give: Borrow to renovate your house if it will increase its value. Borrow for post-secondary education for yourself and kids because it is the best investment you can make. Pay cash for everything else. Not enough cash? No flat screen TV. No vacations beyond your back yard. No eating out. No ordering in. It's actually pretty simple, right? Sure, this is a political game, but at its root is really about the value we place on people who teach kids, protect us and help lock up criminals and rescue you from a house fire that might even be the result of your own negligence. If you have a specific number in mind for the salaries of these folks, let us know. The last time I checked, contracts get signed by at least two parties - the union and the employer. If you think the employer made a bad deal, let them know. I promise you that eliminating collective bargaining won't do a thing to make it cheaper to provide essential services. When you see the foreclosure notice and badly peeling paint on the house of the teacher who inspires your kid and wrote him a recommendation that helped get him into college and who took a 20% pay cut because she had no collective bargaining rights and based her purchase on a social contract that she was reasonably certain would not radically change, don't complain that the value of your own house is diminished because the neighborhood is perceived as going to Hell in a handbasket.