As if the epic defeat of their effort to recall Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker wasn’t enough, the union movement got even more bad news from California last night when voters in San Diego and San Jose gave huge majorities to referenda that called for cutbacks to retirement benefits for municipal workers. If only a year or two ago states and cities throughout the country appeared helpless to stop the march toward insolvency caused by the enormous expenditures required to pay for the generous benefits and pensions given public employees, it now appears the tide has turned in favor of the taxpayers.
Where once there was no greater political power in most states than the unions representing state workers, these once mighty groups look like paper tigers. The voters have rightly determined that the burden of the contracts is too great for the taxpayers to bear in a time of a shrinking economy when private sector workers cannot hope to do as well. Politicians who feared to cross the unions or to stand up to them in negotiations — because doing so meant running the risk of strikes and slowdowns that could bring states and municipalities to their knees — are suddenly discovering the courage to not only say no to further demands on the public exchequer but to request and get givebacks that make fiscal sense. After Scott Walker’s big win in Wisconsin and the 66 and 70 percent majorities won in California, this could be just the start of a broad movement that will end the stranglehold unions once had on state budgets.
To those who cry foul over the pension reform measures in California or Walker’s clipping of the unions’ wings in Wisconsin, we need to point out that treating public employees as a privileged class is what we might find in dictatorships, not a democracy. The ascendancy of the unions was the product not only of political muscle but the vast expansion of government during the last century. The bigger government got, the greater its appetite for revenue and the more leverage state worker unions had. Having used that power to extract exorbitant contract concessions from the people supposedly representing the taxpayers, the unions were determined to hold onto their grip on the nation’s purse strings.
But like any Ponzi scheme, this was a concept that had to go bust sooner or later. The costs of these contracts and pensions continued to grow with only the seemingly unlimited power of the government to confiscate more of the taxpayers’ income to pay for it. The Tea Party revolt that swept the nation in 2010 was an expression of the public’s disgust at the way states and cities were locked into spending patterns that could not be sustained. Rather than merely stopping the spigot of public funds flowing into union coffers, Scott Walker sought to put in place measures that would ensure unions could never again put a figurative gun to his state’s head in order to get a bigger share of the budget. In California, mayors have acted similarly by passing measures that will reverse the giveaways conducted by their predecessors.
Scott Walker’s defeat of a union movement determined to punish him for undermining their hold on Wisconsin’s finances as well as the result from California ensures that others will follow in those footsteps. The era of unions holding up states and cities is over. A new age of fiscal sanity may not be far off.
Yes, but let's not exempt the Federales from this revolution. The Tea Party movement was ignited by *federal* action– the so-called Porkulus Bill that Obama and the Dems rammed through in 2009 and Obama Care. It was primarily Congressional town hall meetings that became the focus of fury in 2009, so much so that town hall meetings are a thing of the past for Leftist politicians. n nSecondly, there is a dire need to re-balance the desirability of public sector jobs. When I was growing up in the 70's, very few people aspired to work for state or federal government or even county government as teachers. The pay was low, the work was seen as typically boring and the only real appeal was the security it offered long term. Everyone I knew wanted a job in the private sector where they could get paid according to their talents and excel. Somehow, (in the 80's or 90's?) things changed and word got around that Public Employment was some kind of sweet deal and you were lucky to get in if you could. Private industry has been starved as a result and our economy cannot help but stagnate when something close to 40% of the working population is employed in a non-wealth-creating sector.
TS_Alfabet says that “When I was growing up in the 70′s, very few people aspired to work for state or federal government or even county government as teachers. The pay was low, the work was seen as typically boring and the only real appeal was the security it offered long term.”
He may be right about the 70s, but — as one who grew up in the 1940s-1950s — I can testify that almost all of my teachers loved their work, and did it very well. Since “working women” usually were teachers, nurses, or secretaries, schools had the option to choose really smart women who loved teaching. And schools also had the opportunity to choose really smart men, many veterans of WWII, who loved teaching (and an environment in which no one was shooting at them).
As a retired California State University economics professor who loved teaching (as well as research and technical writing), I know that California public schools have deteriorated dramatically, compared to my own public school experience (and my wife’s experience as a public school teacher). The average students who entered the school of education had the lowest admission scores of any other university division. One of many examples was a student who had blown the first midterm. When we talked about it I discovered that he couldn’t calculate 20% of $30 without paper and pencil, and when he did so he proudly told me that 20% of $30 was $60. He was in his senior year, as a C student, whose schedule included a basic arithmetic tutorial. Whether he ever graduated I know not. (I got him removed from my course because it was wasting his time.) On another occasion, in a class faced with the same arithmetical issue, a student called out that he would provide the answer, but after waiting while he tried to calculate a percentage on his calculator I put the problem on the chalkboard. Some other students took notes of my calculation.
Smart women now have many more alternatives than in the 1940s-1950s, but public school teaching salaries have not been competitive for either smart women or smart men. And the layering of state and federal educational bureaucracies run by people who got out of teaching doesn’t help.
If you want good schools, hire really smart people who love to teach, and get out of their way. This can be done by paying competitive salaries, financed by dumping state and federal departments of education. And don’t expect all teachers to use the same teaching styles or to teach identical content; variety interests students.
Contrary to TS_Alfabet’s closing sentence, good teaching IS wealth-creating for society.
Roger Folsom
Thank you for your perspective on an issue that seems to be getting worse rather than better, your suggestion on eliminating state and federal DOE would be a great first step towards improving a broken school system.