Public Employee Unions Don't Get One Penny from Taxpayers and Can't

Require Membership, But the Big Lie That They Do Is Everywhere

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet

Posted on March 5, 2011, Printed on March 5, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/150130/
Nobody has to belong to a union or support its political activities, but you'd never know that
from reading the news.

This falsehood pitting public employees against taxpayers is ubiquitous. TheWashington Post ran
a story headlined, “Ohio, Wisconsin shine spotlight on new union battle: Government workers
vs. taxpayers”; Rush Limbaugh called public sector unions, "money launderers" for "Democrat
politicians"; Mark Steyn calledthem, "rapacious, public sector-shakedown kleptocrats," and self-
proclaimed liberal Joe Klein wondered if they “are organized against the might and greed...of the
public?”

All of this is meant to serve another, Bigger Lie – even more ubiquitous -- that the cost of public
workers is killing state budgets. As Bill O'Reilly put it with typical understatement, state
"governments can't afford to operate" because of "union wages and benefits."

Here's another factual baseline: those “cadillac” pensions we always hear about public workers
getting actually average $22,000 per year and amount to just 6 percent of state budgets. Some
states' pension funds have problems because they've been raided to pay for tax cuts, but in
aggregate, pensions aren't eating up state budgets. Andrew Leonard, writing in Salon about what
he calls “the imaginary public sector pension fund crisis,” notes that because the stock market
has recovered to a great degree, “those horrible 'shortfalls' everyone has been making such a big
deal of are already in retreat.”

As economist Dean Baker notes, it was Wall Street, not a bunch of teachers and firefighters,
which is to blame for the gaps that do exist. “Most of the pension shortfall,” he wrote, “is
attributable to the plunge in the stock market in the years 2007-2009. If pension funds had earned
returns just equal to the interest rate on 30-year Treasury bonds in the three years since 2007,
their assets would be more than $850 billion greater than they are today.”

Public workers' salaries are another 28 percent of state budgets. They get paid less than
comparable workers in the private sector, even including benefits. The problem, as far as an
honest debate goes, comes from the word “comparable.” Last week, USA Today (mis)informed
its readers that workers in the public sector make more than in the private, a claim it backed up
with misleading averages. The article only quoted in passing an economist who pointed out that
their “analysis is misleading because it doesn't reflect factors such as education that result in
higher pay for public employees.” It's actually meaningless, as public workers are twice as likely
to have a college degree and have, on average, more years on the job than workers in the private
sector.

State and local employees' wages and salaries have virtually nothing to do with the budget gaps
which many states are grappling with – that too is a result of the recession caused by Wall Street,
not Main Street. According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, “State tax collections,
adjusted for inflation, are now 12 percent below pre-recession levels, while the need for state-
funded services has not declined. As a result, even after making very deep spending cuts over the
last several years, states continue to face large budget gaps.” According to Census data, states'
social welfare payments to struggling individuals and families increased by around 25 percent
between the first quarter of 2007 and the last quarter of 2010.

Most of the media lazily accepts that collective bargaining by state workers is a fiscal matter – a
typical headline on AOL news asked, “Can collective bargaining bills stem state deficits?” as if
there is some correlation between those two things. But the evidence doesn't suggest as much:
There are already 13 states that restrict public workers' bargaining rights and it hasn't helped their
bottom lines. As Ed Kilgore noted, "eight non-collective-bargaining states face larger budget
shortfalls than either Wisconsin or Ohio," and " three of the 13 non-collective bargaining states
are among the eleven states facing budget shortfalls at or above 20%."