Unionized public employees have been holding the public hostage since 1962. That’s when President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order 10988 giving Federal employees’ collective bargaining rights, and the rest, as they say, is history. Shortly thereafter, the right to unionize was extended to state and local public employees as well, and today there are 14 states on the endangered species list and countless cities that are on the verge of insolvency and ready for bankruptcy. This is in thanks to public employee pensions and other retirement expenses that have bled the states dry.
Further pushing governments into the red are the obscene salaries public employees earn: public employees earn 32 percent more than their private employee counterparts in California (and that was in 2007).
Such disparities highlight the fact that union forces and not market forces set unreasonably high compensation packages that we now painfully know are unsustainable.
The Cure? Congress had been working on a bill that would allow states to go bankrupt, thus nullifying existing union contracts and providing for establishing reasonable packages the public can actually afford to pay its servants!.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that it’s probably too late. There are more unionized workers and union controlled demarcates in legislatures who will side the union in ruining the economy for everyone else, and then for themselves. And when not in the majority, like in Wisconsin where legislators are trying to pass a bill eliminating public employee unions and saving 300 million in only two years, the Democrats refuse to show up to work and hide out at luxury resorts to prevent a vote.
Two of my sons had a popular history professor in college that they loved. He had said that John F. Kennedy was the most over rated president there was. Perhaps not in this light where the seeds Kennedy sowed for our national financial ruin bear their fruit. Sort of makes the saying “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country” a little hollow, doesn’t it?
