Cecily Myart-Cruz, UTLA President, center, protests with teachers outside Bravo Medical Magnet High School in Los Angeles Wednesday, October 19, 2022. It has been almost four months since the contract between LAUSD and UTLA members expired. Teachers are asking for smaller class sizes, better pay, more staffing, and other items during record-high inflation and a housing crisis. (Photo by David Crane, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)
Recently I read the book “Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions,” by Philip K. Howard. The book did not change my mind on the subject of public sector unions, but it certainly reinforced it.
The book quotes labor leader Victor Gotbaum as saying: “We have the ability, in a sense, to elect our own boss.” And he is right. Who cares more about who is elected to the various county boards of supervisors than the public employee unions? Why? Because the supervisors set the public employees’ salaries, benefits and conditions of employment. And that is also equally true with city, state and federal offices.
Howard emphasized that point by writing: “About ten percent of the delegates to the Democratic National Convention are members of the teachers unions making them the single largest organizational bloc of Democratic activists.”
So, since they are so powerful, if someone runs for any of these offices there is a major tendency both to accept the unions’ large political contributions and then, if elected, to give the unions whatever they want. And that is what we have seen now, for decades, to the degree that this is destabilizing most if not all of our governments — local, state and even federal.
Furthermore, if you oppose those unions they can — and will — spend huge amounts of money either to fund your opponent in the next election or even to sponsor a recall election. Just ask former Riverside County Supervisor Jeff Hewitt, Santa Ana City Councilperson Cecilia Iglesias or state Sen. John Moorlach, who all lost their positions because they stood up to the public employees unions.
In other words, we should have listened to Thomas Jefferson, who issued an order barring federal employees from “tak(ing) any part in the business of electioneering, that being inconsistent with the spirit of the Constitution and his duties to it.”
Even President Franklin D. Roosevelt adamantly opposed public sector bargaining: “The employer is the whole people … Upon employees in the federal service rests the obligation to serve the whole people.”
Thus FDR said that we cannot have federal employees putting their interests in front of the interests of We the People.
But this union power is now ingrained in our Constitutional law by the (badly decided) 2010 U.S. Supreme Court case of Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission. This case allowed entities, both public and private, to be able to accumulate and spend limitless monies on election campaigns as a matter of First Amendment free speech.
My ruling would have been that any individual human being has such a right, but artificial “persons” do not. If human beings want to spend their own money, let them, with full disclosure. But corporations or unions should not have that power, if only because there often are shareholders or union members, etc. whose money is being spent on outcomes with which they do not agree.
And it does matter. For example, years ago a deputy sheriff pointed to a driver of a sheriff’s bus and said that he was about to retire at 150% of his current salary. How could that happen? The formula is to pay each qualified retiree 75% of his last year’s salary. OK so far. But how is that last year’s salary computed? Almost all of the employee’s supervisors cooperate with the upcoming retirees during their last year by giving them as much overtime that they can handle, and that also goes into the computation. In addition, they don’t take any vacation during their last year, so that is added as well, and often so is sick time. And that is their base for the rest of their lives.
As a result of this union power, as written on the front page of the Aug. 6 edition of this newspaper, last year a Los Angeles firefighter, who makes $169,489 per year, was paid an additional $510,301 in overtime pay, for a total yearly compensation of $699,478.
Phillip Howard spreads the alarm this way: “Most of the huge debt for public employee benefits in the future, incurred largely as a result of union demands, will not come due during the tenure of the political leaders who acceded to it, nor indeed to the voters at that time. Our children must pay the bill.”
In other words, no one is protecting our children and grandchildren’s future. It’s up to us to do so.
James P. Gray is a retired judge of the Orange County Superior Court, a former criminal defense in the Navy JAG Corps, federal prosecutor in Los Angeles and the Libertarian candidate for vice president in 2012, along with former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson.
