Liberals vs Public Worker Unions

The rise of collective bargaining in the United States has a bloody history. Big players in corporate America, including Henry Ford himself, used local police and hired well-armed goons mercilessly to crush efforts to organize his assembly lines. People died in that effort. Employers believed that allowing their workers to organize would kill their ability to make profits, so they employed every tactic they could to prevent that from happening. It took the Great Depression and the right of social legislation to get America back to work to change all that.

“In the United States, the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 [enhanced by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947] made it illegal for any employer to deny union rights to an employee. The issue of unionizing government employees in a public-sector trade union was much more controversial until the 1950s. In 1962 President John F. Kennedy issued an executive order granting federal employees the right to unionize.” Wikipedia. Corporate America fought this legislation in the courts. Some even had their employees sign individual contracts in order to assert that the new labor legislation took away these employers’ contractual property rights without due process of law. Courts quickly invalidated what they called “yellow dog” employee agreements, and collective bargaining was on its way.

Simply put, when a union is certified as the proper representative of a group of employees (who vote that union as their representative), they address the three mandatory subjects of collective bargaining: wages, hours and working conditions. In a strange way, the resulting rise in effective pay rates created by unionization generated a large middle class that was able to buy more products than ever before. These wages went right back to the same employers who feared destruction in the form of dramatically increased consumer spending. Union workers generally earn 10%-30% more than non-union counterparts. And they spend it!

Half a century ago, almost a third of all American workers were unionized. Today, that number has dwindled to approximately 12.7%, with around 6.2% of private sector workers covered by a collective bargaining agreement. The huge growth has been in public sector unions, where over a third of non-military government workers are now represented by a union. That public sector unionization has generated enormous political power, their coffers full from such sizeable membership dues, often used to lobby and cajole elected officials (state, federal and municipal) to keep wages high and government funding for union jobs high, has been a sore spot for many budget impaired governmental agencies.

Critics of government unions, which are generally not permitted to strike, have argued that unions prioritize seniority and job retention over protecting the public from incompetent, under-performing and sometimes dangerous union members. They point to being unable to fire “overpaid” senior teachers whose students fail upwards, instruction that clearly is second rate or worse.

And for police unions, it is the consistent lock-step combination of using concerted labor actions short of striking (the “blue flu” or simple slowdowns and unresponsiveness to police emergency calls) to secure raised and increase funding with a grievance and arbitration process that pits a union representative (with rank and file encouragement) against the city administrators attempting to discipline “bad cops.” First responders also usually have exceptional defined benefit retirement benefits that are triggered decades before most ordinary workers reach retirement age. Police unions also deploy top-flight lawyers and engage in high-profile assaults in the press to protect even rogue cops. The thought of losing union campaign funding or, worse, generating funding for negative campaigns, has caused a large cadre of elected officials to let cops back into the force… who really should not be there.

While police officers generally are wildly supportive of their unions’ zealous defense of all charged police officers, what used to be a lockstep public support of collective bargaining for government employees has frayed of late. As income inequality has infected our economy over the last few decades, more often than not, public employees make significantly more (with better fringe and retirement benefits) than the average, comparably trained worker in the private sector. But nothing has escalated the rise of a negative public perception of government trade unions than the recent spate of blue-on-black killings and the police response to peaceful protesters. Militarization of police departments combined with seemingly unbridled police union power have turned the public tide.

We have given police too many laws to enforce and saddled them with covering activities – like mental illness, drug addiction and homelessness – which really are much better suited to other governmental agencies. Effectively, society has dumped “stuff no one else wants to do” on cops. For some, “defunding” the police is nothing more than moving these social problems (and that share of the police budget consumed with these social issues) away from cops… to let them focus on what they really should be doing. Additionally, most US police officers receive a fraction of the training that is applied in other developed nations. It shows.

As the partisan response to national anger, which broke loose with the murder of George Floyd, pits “law and order” advocates against “humanize the police and get them closer to the community they serve” policy wonks. But what to do about police unions is now a problem for left, right and center. It’s time, say many, to curb union power both in terms of what is possible within the confines of a collective bargaining agreement and how unions represent rogue cops or cops who have made big mistakes.

Matt Pearce, writing for the June 16^th Los Angeles Times, provides a clearer look at the issue: “Many activists have called for legal reforms to limit police collective-bargaining agreements and union-backed laws that limit transparency into misconduct or make it harder to fire officers for wrongdoing.

“Some union contracts allow departments to erase disciplinary records, give officers access to investigative records before they are questioned or allow the officers to essentially prevent their departments from publicly releasing internal records — making it easier for officers to beat misconduct charges or to prevent the public from knowing about them… One University of Chicago Law School working paper from 2019 on newly unionized sheriff’s deputies in Florida concluded that ‘collective bargaining rights led to about a 40% increase in violent incidents of misconduct among sheriffs’ offices.’

“The labor movement in the U.S. is facing questions about what its relationship should be with the hundreds of thousands of police officers who make up a major portion of unionized public-sector workers… The AFL-CIO has faced growing calls to disaffiliate from the International Union of Police Assns., and some liberal activists have started calling for Democratic politicians to reject campaign contributions from police unions.

“‘Even for people who have a deep, long-standing, genuine commitment to the labor movement ... there’s a recognition that the power of unionization, the power of collective bargaining, is being abused in indefensible ways by police unions,’ said Benjamin Sachs, a Harvard law professor and faculty director of the school’s labor and work-life program, which will be studying potential legal reforms to collective bargaining by police.

“Police officers are heavily unionized compared with many private-sector workers, and they have enjoyed generally high approval ratings from the public compared with other government services. Police unions can also be a big spending force in political campaigns, like in Los Angeles, giving them influence before they even reach the bargaining table… Like many unions, police officers’ leaders are unapologetic advocates for their members, often willing to wage bare-knuckle political fights, including during the recent wave of protests. But unlike many unions, police unions’ members have the power to arrest and kill, and their central role in public safety gives them immense — and sometimes intimidating — leverage.

“In New York City, the Sergeants Benevolent Assn. violated Twitter’s rules when it tweeted private arrest-record information about Mayor Bill de Blasio’s daughter, Chiara, after she was arrested at a May 30 protest, adding, ‘How can the NYPD protect the city of N.Y. from rioting anarchists when the mayor’s object-throwing daughter is one of them?’ (She had not been accused of throwing anything.) The account had also recently tussled with the city’s health commissioner over a lack of masks for officers, at one point tweeting that she ‘has blood on her hands.’

“In Delaware County, Pa., the local police union posted a warning to potential critics on June 3: ‘If you choose to speak out against the police or our members, we will do everything in our power to not support your business.’ (The union later apologized for the comment.) One member was reportedly suspended from the Media Borough Police Department when he added: ‘Try us. We’ll destroy you.’

“After the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency said June 9 it would no longer transport local police to anti-police-brutality protests, the officers’ union, the San Francisco Police Officers Assn., shot back on Twitter: ‘Hey Muni, lose our number next time you need officers for fare evasion enforcement or removing problem passengers from your buses and trains.’

“Floyd’s death became a breaking point for many labor supporters. As protests swelled in Seattle, the Martin Luther King Jr. County Labor Council, which represents more than 100,000 area union workers, passed a resolution demanding that its affiliated Seattle Police Officers Guild ‘become an antiracist organization’ and acknowledge ‘that racism is a structural problem in our society and in law enforcement’ or risk a vote of expulsion.”

Police unions may be precipitating their own funeral with such actions, but union leaders were elected by their member to take precisely these tough stands. If union attempt to block reform, popular sentiment most major cities will simply reflect a growing frustration among citizens against a once revered category of civil servants… instead of being a constant drain on city budgets to pay off settlements or court judgments against offending officers, many of whom are still on the force!

              I’m Peter Dekom, and for those police officers and union representatives who are fighting to resist this move to improve and change, I say, “get over it or resign; you are on the wrong side of history.”