No Loss for Words

So what’s the deal with these union guys?  Or what’s the deal with these wise guys in the Wisconsin Senate who have stuck it to their Republican colleagues in the past because they had the power to do who now have resorted to fleeing the state to prevent the Senate from taking action on the budget bill?

In all fairness, I don’t hold the union guys responsible for the trouble either Wisconsin faces or the rest of the country.  That responsibility falls on the elected representatives in both the executive branch (who negotiated the contracts) and the legislative branches for approving the contracts.

And that holds true for every level of government from the smallest to the largest.

I know from experience that the union reps sit down to the bargaining table with a list of “demands” for the upcoming contract.  The government side responds with a pitch counter-offering something less.  They dance back and forth a little and come to agreement.  The contract goes back to the union membership for approval and to the legislative branch for theirs and the deal is done.

So how tough can that be?

On the union side, things don’t get tough unless management refuses to budge on an important issue.  They have to decide how hard they want to fight for each issue.  Get the easy ones settled first then squeeze later for the harder ones.  Sometimes the parties are not able to come together and the union members exercise their rights under collective bargaining rules and stop work.  They are calculating that by stopping or slowing their work management will cave and agree to their demands.  Maybe, maybe not!

The rules of the game for the union are pretty much the same in both the private sector and the public sector with a few exceptions.

The difference between union negotiations with a public agency and a private company is the person negotiating on the private sector side is always a staunch advocate for the company shareholders and the company’s bottom line whereas on the public side, the person negotiating for the taxpayers may well be a union member themselves and not an advocate for the taxpayers at all.  You can imagine how some of those contracts might end up.

The negotiations in public sector contracts often are not negotiations at all.  The union puts their demands on the table and the government guy agrees then goes back to his legislative body and cries about how hard the negotiations were and how he got the best deal he could and we need to approve it.

As an elected official in my city, I was never allowed to sit in on union negotiations with my city manager.  Our council was only given limited details of the contract until it was voted on by the union.  We never had fiscal impact analyses prepared in advance so we could see how our long term liabilities were altered by the changing labor contract.

We were never actually allowed to see any of the details of the contracts until after we had approved them.

I understand that the union members are feeling Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is attacking them because this change will affect them personally.  And I feel for them in that regard.

But I also know what it feels like to be an elected official with a budget to balance and lots of folks with their hand out.  It’s a no win situation.

For years I have been talking about the ticking time bomb with our government pension system.  The issue came up in about 1991 when I served on the Joint Fire Board as one of the representatives for the city.  A fire department in California had been run by Commissioners who were retired fire fighters.  Whenever the contracts came up for renegotiation, they got great settlements with the expectation that when the cash flow got tight, they would just go to the voters to lift the levy lid.  If you present fire department money requests in such a way that failing to approve might result in a family member not making it in an emergency, voters approve.

So when pension commitments started coming due, they had to come out of current revenues since the fire district didn’t put any of that money away as the commitments accumulated.  When voters didn’t go along with raising taxes again, a crisis arose.

So was that a spending crisis or a revenue crisis?

Now take that scenario and apply it to nearly every government agency you can think of and imagine how large the crisis really is.

Sadly, the elected officials who negotiated these sweetheart contracts are long gone and the union leaders only did what they always do in advocating for their members.

Unfortunately the rank and file union members will be the ones that have to bear the brunt of the correction that must take place in order to get government back on a sound fiscal footing.

Elected officials in every district, council and legislature facing budget emergencies now have to figure out how to work around a problem that’s been accumulating for decades. 

I don’t envy them a bit.