Conservative Attack on Public Employee Unions

The most recent development in the conservative techniques for winning elections may be to attack the individual states which fund the pension plans of state employees. Ridiculous sounding? There is currently a push by Republicans to introduce a bill that would make the debts of the states more transparent – thus revealing to the public what portion of a state’s debt is due to financial obligations to state employee’s retirement. The next step was denying any usage of “Building America Bonds” (BABs) by the states in the new tax deal. This is a big change, since currently up to 20% of state debt is held through BABs. James Pethokoukis has stated in Reuter’s blog that next step will be a repeal of the 1930’s era law that forbids states from declaring bankruptcy.

The cumulative effect of these steps will be to make it more difficult for a state to borrow in order to meet its budget requirements, while publicizing the exact amount of the state debt goes to paying retired state employees. Regardless of how we feel about these precursors, we can be certain that there has been an ongoing effort to attack the “overcompensated” state retirees. The reason can be surmised from a few simple facts: 1.) state employees are heavily unionized, 2.) unions support Democratic nominees for office more often than Republican, 3.) The Republicanparty would directly benefit by the destruction of the few remaining unions.

The collapse of the UAW and other unions since the 1950’s has seen a huge shift in the political process. Once, the large unions acted as treasure chests for the Democratic Party and offered somewhat of a buffer from the huge influx of funds into the Republican Party from private industry. Ronald Reagan began the dismantling of the Unions with his frontal attack on the Air Traffic Controllers while he was President. This effort at union dismantling has continued and has dropped by more than ½ since the 1950’s.

The American

Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

 media has been complicit in the characterization of state employee unions as vehicles for greed. This appears to be so much bunk when compared to the truly extravagant greed displayed by CEO’s who take huge Government handouts after having guided our economy into one of the worst disasters in human history. It looks an awful lot like a case of scapegoating for the mouthpieces of these CEO’s (the GOP) to blame hard working public employees who have served 30 plus years at the local state level for the economic problems that we now face. These same people utterly refuse to look at the single largest expense in the US – the military, which has been declared “off-limits” despite the fact that the US spends more that the next ten nations combined on military spending and we face no serious threat to our existence militarily.

It remains to be seen whether the GOP will proceed with a direct frontal assault on public employee unions as they have in the past. It bears remembering though, that this is an old pattern, the basic building blocks are in place and we can-not trust the US media to connect the dots for us on this issue.