Neither supporters nor critics of public-sector unions will be completely pleased with Bloomberg Businessweek?s coverage of the topic in its latest issue.
Writer Brendan Greeley doesn?t bash these unions, but he also points out clear problems, including their outsized impact on politics:
[U]nions entered politics, and their ability to elect Democratic mayors and governors created a built-in conflict: Lawmakers were often negotiating with labor leaders who put them in office. By the late 1970s, according to Cornell’s Colvin, they had no clear counter-weight. That arrived with Ronald Reagan, not because he fired striking air traffic controllers in 1981 but simply because he won his election.
While Greeley takes shots at the legislation that has angered union activists in Wisconsin, he offers less criticism of a similar measure under discussion in (the great state of) Ohio:
Ohio’s legislation, now in committee in Columbus, is a more serious piece of work. It abolishes collective bargaining without suggesting specific cuts or clawbacks, removing from the discussion the urgency to narrow any immediate deficit. (Ohio’s is projected to be about $8 billion over the next two years.) It avoids some of the provisions on dues and votes that the ?anti-union crowd favors. It includes police and firefighters. And it doesn’t limit pay measures the way Wisconsin does with its proposal to peg wages to the consumer price index. Shannon Jones, the Republican state senator who wrote the bill, describes it as a “reset.”
Local governments, the second-term senator explains, are fettered with two chains. The terms of collective bargaining?in particular binding arbitration?have prevented local politicians from renegotiating contracts in line with revenue. At the same time, antitax movements at the local level have prevented local governments from raising revenue to meet contracts. Cincinnati, part of which lies in Jones’s district, needs to hold a referendum to raise taxes. Its pension fund is more than $1 billion in the hole.
Collective bargaining works as a ?ratchet: It takes the last contract as a starting point. It can obscure raises through impenetrable tiers and terms, and binding arbitration can tell a local government to raise more revenue even if voters won’t approve a new tax levy. ?Although real money is at stake?85 percent of Ohio’s state budget goes to local governments?Jones’s bill wouldn’t directly fix any budgets. It proposes to solve a problem of governance.
