- Oct 6, 2008
- 125,102
- 60,661
The source of the article, solidly conservative, found that Richard Steier, solidly pro-union, did the public service unions no service when he wrote about their "plight."
Here, a peek into both sides of the issue:
1. "In 1958, New York City mayor Robert F. Wagner issued an executive order mandating collective bargaining for municipal employees..... Public-sector unions quickly became a political force in New York.
[In 1937, Wagner's father, a New Deal-era senator, had authored 1935s Wagner Act requiring collective bargaining in the private sector, effectively ending any view that the Constitution held sway in the United States.]
a. In addition to bargaining collectively over wages, working conditions, and benefits, they began to underwrite political campaigns, lobby mayors and city council members, and organize protests when their interests were threatened. The dominant political player in the city council today is the Working Families Party, a creation of the citys public-sector unions.
2. The result has been a ratcheting up of the cost of city government, as unionization added wage and benefit premiums to what workers would have otherwise earned. Layering work rules on top of civil-service protections also constrained the authority of administrative managers.
3. .... Steier, an editor and columnist for the Chief-Leader, a newspaper dedicated to covering the civil service in New York.... political line is Old Leftmore the Popular Front of 1938 than the radical chic of 1968..... Steiers case for public-employee unionization is that most government workers make modest, middle-class salaries, and thus unions represent the best shot that ordinary people in this nation have for fair economic treatment.
a. ..... humble government employees are menaced by a teeming horde of villains. These include Wall Street financiers, presidents Reagan and Bush, mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg, Governor Andrew Cuomo, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, charter school operator Eva Moskowitz, the Citizens Budget Commission, the Manhattan Institute (publisher of City Journal), and the corruption and cupidity of many union leaders themselves.
4. If only the unions could get their story out on issues that involve conflict with the city and state government.... citizens would rally to the union cause. Because, as Steier sees it, .... He takes heart, however, in the unions ability to block legislation that would harm them or their rank and file. That requires political power.
5. The unions biggest enemy, in Steiers telling, is their own leadership. He offers lurid tales of leaders dipping into union coffers to enrich themselves (and their relatives) and rigging contract votes..... the head of Local 372, embezzled $2 million while maintaining a cocaine habit in the late 1990s.
6. .... the ideological thrust of his writing is straightforward statism. The goal, as he sees it, is to transfer ever more resources from the private sector to the public sector.
7. He never tries to balance the unions interests against otherssuch as those of taxpayers, small businesses, schoolchildren, or the consumers of city services. He refuses to confront the issue of exploding pension and retiree health-care costs, which threaten to displace current government services such as police, fire, and sanitation.
8..... no limit exists to how much the rich can be taxed to pay for a more opulent public sector, and hes not interested in comparing the lots of similarly situated public- and private-sector workers. Doing so would have allowed readers to judge how government workers are faring compared with the four-fifths of workers employed in the private sector."
With Friends Like These by Daniel DiSalvo, City Journal 4 April 2014
Here, a peek into both sides of the issue:
1. "In 1958, New York City mayor Robert F. Wagner issued an executive order mandating collective bargaining for municipal employees..... Public-sector unions quickly became a political force in New York.
[In 1937, Wagner's father, a New Deal-era senator, had authored 1935s Wagner Act requiring collective bargaining in the private sector, effectively ending any view that the Constitution held sway in the United States.]
a. In addition to bargaining collectively over wages, working conditions, and benefits, they began to underwrite political campaigns, lobby mayors and city council members, and organize protests when their interests were threatened. The dominant political player in the city council today is the Working Families Party, a creation of the citys public-sector unions.
2. The result has been a ratcheting up of the cost of city government, as unionization added wage and benefit premiums to what workers would have otherwise earned. Layering work rules on top of civil-service protections also constrained the authority of administrative managers.
3. .... Steier, an editor and columnist for the Chief-Leader, a newspaper dedicated to covering the civil service in New York.... political line is Old Leftmore the Popular Front of 1938 than the radical chic of 1968..... Steiers case for public-employee unionization is that most government workers make modest, middle-class salaries, and thus unions represent the best shot that ordinary people in this nation have for fair economic treatment.
a. ..... humble government employees are menaced by a teeming horde of villains. These include Wall Street financiers, presidents Reagan and Bush, mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg, Governor Andrew Cuomo, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, charter school operator Eva Moskowitz, the Citizens Budget Commission, the Manhattan Institute (publisher of City Journal), and the corruption and cupidity of many union leaders themselves.
4. If only the unions could get their story out on issues that involve conflict with the city and state government.... citizens would rally to the union cause. Because, as Steier sees it, .... He takes heart, however, in the unions ability to block legislation that would harm them or their rank and file. That requires political power.
5. The unions biggest enemy, in Steiers telling, is their own leadership. He offers lurid tales of leaders dipping into union coffers to enrich themselves (and their relatives) and rigging contract votes..... the head of Local 372, embezzled $2 million while maintaining a cocaine habit in the late 1990s.
6. .... the ideological thrust of his writing is straightforward statism. The goal, as he sees it, is to transfer ever more resources from the private sector to the public sector.
7. He never tries to balance the unions interests against otherssuch as those of taxpayers, small businesses, schoolchildren, or the consumers of city services. He refuses to confront the issue of exploding pension and retiree health-care costs, which threaten to displace current government services such as police, fire, and sanitation.
8..... no limit exists to how much the rich can be taxed to pay for a more opulent public sector, and hes not interested in comparing the lots of similarly situated public- and private-sector workers. Doing so would have allowed readers to judge how government workers are faring compared with the four-fifths of workers employed in the private sector."
With Friends Like These by Daniel DiSalvo, City Journal 4 April 2014
