Update: NY Times on the GOP war on public employees

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The New York Times today takes a look at the GOP war on public employees. Public Employee Unions Face Rising Public Anger:

Across the nation, a rising irritation with public employee unions is palpable, as a wounded economy has blown gaping holes in state, city and town budgets, and revealed that some public pension funds dangle perilously close to bankruptcy. In California, New York, Michigan and New Jersey, states where public unions wield much power and the culture historically tends to be pro-labor, even longtime liberal political leaders have demanded concessions — wage freezes, benefit cuts and tougher work rules.

It is an angry conversation. Union chiefs, who sometimes persuaded members to take pension sweeteners in lieu of raises, are loath to surrender ground. Taxpayers are split between those who want cuts and those who hope that rising tax receipts might bring easier choices.

And a growing cadre of political leaders and municipal finance experts argue that much of the edifice of municipal and state finance is jury-rigged and, without new revenue, perhaps unsustainable. Too many political leaders, they argue, acted too irresponsibly, failing to either raise taxes or cut spending.

A brutal reckoning awaits, they say.

* * *

Across the nation in the last two years, public workers have experienced furloughs and pay cuts. Local governments shed 212,000 jobs last year.

A raft of recent studies found that public salaries, even with benefits included, are equivalent to or lag slightly behind those of private sector workers.

* * *

Benefits tend to be the sorest point. From Illinois to New Jersey, politicians have refused to pay into pension funds, creating deeper and deeper shortfalls.

In California, pension costs now crowd out spending for parks, public schools and state universities; in Illinois, spiraling pension costs threaten the state with insolvency.

And taxpayer resentment simmers.

The focus of the article is on Gov. Chris Christie and New Jersey's decades-long shortchanging of contributions to its public employee pension funds:

For much of the last two decades, New Jersey has shortchanged its pension contribution.

Governor Christie talked about tough choices this past year — then skipped the state’s required $3.1 billion payment. Now New Jersey has a $53.9 billion unfunded pension liability.

Who does the media, and by extension, the public blame for this fiscal mismanagement? Not the irresponsible politicians, but the public employee unions. There is an inherent anti-union bias in the reporting by corporate media (in particular, here in Arizona).

Jeffrey H. Keefe, a Rutgers professor who studied the issue for the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute, uncovered some intriguing class splits. Blue-collar public workers make more money than their private sector counterparts. For such jobs, public unions have established a higher wage floor. [This is a good thing that benefits private sector employees.]

The sense that public workers enjoy certain advantages is not a mirage. Public employees pay into their pension funds, but health benefits often come at a fraction of the cost of most private sector packages. [This is mostly due to the economy of scale of collective bargaining units.]

Government employment also tends to be more secure. When the economy crashed, federal stimulus dollars safeguarded many public jobs. [Essential services: teachers, police, fire, emergency workers, court personnel, transportation, etc.] The alternative, many economists point out, was to force towns and cities into extensive layoffs, even as unemployment hovered around 10 percent and millions of Americans sought help from public agencies.

But it accentuated the perception that public workers, however tenuously, inhabited a protected class. [Tell that to those who have been laid off or furloughed.]

Blaming unions for the economy and the status of state budgets is simply asinine. This is the result of thirty years of failed faith based supply-side "trickle down" GOP economics, and the "smartest guys in the room" – the banksters of Wall Street – who invented casino capitalism and gambling on exotic investment devices that are essentially worthless and do nothing to grow the economy or to create jobs. Their gaming of our economy destroyed the value of many pension funds during the Bush Great Recession.

And let's not forget state legislators who have been stealing from the front end of public employee pensions by not making adequate contributions, and who now want to steal from the back end of public employee pensions by reducing or eliminating pension benefits (if Congress changes the bankruptcy rules) to public employee retirees.

Let's not lose focus here on who is really to blame.

H/t stateline.org for the graphic.