Alexis de Tocqueville thought, as I observed in an earlier post, that after the grand principled politics of the earliest years of the Republic, American parties and politics would be about minor issues. About dividing up the spoils, not about the definition of what democracy is and how it should be enacted. His important insight was to distinguish between two different forms of political contestation. He correctly noted that American politics would be mostly about dividing the spoils, resting upon a general consensus about fundamental principles. But what he missed is that fundamental conflicts have a way, episodically, of reappearing, sometimes quite unexpectedly, and even with a slight of hand. Such is our present situation.
This became clear to me as I was surfing the web this morning and came across a post by Jonah Goldberg at the National Review online. He openly made the move from petit to grand politics in Tocqueville’s sense.
“The protesting public-school teachers with fake doctor’s notes swarming the capitol building in Madison, Wis., insist that Gov. Scott Walker is hell-bent on “union busting.” Walker denies that his effort to reform public-sector unions in Wisconsin is anything more than an honest attempt at balancing the state’s books.
I hope the protesters are right. Public unions have been a 50-year mistake.”
Goldberg argues against the very idea of public employee unions, going a step further than the aggressive Governor of Wisconsin. For Goldberg it is all about the principle, as he supports a politician who must get on with practical political concerns. As Max Weber would put it, Walker uses an apparent ethic of responsibility, fiscal balance, to hide his ultimate ends; attacking the public employees’ unions. Walker governs responsibly, moving toward the principled goal.
But there is more than meets the eye in Goldberg’s essay, which is framed around the idea that unions in the private sector fought a valiant and historic struggle against capitalist exploitation, while public unions just stand for stealing from the public coffers. On the page where his post appears, there is a standard right wing advertisement, that takes the issue one step further from fiscal responsibility to opposition to public employee unions by calling for an anti-union petition.
The libertarian call for anti-union ‘right to work’ laws has been standard fare at the National Review dating back to its founding in the fifties. Back then, it was a voice in the liberal wilderness, i.e. from its editors’ point of view. Back then there existed a social contract in the nation, supported by a broad spectrum of Democrats and Republicans alike, that prevented sustained attacks on workers’ rights. Goldberg presents an argument that purports to adhere to that position. But the anti-Obama, libertarian ad makes clear not all are interested in a social truce. It is not about the spoils but about a principled choice between individual liberty and the primacy of the right to property on the one side, and worker collective action and the struggle for social justice, on the other.
I suspect that Goldberg didn’t object to the ad’s placement, it communicates the logical conclusion of his and Governor Walker’s positions. It revealed to this reader what is at stake in the Wisconsin events.
How true. Walker fancies himself to be a great revolutionary as he revealed to “David Koch.” For those who don’t have the time to listen for 20 minutes, I feel the most revealing part comes right before the end when Walker doesn’t want to hang up before offering his belief in how momentous his own actions are. To listen to the call (if you haven’t already), click on link below:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/23/scott-walker-buffalo-beast-phone-prank_n_827058.html
Jeff suggests that the more fundamental issue at stake in Wisconsin may be stated in this manner, “It is not about the spoils but about a principled choice between individual liberty and the primacy of property on one side, and worker collective action and the struggle for social justice, one the other.”
I’ve seen the Jonah Goldberg piece before, but not in juxtaposition to the Rand Paul petition request. I saw it in the L. A. Times where it was positioned next to an ad for Target department stores. Goldberg’s opinion piece has been pushed on many venues, including the American Enterprise Institute’s web site where Goldberg is listed as a fellow.
The debate on public sector unions has appeared in numerous locations. For instance, the Metro NY Labor Communications Council ran two perspectives on the issue: a pro one by Saru Jayarman, a CUNY faculty member who has also been a labor organizer; and a con written by Daniel DiSalvo who at the time was an assistant professor of political science at CCNY. Jayarman commented on DiSalvo’s short previously published piece which concludes, “Ultimately, what citizens’ tax dollars buy us depends, in part, on the number of public servants and how much they are paid. The public should be fair to them. But they also need to be fair to the public.” Jayarman concludes her piece by writing, “DiSalvo is right about one thing – in the long run, public workers will be unable to maintain good wages and benefits if private sector workers are losing them. But parity can be achieved in two ways: by bring the top down, or by bringing the bottom up. The choice we make will determine the kind of society that we become.”
A much more robust paper on the issue, “The Trouble with Public Sector Unions,” was written by Daniel DiSalvo and published on the website of National Affairs in issue Number 5, Fall 2010. As part of its mission, “National Affairs” will publish essays that bring to bear hard facts and figures and employ the social sciences, even as we remain aware of their limitations. It also means thinking more deeply, and we will publish essays that look to the philosophical foundations of our public life. And it means thinking constructively, so that we will publish not only diagnoses, but, when possible, proposals for plausible remedies.”
In my opinion, DiSalvo’s lengthy essay is worth considering. It examines public sector unions over the past sixty or so years, and as you might expect is explicit about from where his information comes. http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-trouble-with-public-sector-unions. DiSalvo does offer analysis and draws conclusions some of which are disturbing if true, “Taken together, the intrinsic advantages that public-sector unions enjoy over private-sector advocacy groups (including private-sector unions) have given organized government laborers enormous power over government at the local, state, and federal levels; to shape public finances and fiscal policy; and to influence the very spirit of our democracy. The results, unfortunately, have not always been pretty.” I would like to see others work through the DiSalvo essay is see if there are flaws in his data or analysis, if not, then there are issues which must be addressed.
Tocqueville’s concepts might apply here. Have public-sector unions well-founded upon the principles of self-interest rightly understood devolved to self interest at the expense of public interests? Are we seeing associational tensions being played out to try to rebalance the situation?
Certainly it could be said that public-sector unions are not without unintended consequences; and certainly they result in employees making, in both earnings and benifits, than they would have otherwise. But I feel in many ways they have become the scapegoat for a much wider complex of problems; for instance, the loss of tax revenue due to “the Great Recession,” a problem that was certainly not caused by public sector unions.
The attack on public school teachers in particularly disconcerting. Fox New in particular has inflated Wisconsin teacher earnings (as discussed on PolitiFact):
“On his show the following night (Feb. 22) Bolling said in the numbers he had posted the night before, “our math was off a bit.” A new graphic, he said, showed the unweighted average for Wisconsin teachers for the 2010 school year: a $51,000 salary, plus $30,000 worth of benefits (for a total of $81,000 worth of compensation). For an average private sector worker, he said, the salary in 2010 was $46,000 with $20,000 worth of benefits (total compensation $66,000)”
Is a teaching job not worth at least $50,000 a year provided the teacher is doing their job well? Yes, there are issues with teacher’s unions, but at the same time teaching at a public high school or grade school is an extremely demanding job. Meanwhile, the average Wall Street bonus, just bonus mind you, is $120,000. One might argue that Wall Street does not use public money. But this is by no means certain, given the recent bailout and the fact that Wall Street banks can use the publicly subsidized Federal Reserve as their piggy bank, not to mention that the Great Recession began with Wall Street in the first instance. American corporations receive billions in subsidies from the government each year, some of this money actually subsidizing the export of jobs overseas. Attempts to end these kinds of subsidies have not yet been successful; for one, corporations have billionaires such as the Koch brothers on their side. It is not necessarily fair to criticize public sector unions has being too “powerful” when you can see the kind of money their up against.
But lets return to the issue at hand. Do public-sector unions disproportionately inflate the salaries of government workers; PolitiFact offers evidence to the contrary:
“A report titled “Out of Balance” by two University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professors for the National Institute of Retirement Security, whose board is largely composed of representatives of public employee pensions, found that when “comparable earning determinants,” such as education, are considered, state employees typically earn salaries 11 percent lower than their private sector counterparts. When you consider total compensation — salary plus benefits — the deficit dropped to 6.8 percent (because public employees generally get better benefits packages than those in the private sector).
Another report, by the liberal Economic Policy Institute, found that Wisconsin public employees earn 4.8 percent less in total compensation than comparable private-sector workers.”
PolitiFact concluded their article by saying:
“On average, Wisconsin teachers are far more highly educated than the average worker. People with higher levels of education tend to make more.” http://tinyurl.com/47688kf
And shouldn’t they? I don’t think a university professor would disagree.
My particular qualms aside, and how much other public employees should be making is perhaps another issue, I would sum up by stating that public-sectors workers have agreed to make sacrifices, stopping short of giving up their collective bargaining rights. The governor of Wisconsin has indeed stated they all must give up something so that the state budget can be balanced; however, I have heard very little about what sacrifices big businesses are being asked to make, higher-taxes for example, nor have I heard the governor himself state that he would agree to a cut in his own salary or benifits. Such a state of affairs can hardly be considered just.
Scott’s post appropriately ends with the word “just.” Yes, a teacher should earn $50,000 to avoid slipping beneath the poverty line. I drive past my neighbor’s window at night (she teaches 5th grade) and I can see her at her desk grading papers and preparing lessons into the hours when most people are comfortably in their beds watching television and falling asleep. Teachers work long hours and have tremendous responibility. The income gap in the United States is widening to absurd proportions. Beneath the attacks on teachers is a haze of false consciousness. My question becomes: Why aren’t those on Wall Street who concocted elaborate, unethical schemes to rip off public pension funds going to court and jail? Do we dare, as a society, start to answer that one? No, we demonize teachers, scapegoating them for the nation’s economic ills.
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