No one has yet asked Ned Lamont – according to recent polls,
Connecticut’s next governor – how he plans to bring the state’s public employee
unions to heel.
Connecticut’s unionized, tax supported UConn Health Center
is now, for all practical purposes, bankrupt. “As a public institution with a
large share of unionized physicians and staff,” The Hartford Courant notes in a
recent story, the UConn Health Center faces “added challenges. Pension
liabilities for its more than 2,300 employees increased from $1.2 billion in
2016 to an anticipated $2.3 billion this year.”
Bankruptcy, court ordered contractual realignment, is what
happens when business expenses exceed a business’s intake and the business or
city is either unable or unwilling to cut labor costs. Connecticut’s Capital City, union bedeviled Hartford, was on the
point of bankruptcy some time ago, but the city was “saved” from bankruptcy
when the Democrat dominated General Assembly bailed it out with an infusion of
state tax funds. The half a billion
dollar bailout simply saved city
Democrats and Mayor Luke Bronin, once Governor Dannel Malloy’s Chief Counsel, the necessity of trimming labor costs. And so
– the false “solution,” the tax bailout, moved the problem into the future,
where it will no doubt be revisited by a future Democrat dominated City Council
begging the state for bailout dollars. In ordinary, common sense parlance, this
is called NOT SOLVING THE PROBLEM.
The state of Connecticut is experiencing the very same economic
dilemma. The revenue brought into state coffers through tax increases is not
sufficient – and will never be sufficient – to cover labor
costs. The only way to permanently settle the labor cost problem is to reduce the
cost of labor, an unpalatable solution for progressive state legislators who
owe their election to office to state workers’ tireless efforts to support
their campaigns.
“A Message From Your AFSCME Council 4 Union” distributed to
about 30,000 rank and file members connects the political dots in the governor’s
race. Lamont is “fighting for working people” by defending the
rights of unionized state employees, an ever growing portion of “all working
people who cannot tap into tax dollars.” Though it may not be clear from the
union-fee generated political brochure, Lamont is fighting for tax consuming
“working people” at the expense of tax paying “working people. “Lamont thinks
Connecticut retirees, teachers and state workers should not be blamed for the
failure of past governors and legislators to fund pension and health
liabilities.” But the Democrat Party in the General Assembly -- with the
sufferance of SEBAC, the union conglomerate charged with striking contracts
written in judicial stone between governors and union heads – has controlled
state workers’ pensions and salaries for the last three decades and more. Yet
AFSCME is not recommending that its rank and file members should vote against
Democrat legislators.
On the contrary, a vote for Lamont is a vote for the
continuation of the policies, beneficial for state workers, of the Malloy
administration – and a vote against “structural changes,” the real remedy to the
pro-union budget busting benefits encoded in the contracts signed by Malloy and
SEBAC. The terms of those contracts -- which include automatic salary and
pension raises -- will be carried forward through a possible Lamont
administration until they expire in 2017.
Salary and pension increases, tax payers who do not work for
the state should understand, represent a tax increase for them. This is
governing on auto pilot; because contracts are affirmed in negotiations between
Governors and union leaders, only an appeal to courts may adjust the terms of
the agreements. Republican leaders have been insisting for years that salaries
and benefits should be determined legislatively, as is the case in most states.
That change, if adopted, would be a structural change that would recover for
the General Assembly its constitutional prerogatives, which stipulate that the
General Assembly rather than the courts should have directional control over
getting and spending.
The same card that prompts rank and file members to vote in
favor of Lamont rather than his Republican challenger includes a small,
seemingly innocuous notice: “Did you “Re-Member” to sign your council 4
membership card?”
The “fine print” on the cards, the Yankee Institute advises,
“authorizes one of the state’s largest public-sector unions to automatically
deduct dues even if the employee resigns from the union in the future and
places restrictions on when an employee can cease paying those dues. According
to the membership card, if membership revocation is not included in a
collective bargaining agreement, paying dues “shall be irrevocable, regardless
of whether I am or remain a member of the Union.”
The “Re-Member” card is AFSCME’s answer to a Supreme Court ruling which
affirms that state workers who do not wish to belong to unions cannot be punished
for their decision by requiring such workers to pay union dues, a portion of
which is devoted to producing political mailers that are in effect campaign literature
disguised as informational brochures.
Sign on the dotted line, forget the
wizard of Oz pulling the political strings of bought legislators, climb aboard
the Lamont Express, and just shut up.
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