By Chris Powell
Could Stamford, a Democratic-controlled city, be tired of forfeiting its financial management to government employee unions?
That’s the implication of a vote by the city’s Board of Representatives — the city council — at its first meeting of the new year. The board voted 23-7 to reject a proposed contract with the school administrators union on the grounds that it is too expensive. It would have provided 10.5% raises over three years. While that would be much less than inflation, school administrators long have been highly paid.
So now, under Connecticut’s democracy-destroying government labor law, the contract will go to binding arbitration, in which, as the board was warned, the city may lose and have to pay tens of thousands of dollars in fees.
According to the Connecticut Examiner, the big majority against the contract included both Democrats and Republicans, and they meant to caution other city employee unions and the city’s Board of Education against asking for too much.
Whether Stamford’s school administrators deserve those raises isn’t the big point here. The big point is whether Stamford’s elected representatives should determine the city’s payroll. With binding arbitration, state law maintains that the special interest — government employee unions — should have power equal to or even greater than that of elected officials. This is a big reason why Connecticut is so highly taxed and expensive.
The law is a consequence of the cowardice of governors and legislators going back four decades. As government employment rose and government employee unions became more influential, governors and legislators didn’t want to get caught between those unions and taxpayers. (Most municipal officials didn’t want to either.) So ultimate control over government labor costs was transferred to arbiters, enabling elected officials to shrug at the expensive results and claim there was nothing they could do.
The argument for binding arbitration for government employee union contracts has been that it prevents strikes. This is false.
Strikes are prevented by [ITALICS] giving in. [END ITALICS] If government employees are ever dissatisfied enough with an arbitrated contract, they might strike anyway — if they want to risk breaking Connecticut’s law forbidding strikes by government employee unions. (In 1978 an illegal strike by teachers in Bridgeport prompted Connecticut’s extension of binding arbitration to teacher unions the following year.)
Some people who recognize binding arbitration law’s affront to democracy suggest repealing both the arbitration law and the law forbidding government employee union strikes. But there is no public interest in allowing such strikes, since government represents everyone but a union only a few.
It’s different in the private sector, where the public interest is much less if ever at stake.
Of course since Connecticut is controlled by Democrats and the government employee unions control the Democratic Party, the state won’t see reform of government employee labor law any time soon. But maybe someday a brave state legislator will propose the reform that would expose binding arbitration and its advocates as enemies of democracy.
Such legislation would preserve binding arbitration but elect the arbiters and put government employee union contracts to referendum.
Then the government employee unions might have to explain to the public why democracy is bad.
* * *
KEEP DEBT LIMIT: With Republicans in control of the U.S. House of Representatives, concern is growing that they won’t approve an increase in the federal debt limit and that, in freezing the debt limit, they will trigger a shutdown of the government.
This is nonsense. For the federal government could continue operating just fine without raising the debt limit. Instead it could raise taxes or reduce spending or both. So responsibility for any shutdown also would fall on those members of Congress who wouldn’t raise taxes or cut spending.
There is so much bloat in federal spending, so much special-interest favoritism in tax law, and so much inflation caused by excessive spending and debt monetization that freezing the debt limit is needed to prompt some of the auditing and economizing the federal government needs.
—–
Chris Powell (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com) is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut.
-END-
Chris Powell column 