Wisconsin's unrest boils down to a basic injustice for which the unions are responsible, which most Americans understand in the end

Ryan Streeter

With all the coverage coming out of Wisconsin and the conflicting statements made by the protestors and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, it's worth boiling down the issue to the basics. Here you go.

George Lightbourn, who runs Wisconsin's premier free market think tank, has a post today here on ConservativeHome in which he makes a statement that helps put in perspective what is going on in Wisconsin: "a public sector worker with a salary of $48,000 has a retirement benefit equal to a private sector worker with a $70,000 salary."

I was reading over the report that George's think tank published on how the public pension system works in Wisconsin and came across a table that shows more explicitly what George mentions in his post (a "WRS Employee" is a state government employee).

The table is accompanied by another chart comparing the pension contributions of state and private employers as a percentage of overall payroll.

As you can see, you can get a much better benefit on a lower salary when you work for the state, and the state contributes a much greater percentage to public employees' retirement plans.

This is, very basically, what Scott Walker has been talking about.

If I could distill what he has been saying into two basic points, it would be these:

1. There is a basic injustice at work when taxpayers are forced to pay public employees a better compensation than they themselves enjoy, and this injustice is made even worse when it creates huge fiscal imbalances - that, in the end, taxpayers have to foot the bill for, too.
2. This injustice is ultimately the product of collective bargaining, which avoids democratic procedures for setting compensation levels, games the political system to the advantage of public workers, and disregards any sense of parity with the private sector.

Yuval Levin has an especially good post laying out how the public unions work to their own advantage and enjoy an upper hand over their private sector union counterparts, not to mention non-unionized private workers. He writes:

[With collective bargaining,] the unions gain the power to make in private negotiations decisions that should be made in public deliberations—decisions about public priorities and public budgets. And they turn public employees into a formal procedural adversary of the public they serve. This presents some serious problems to our democratic system, problems that traditionally kept even the biggest advocates of unionism from supporting collective bargaining with the government.

In the end, those opposing Walker have to convincingly refute the two points above. The American public understands that it's pretty hard to refute them, which is why more people support Walker than the unions in the matter.

Comments

[Ash Faulkner]

Right. So the private sector in the United States has, in the past thirty years, consistently screwed its workers as practically all the gains in productivity have gone to profits. This is directly connected to the decline of unionisation in the private sector. In the public sector, where unionisation is relatively higher, surprise surprise, the workers get a better deal. And who gets the blame? The public sector unions for still having the guts and the power to push for their own interests and stop themselves being shafted like their private counterparts have been - and are being to this day. It's just incredible. The existential crisis of neoliberalism leads to what? More neoliberalism!

Oh, and there's always money for tax cuts for millionaires. Fiscal conservatism my arse.

[johhny galt]

There are a few things that the think tank failed to disclose: public employees do not collect social security benefits if they receive a pension even though they pay into social security.
Think tank also failed to include financial benefits from the private sector which often include stock options, as well as the finanial values of such things as airline and hotel discounts, frequent flyer miles accumulation, car stipend and gasoline cards--to name a few.