Posts

Public Sector Unions Are Very Different From Private Sector Unions

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Washington Examiner A strike in Chicago and New York City; rallies of tens of thousands in Wisconsin; politician walkouts in Indiana; attempts to change the constitution in Michigan — these events and more featured government unions and their leaders at the forefront of the recent battles over public policy.

As a recessed economy dragged down state expenditures, governors and legislatures increasingly looked to trim from the fattest part of government: Public-sector employees. Salaries and pensions that saw government workers being compensated far more generously than their private-sector counterparts were finally beginning to be addressed.

While it would be easy to classify this battle as between those who are “pro-union” or “anti-union,” a distinction should be made between unions in the private-sector versus the public-sector counterpart. Historically and in modern-day practice, these are two very different things.

Under the National Labor Relations Act, private-sector unions are allowed to extract dues and fees from workers if the employer is a unionized workplace. The NLRA, passed in 1935 during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first term, does not, however, apply to public-sector employees, including state and federal workers, because the thinking was that this would over-politicize government and cause a conflict of interest between unions and politicians.

Read more from this story HERE.

Public Employee Unions Spending More on Lobbying as Membership Booms

/1 Comment/in , /by

Unlike their private sector counterparts who have seen steady membership declines for several decades, federal career civil service employee unions are expanding their numbers even as they devote more dues money to lobbying Congress and the White House, often on issues only tangentially related to goverment workplace conditions, according to OpenSecrets.org’s Janie Boschma.

Approximately half of the federal government’s 2.1 million career employees are union members, and the largest of those unions is the American Federation of Government Employees, an AFL-CIO affiliate that saw a 43 percent increase in members to 282,535 last year, Boschma said. The increase came about “partly because AFGE began representing Transportation Security Administration employees last year.” she said.

The union “also increased its lobbying budget to $1.49 million last year, an increase of $190,000 over 2011, the biggest jump for federal unions in 2012. According to its fourth-quarter report, AFGE mostly lobbied budget and appropriations issues to secure funding for Customs and Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, for example.”

AFGE is the largest of the federal employee unions but it is not the biggest spending public employee union lobbyist. That distinction belongs to the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, also an AFL-CIO affiliate, which Boschma said spent $2.68 million on lobbying in 2012.

“According to its fourth-quarter report, AFSCME lobbied on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, as well as job creation bills, Hurricane Sandy relief and the fiscal cliff negotiations,” she said.

Read more from this story HERE.