The California Teachers Association just enthused: “On this Labor Day, let us come together to celebrate working people everywhere, the freedom to join unions and the transformative power of labor organizations.” Below was a headline, in bold: “Union Power, Forever.”
If you listen to the unions, they will tell you how things really work. “We have a unique power – we elect our bosses,” former Los Angeles teachers union president Alex Caputo-Pearl told union members in 2020. “It would be difficult to think of workers anywhere else who elect their bosses. We do.”
What about the people, the citizens, the taxpayers, the other voters? And for school districts, the parents? The union bosses don’t care about them. They care about power and all that power brings with it.
In the non-government sector that actually produces the goods taxed to pay for the government sector, except in rare cases, the employees do not “elect their own bosses.” The bosses are the owners of the company, either the private owners or the stockholders of a publicly traded firm. Where there’s a union, the union leadership negotiates not with “our own bosses,” but with management. And the union knows if it goes too far in its demands, the company can go broke and everybody loses their job.
By contrast, with government-employee unions, excessive demands typically come at the expense of taxpayers. When the government unions drain public funds, public services are reduced over time. Taxpayers are then treated to a shaming exercise in which consultant-crafted tax increases are rammed through “to sustain public services.” Rinse and repeat.
For Labor Day 2025, union clout is straining state and local budgets more than ever.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s January budget proposal for 2025-26 included data showing 11.1 state workers per 100,000 population. That was up 20% from predecessor Gov. Jerry Brown’s 9.26%. In just six years. And boy are they paid well. In May, Stanford University budget expert David Crane calculated Newsom now is paying 255,000 executive-branch positions an average of $177,000 for salaries and benefits. Total: $45 billion.
On Aug. 6, Controller Malia reported, “[T]he state’s net liability for retiree health and dental benefits – also known as other post-employment benefits (OPEB) – increased to $91.5 billion.” Up from $6.3 billion from 2024. Stanford University budget expert David Crane said that was “one of the reasons government unions in California are polling for opportunities to raise taxes.” And no wonder the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office in its May Multiyear Budget Outlook warned of deficits that “range from $10 billion to $20 billion through 2028-29.”
For cities, as this newspaper reported in July, “Retiree pensions continue to inflict great pain on municipal finances, gobbling up more than 20% of general fund dollars in at least a half-dozen Orange County cities.” Earlier, Los Angeles resolved, for now, a $1 billion budget deficit with cuts to services. Union-controlled San Diego County, meanwhile, has moved to raid its reserve funds at the behest of county unions.
Something has to give. Organized labor isn’t the only labor. The rest of us work, too. The Legislature, governor and unions need to respect our labor and not tax us into penury.