George Will: End taxpayer funding of union salaries

George Will: End taxpayer funding of union salaries

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snip


Mark Flatten of the Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank, says all six of the top PLEA officers derive full pay and benefits from the city, although each is assigned full time to the union — and each is also entitled to 160 hours of annual extra-pay overtime. Officials of the six other public employees unions also have full-time city jobs. All told, the annual bill for 73,000 hours of release time is $3.7 million.
In 2007, Phoenix voters endorsed a sales tax increase to pay for more police and firefighters. DiCiccio, who is working for better contracts, knows that few voters knew about the existence, let alone the costs, of release time.
Other states and local governments have release time provisions in contracts with public employees, as do some federal contracts. The unions, and their partners and enablers in government, insist that release time activities improve government employees' morale and efficiency and they receive the release time benefit in lieu of higher wages and benefits. But how could that be demonstrated?
If release time really involves no increase in aggregate compensation to union members, why do unions favor this roundabout route to compensation? One reason, perhaps, is to punish police officers who do not join the union: They see some of their potential wages go instead to union officials. Also, if union activities were paid for by union dues rather than tax dollars, there would be less dues money available for campaign contributions to the grateful politicians who negotiate release time benefits for the contributing unions.
This is a crucial difference between release time provisions negotiated by private companies: In the private sector, unions are not effectively on both sides of the negotiation table. Collusion between the employer and the employees' union is inherent in public-sector unionization, particularly because public-sector employers and employees have congruent interests in increasing government budgets.

Read more: http://www.stltoday.com/news/opinion/columns/george-will/george-will-end-taxpayer-funding-of-union-salaries/article_4a375443-ff82-5e2d-813b-1208aae6a97e.html#ixzz1pO3pleng

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sad that George seems to be a moron in this matter.  George usually puts up a more intellectual argument than "unions are bad"