Tag Archives: public employees

What Happens When You Elect Good Government

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On Christmas Eve, The Epoch Times posted an article about Argentinian President Javier Milei’s first year in office. He definitely has moved Argentina in the right direction.

The article reports:

On his first anniversary as president of Argentina, Javier Milei announced the initial results of his relentless campaign to cut government spending, eliminate regulations, and pare back the country’s administrative state.

“Today, with pride and hope, I can tell you that we have passed the test of fire,” Milei told Argentinians last week. “We are leaving the desert, the recession is over, and the country has finally begun to grow.”

When Milei took office in November 2023, Argentina, once one of the world’s 10 richest countries, was in a dysfunctional state. Having defaulted on its sovereign debt three times since 2001, it was on track to do it again.

Its annual inflation rate was approaching 200 percent, its poverty rate was above 40 percent, its growth rate was negative 1.6 percent, its fiscal deficit was 15 percent of GDP, and it was running a chronic trade deficit.

Argentinians wanted change and voted the self-proclaimed libertarian into office with the largest majority a presidential candidate has received since free elections were reinstated in 1983, taking 55.7 percent of the vote over his opponent, incumbent economy minister Sergio Massa, who received 44.3 percent.

Over the past year, Milei eliminated 10 of Argentina’s 18 government ministries, capped the salaries of top bureaucrats, and fired 34,000 public employees, cutting government spending by 30 percent.

America is heading to the place Argentina was before President Milei took office. Hopefully, President Trump will get results similar to those of President Milei.

The article notes:

Upon taking office, Milei’s administration operated as if it were in a race against time, scrambling to deliver some sign of a brighter future before voters’ patience ran out.
During his first month in office, Milei issued a “mega-decree” that included 366 regulatory reforms, according to a report by Cato political analyst Ian Vasquez and Human Freedom Index co-author Guillermina Sutter Schneider.

By the end of his first year, that had climbed to 672 regulatory reforms enacted, along with the elimination of 331 regulations and modification of 341 others.

These included actions such as eliminating import licenses and lifting rent controls. These acts ultimately led to a 35 percent reduction in the price of home appliances and a 20 percent reduction in the cost of clothing, the authors write, as well as a sharp increase in available rental apartments in Buenos Aires that brought a significant drop in rent prices.

I hope the incoming Trump administration is taking notes.

The Right To Work

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The American Spectator posted an article today about a recent decision by the West Virginia Supreme  Court.

The article reports:

This spring, the West Virginia high court upheld the state’s right-to-work law. That part of the ruling was no surprise, as courts for over 70 years have said right-to-work laws are constitutional.

Perhaps the more significant part of the ruling, which garnered less attention, is that the court essentially said the entire country should be right-to-work.

Right-to-work simply means that a union cannot get a worker fired for not paying the union. A right-to-work law gives workers the freedom to support a union if they are doing a good job, and refrain from supporting a union if they wish.

In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Janus v. AFSCME  that everything government unions do is political and that public employees have a First Amendment right to decide to support their union or not. The Janus case brought right-to-work to public employees across the country.

The article concludes:

Even West Virginia Justice Margaret Workman, who was critical of right-to-work, agreed in part and disagreed in part with the decision, writing, “I also believe that although Janus was a decision involving only public employees’ unions, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows; there is no principled basis on which to conclude that under the legal analysis upon which Janus is based, a prohibition on the collection of agency fees is constitutional for public employees’ unions but unconstitutional for private employees’ unions.”

Currently, 23 states can force private sector employees to pay unions. Similarly, airline and railroad employees, who are governed by a separate federal law, are also forced to support unions whether they want to or not.

If the U.S. Supreme Court does eventually decide the question with the same reasoning as the West Virginia Supreme Court, then all employees, public and private, will have the right to choose whether or not the union at their workplace is doing a good job and if they want to support it.

After all, freedom is blowing in the wind.

If a union is necessary in a company, the employees will support it. If it is not, the employees will not support it. That is called freedom.

Wrecking A Good Economy

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Yesterday The Daily Signal reported on a bill making its way through the House of Representatives that will negatively impact the job market.

The article reports:

Despite its congenial acronym, a bill the House of Representatives is about to pass would upend the U.S. labor market as we know it.

The Protecting the Right to Organize Act—dubbed the PRO Act—comes at a time when the labor market is stronger than it has been in decades.

Unemployment is at a 50-year low. Wage growth is incredibly strong, with the lowest-wage earners experiencing twice the average gains. The number of discouraged workers plummeted more than 25% over the past year as favorable work opportunities opened up for them.

The PRO Act threatens all of those gains at the expense of benefiting union bosses who send hundreds of millions of dollars to liberal causes and politicians each year.

The Democrats in the House of Representative are making a move to protect the flow of union money into their campaign coffers.

The article continues:

Here are just a few of the PRO Act’s harmful provisions:

1. It violates workers’ privacy. The PRO Act would force employers to provide employees’ private information—without their consent and without even the chance to opt out—including their home address, personal email address, and mobile and home phone numbers to unions.

2. It strips workers of the right to a secret ballot election. A fundamental component of our democracy is the right to vote in secret and free from fear and intimidation. That’s why many Democrats in Congress insisted on secret ballot union elections as a condition in the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

3. It subjects neutral third parties to strikes and boycotts. In an attempt to force other companies to do their bidding, the PRO Act would allow unions to strike, boycott, and otherwise harass neutral third parties that are not involved in labor disputes, but that simply do business with a company involved in a dispute.

4. It overturns the franchising business model. There are about 750,000 franchise establishments in the United States, representing far more than just fast-food restaurants. All told, franchises are spread across 300 different types of businesses in the U.S.—including car dealerships, gas stations, hotels, and gyms—and employ nearly 8 million workers. The PRO Act would upend that business model by requiring franchisors to become legally liable for workers they do not hire, fire, pay, supervise, schedule, or promote—in short, workers over whom they exercise no direct control.

5. It upends the gig economy, contracting, and independent work. Lots of people like working for themselves. In fact, the Freelancers Union estimates that 1 out of every 3 workers in the U.S. participates in independent work. About 10% of workers perform independent work (contracting, freelancing, consulting) as their primary job, and that’s their choice. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, fewer than 1 in 10 independent contractors would prefer a traditional work arrangement. By changing the definition of an employee, the PRO Act would require that almost everyone answer to a boss instead of having the option to work independently—including when, where, and for whom they want.

6. It invalidates 27 states’ right-to-work laws and overturns a Supreme Court decision. Currently, 27 states have laws that allow workers the right to choose whether or not to join a union, and the Supreme Court ruled in Janus v. AFSCME that public employees cannot be forced to pay fees to unions as a condition of their employment. The PRO Act would upend these laws of the land, usurping power from one branch of the federal government to another, as well as restricting state lawmakers from their rights to enact worker freedoms and establish an economic and business climate that they believe is most conducive to growth and opportunity. For workers in unionized workplaces, this could mean the loss of hundreds of dollars in wages each year to pay for a service workers do not want and may actively oppose.

This is the result of the election of a Democrat majority in the House of Representatives.

 

 

Bringing Efficiency Into Federal Employment

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Yesterday The Washington Times posted an article about President Trump’s recent executive orders to change civil service regulations.

The article reports:

“These executive orders will make it easier for agencies to remove poor-performing employees and make sure taxpayer dollars are more efficiently used,” Mr. Bremberg said.

The move will promote efficiency, save taxpayer dollars and create better work environments for “thousands of employees who come to work each day and do a great job,” said another official.

as expected, unions objected loudly. The article reports some of the reasons for the reforms:

Office of Personnel Management data shows federal employees are 44 times less likely to be fired than a private sector worker once they’ve completed a probationary period.

A recent Government Accountability Office report showed that it takes between six months and a year to remove a federal employee for poor performance, followed by an eight-month appeals process.

The National Affairs blog posted the following this spring:

Even President Franklin Roosevelt, a friend of private-sector unionism, drew a line when it came to government workers: “Meticulous attention,” the president insisted in 1937, “should be paid to the special relations and obligations of public servants to the public itself and to the Government….The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.” The reason? F.D.R. believed that “[a] strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to obstruct the operations of government until their demands are satisfied. Such action looking toward the paralysis of government by those who have sworn to support it is unthinkable and intolerable.” Roosevelt was hardly alone in holding these views, even among the champions of organized labor. Indeed, the first president of the AFL-CIO, George Meany, believed it was “impossible to bargain collectively with the government.”

Many of our current civil service policies are the result of the unionization of government workers. It is time for that practice to end. Government workers are paid very well and should be subject to the same rules as the rest of the workforce. Unions should not be able to collective bargain with people whose political campaigns they help finance.

Should Your Family Caregiver Have To Join A Union?

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Many families face the challenge of having to take care of elderly parents or disabled children. In certain states these family members are classified as public employees and required to have union dues taken out of the Medicaid funds that help pay for this care. If we are not careful, mom is going to be classified as a public employee so that unions can collect dues from her!

The Independent Journal Review  (IJR) posted an article today stating the following:

House Republican Conference Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) will introduce a bill by the end of February “that would prohibit states from allowing unions to automatically deduct dues and fees from Medicaid funds that are intended to help family caregivers,” according to McMorris Rodgers’ aides.

The bill, which according to aides has at least some support in the Senate, will clearly state that withdrawing labor organization dues from a Medicaid payment to a family caregiver is an “improper use of Medicaid funds.”

A civil monetary penalty will be handed out for any violations of the proposed bill, according to the chairwoman’s office. “Due-skimming is robbing our nation’s most vulnerable who need Medicaid the most,” an aide told IJR.

The article concludes:

Caregivers took to Capitol Hill on Tuesday, calling on Congress to stop states — including California, Minnesota and Illinois — from classifying family caregivers as public employees. House GOP officials say ending the practice could save Medicaid and other programs as much as $200 million a year.

“What bothers me the most is, I know a lot of parents, because I’m in this community,” said Miranda Thorpe, a registered nurse who also cares for her 21-year-old daughter, according to Fox News.

“And none of them really understand that this is happening to them. They have no idea. I don’t think the state should be the factor that colludes with unions to take out this money without people’s knowledge,” Thorpe added.

“If they really wanted people to have a choice, then they should let them know what their options are. … I think it’s very unfair since this is a very vulnerable population.”

I don’t have a problem with unions, but they have become as corrupt as politicians (and sometimes the two work together very closely). Union dues should be collected from people who choose to join a union. Union fat cats live as well as the corporate fat cats they condemn (at least the corporate fat cats generally produce either a product or a service). It is time for the practice of penalizing family members who provide care for a family member to end.