THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

No other organization can pass a law mandating that its customers (taxpayers) purchase its services and at what price (taxes), either.

This is flawed logic. There is a very big reason why legislative and executive is supposed to be separated and your logic comes from an assumption that there is no separation.

The executive branch should govern as it sees fit within the limits of the law that the people have decided, and the people should elect lawmakers that know what the heck they are doing. Democracy 101.

If this simple principle is not working/not respected there is a larger issue to resolve.

Simply said, the employer here cannot actually set ‘LAWS’, only “company policies”. They can however formulate law needs that the legislative branch, supposedly run by electees of the people, need to vet.

Perhaps you can take this into account in your reflection and see where it takes you?

Liberalism dies when all the tax revenue goes to the workforce and not to those who are the desired recipients of government assistance.

Each dollar that goes to overhead is theft from a needy person.

One argument against public sector unions is that public sector unions hold an inordinate amount of influence over their “employers.” Because of their political power, public sector unions can threaten to fire their bosses.

I do think that changing the rules mid-stream is a wrong, but my impression is that the Republican plan in Wisconsin will still give everyone everything they have already been promised.

Many states including Virgina (plus 11 others) “already” do not allow collective bargaining in the public sector at all and are doing fine.  Without going into all the detail about how inefficient and how inconsistent with freedom unions are, I’d like to welcome Wisconsin in to the fold.

@Frank

Someone who has studied the issue in great detail disagrees with you:

http://centerforsocialconcerns.nd.edu/documents/HigginsReportonRTWMarch32011.pdf

“Empirically, the argument that RTW laws will, in the long run, lead to higher wages is not accurate either. Since the Taft-Hartley Act was passed in 1947, and since 18 of the 22 RTW states had passed RTW laws by 1955, the long run should have already arrived. But the evidence indicates...that wages and benefits today are lower for union and non-union workers in RTW states than in non-RTW states.”

Unless you’re arguing that it’s good for employers to pay their employees less, which I can’t imagine many people agreeing with.

Hawerchuk wrote: “Unless you’re arguing that it’s good for employers to pay their employees less, which I can’t imagine many people agreeing with.”

The report Hawerchuk provides is even more scathing than this, too. Not only are the wages lower (which is perhaps not surprising), but it notes that the oft-cited trickle-down effect of attracting non-unionized jobs doesn’t actually exist, either.

But I don’t understand, philosophically, why pro-market types don’t support unions. They’re just another corporation, looking to land the best return for their goods in order to satisfy their shareholders. They aren’t undermining capitalism - they’re feeding it. (That is, until you start f*ing with their right to exist.)

@Xeifrank

Only 5 states do not have collective bargaining for educators and have deemed it illegal. Those states and their ranking on ACT/SAT scores are:

South Carolina -50th
North Carolina -49th
Georgia -48th
Texas -47th
Virginia -44th

I’m guessing that a lot of that has to do with the findings Hawerchuk mentioned.

Wisconsin, with it’s collective barganing for teachers, is ranked 2nd in the country.

It seems to me that so long as local governments have a near-monopoly on teacher hiring, teachers ought to be allowed to collectively bargain.

Ideally, I think, charter schools would make up a significant portion of the market and public schools would bid against each other for teachers and then there would be no need for a union.

I think that some of the problems with schools might stem from this government monopoly.  As a teacher at a private school I don’t have to worry about getting arbitrarily fired.  If the higher-ups fire good teachers their paying customers will get upset and take the money elsewhere.  Sure, the administration might make occasional mistakes but they are incentivized to get it right.  At a public school, there’s no such mechanism so teacher are worried about being arbitrarily fired and we end up with all these disputes over seniority, tenure, high-stakes testing and the like that would be non-issues without the monopoly.

#8.  What is the ‘R’ on your causation vs correlation study?

#8:

That’s a great example of bad statistics:

http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/03/longhorns-17-badgers-1.html

In principal I agree that unions shouldn’t be illegal, be they public or private sector. However, AFAIK, in general unions *force* employees to join. That is, you cannot be, say, a public school teacher and *not* join the teacher’s union. This takes away a major right of individuals: the ability to negotiate your own wages.

So it’s not a very good argument to say that employees are prevented from bargaining their wages. They can still do that just as much as before. Indeed collective bargaining must favor some employees over others. In general top performers would much rather bargain individually.

#8, I’m not sure where your data comes from. Here is a list of all states by SAT score, which doesn’t agree with your numbers:
http://www.commonwealthfoundation.org/policyblog/detail/2010-sat-scores-by-state

It has Wisconsin 3rd. However it’s pretty clear that this is a poor measurement, since only 4% of students in Wisconsin take the SAT vs. 92% in Maine (which ranks last). To do this more properly you’d need a test that all students were required to take (I’m not sure that this even exists), and you’d need to adjust for race and income level (e.g., Maryland has more than twice the per-capita income of Mississippi).

@12,

I don’t know the law in Wisconsin, but in the non-RTW state where I live, teachers absolutely are NOT required to join the union. In fact, union membership is only about 60% in the district where my wife teaches. From my perspective, the biggest problem is the 40% who benefit from the negotiations of the union without paying dues are free-loaders.

As for “top performers” being allowed to negotiate individually, in my wife’s experience, teachers are rarely rated on actual teaching ability. Rather, they are rated on their political skills. For instance, one of her co-workers who has taught the same grade for 30 years is about to be forced to move to a different grade. This is not because she’s a bad teacher - her students actually do quite well. Rather, it is because she doesn’t want to implement a particular teaching technique. She’s tried it in the past, and says it doesn’t work well for her. But the administration has been in place for only two years and is adamant that everyone teaching at that particular grade level use this technique. Does her refusal make her a difficult employee? Probably. But it doesn’t make her a bad teacher.

Unions in general are economically obsolete. Labor law is too inflexible for the modern economy and most of the problems unions used to solve are now addressed by legislation. There are government regulations and agencies galore to deal with occupational safety, discrimination, and so forth.

The original post is worthless because it misses the rather important fact that public employees will still be allowed to collectively bargain for wages. Their benefits will still be incredibly good, but even if future contracts reduced them, the public employees could hold out for higher wages to compensate.

Ultimately though public unions are a bad idea, as FDR believed. We see now how taxpayer dollars are funneled in huge quantities to the Democratic Party, such that in many cases there is no adversarial relationship. Democrats happily overpay public employees, knowing that in turn millions will flow to their political operation.

How fair is it that Republican teachers in WI and other states have no choice but to fund the Democratic Party? And not just on the margins- public unions are the financial and organizational backbone of Democrats across the country. That’s why they will do anything to protect the corrupt system that has developed.

Nice article Gassko. Krugman is an embarrassment.

About this topic, collective bargaining is fine when there are two opposing sides sitting at the table. That too often isn’t the case when public employees are involved. Public unions, through elections, have the power to choose their opponents.

Just take a look at who is on the school board in Madison. Most are former teachers beholden to the teachers unions. Those are the people charged with “negotiating” with the union.  It is like having your batting practice pitcher on the mound closing out a game instead of your opponent’s closer, or going to a diner and having the waitress’s tip be determined by her boss.

In Minnesota, for example, pension contributions are written into state law and can’t be bargained:

http://www.startribune.com/politics/local/116784878.html

Is that “dirty pool” according to MGL’s argument?

David (11), from your link:

Event Dropout Rates for 9th-12th graders during 2006-7 school year:

White students: Texas 1.9%, Wisconsin 1.2% (national average 3.0%)
Black students: Texas 5.8%, Wisconsin 7.8% (national 6.8%)
Hispanic students: Texas 5.6%, Wisconsin 5.2% (national 6.5%)

White and Hispanic Texas students indeed seem to dropout at a higher rate than their counterparts in Wisconsin, although in both cases (a) the difference is not statistically significant

If I’m being super conservative, there’s what - 100,000 students 9-12th grade in WI?

How is 1.2% versus 1.9% over a sample of 100,000+ students NOT statistically significant?  I see it as p < .01.  I see it as p < .01 with a sample of 10,000 students in each.

#15 “Unions in general are economically obsolete. Labor law is too inflexible for the modern economy and most of the problems unions used to solve are now addressed by legislation. There are government regulations and agencies galore to deal with occupational safety, discrimination, and so forth.”

In regards to occupational safety, many of the agencies that are supposed to enforce the legislation are under funded, under staffed, and under political pressure to not do their job.  This makes unions extremely important for occupational safety.  It would be hard to see this if you have not been involved in it, but it is the case.  Corporations preach safety first, but will fight tooth and nail against safety upgrades and inspections, as they take away from profit (in the short term, at least).  Legislation and enforcement are separate branches of the government.

Safety is a hard sell.  Workers do not want safety precautions that make their work more difficult or time consuming.  Employers do not want safety precautions that cost them profit.  Politicians do not like to fund safety because there is nothing to point to if it is successful. 

Union safety reps get little support from anyone except the state OSHA workers who are treated the same way and often apologize for not being able to do what is right.

Nobody, of course, has mentioned the larger point:

- Financial firms sold state pension funds “AAA-rated” bonds
- Said bonds were decidedly not AAA-rated - this was a fix of fraudulence and incompetence
- We bailed out Wall St, when it’s all said and done, on the order of $10T.
- Nobody bailed out the state pension funds; they weren’t set to immediately explode
- Now Wall St and its fellow travelers are using Wall St’s own incompetence and fraudulence to justify breaking unions

In some cases, Wall St is directly trying to break the unions.  e.g. John Kasich, governor of Ohio?  Managing Director at Lehman Brothers. 

So fix this problem, which has cost us a damned fortune, and then we can move on to the merits of collective bargaining and discuss whether working people deserve to live middle-class lives.

The agenda of the Wisconsin governor and R. legislators is clear. Let’s pass a law that reduces the overall benefits (i.e. money) for the state’s employees so that we can reduce the deficit.  Yes, I think that is dirty pool.  Employees and employers should be free to bargain with one another unfettered by government intrusion.

I am NOT passing judgment on which system is economically beneficial to the state and I am not passing judgment on whether unions are good or effective or not. I am making an ideological judgment, and I stand by it, despite some good and interesting information in this thread from some knowledgeable folks.

I agree about Krugman by the way.  I had always thought that he was this progressive genius.  Then I saw him on the Bill Maher show and he sounded like an idiot and a talking head.  I am glad to know that my instincts were right (at least according to the opinion of some people)…

Hard to argue with mgl’s last comment.  But how do we get public union’s that have retirement at age 50 with 98% of their last salary?  How do we get public union members that contribute 6% of their medical insurance costs?  One simple reason:  Negotiations are one-sided.  I’ve negotiated many contracts for companies I worked for.  Contracts with suppliers, contracts with DoD bureaucrats and contracts with other DoD prime contractors.  Guess which were easiest?  Oh, I bet you guessed.  Why would bureaucrats be easier to negotiate with?  Because IT’S NOT THEIR MONEY.  All they care about is if they “look good” by getting some concession from the contractor.  So I made sure I could give it to them at the right time.  That’s how public unions have gotten these ridiculous contracts.  How else?  The need for public unions has long since passed, and they should not be allowed.

The need for public unions has long since passed, and they should not be allowed.

Countries that don’t or didn’t allow unions:

China, Burma, North Korea, United Arab Emirates, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Mussolini’s Italy, Franco’s Spain, Napoleon’s France, Hussein’s Iraq, Bremer’s Iraq.

so you’re saying Pol Pot allowed unions?

@23

Godwin’s Law invoked.  You Lose.

#22, you nailed it.

#23, in China everyone has a legal right to join a union. Even Wal-marts employees in China are unionized, as are government workers.

http://www.china.org.cn/english/2002/Nov/48588.htm

Of course, all union leaders become party members, who are controlled by the party. Union members can not vote for the party leaders, so they have nothing to worry about.

Public unions in the US, because of their ability to influence the vote, are bought off with tax payer dollars (or debt), while non-public union leaders get bought off to reduce demands from their unions.

Unions are/were central to corporations and governments ability to control workers and obtain cost certainty.  The bill for any concession is paid by the workers in the form of higher taxes or prices for goods/services. 

However, given the lower standard of living for the average non public worker over the past 30 years, their ability to absorb price increases is reduced, so non-public unions are corrupted to suppress their workers demands. On the other hand, public unions work with a cash cow, as the ability of government to carry debt and tax means their demands are met with nary a whimper.

23:  Private unions are OK.  Companies have a real, vested interest in negotiations....

Here is one example of the type of negotiations going on when public unions are involved. This article was written two years ago about a new contract for a Milwaukee school system.

http://www.wpri.org/WIInterest/Vol18No2/Nichols18.2.html

The voice vote that afternoon passed unanimously without a word from board members other than a collective “Aye.” After the vote, Earle finally spoke up.

“Is that the first time we have had no dissenting votes on a labor contract?” he asked.
There was a little bit of laughter and everyone seemed amused—with the exception of Cole, who would be fired five months later after being cited for driving under the influence.

“We’ll send our historical research team on that one, [and have them] report back,” Baker quipped.“I have another question: Is this the first time you have had a three-minute board meeting?” asked Holmes.

“Well, I did say I want this in my batting average,” replied Baker. “I want this factored in.”

“Well,” replied Holmes, “your average is coming way down.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Baker, “I want this factored in.”

Wilson, on the speaker phone, moved adjournment and—exactly three minutes and 34 seconds after the meeting had been called to order—it was over.

Godwin’s Law

Santayana’s Law: Those Who Ignore History Are Doomed To Repeat It

Wow, I didn’t realize that Krugman grew up in the same home town as I did…

#22/exactly.  School boards and other officials who are supposed to represent the interests of students, teachers, and taxpayers all too often completely forget the taxpayers.  The old economic “concentrated benefits, diffuse costs” arrangement leads to the current budget situation that many states and localities find themselves in.  Public unions vs private unions makes all of the difference in the world--school board members have no incentive to vote against the interests of the education establishment no matter how out of line their requests may be.  Pay a small amount of extra taxes themselves and get the teacher unions and administrators (who turn out the vote in sparsely attended school board elections) behind you & your political ambitions and shift the tax burden to the general taxpayer.  The school board in my town has voted 7-0 on every decision for at least five years.  These included 4-4.5% teacher raises every single year over the last four years.  One would think at least a single individual might have questioned the wisdom of this policy during the falling property values, high unemployment, and the worst economic climate since the Great Depression.

Here is a local article that sums up the situation pretty well…

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/article_6f246264-984a-52ab-9090-ec96f8618499.html

Relevant part at the end of the article:

But school districts have been able to soften the blow, largely due to their own ability to set property tax rates, The reason that school districts have avoided some of the pain of the recession can be traced directly back to the local school boards that set tax rates, said William T. Rebore, an expert on school finance at St. Louis University and former superintendent in the Valley Park and Francis Howell school districts.

He said school board members, many of whom have children enrolled in the districts, develop close relationships with teachers and staff that pay off at contract time.

“It’s easy to take a stand against employee raises if you’re a corporate executive in Detroit who does not have contact with the autoworkers,” Rebore said. “But that’s not the case at the school board level. You get to become friends. And that’s just human nature, to be on friendly terms with the teacher who is teaching your kids; you don’t want to have a negative relationship with them (teachers). And that attitude does benefit teachers at contract time.”

One longtime school board member agrees with Rebore’s analysis.

Mark Behlmann has been on the board of the Hazelwood School District for 14 years.

In April, the board approved a contract giving teachers and staff a 3 percent raise for the 2010-11 school year. That followed a 4 percent raise for Hazelwood teachers and staff last year.

“What Rebore said is very accurate,” Behlmann said. “There is a very close-knit relationship between school board members and teachers; it’s like family.”

"One would think at least a single individual might have questioned the wisdom of this policy during the falling property values, high unemployment, and the worst economic climate since the Great Depression.”

Worst economic climate since the great depression?  You could have fooled me.  We had record corporate profits in 2010 (and continuing into 2011.)

Wall Street reported a 4% increase in bonuses in 2010:

http://www.aolnews.com/2010/10/12/144-billion-dollars-in-wall-street-bonuses-how-much-is-that-re/

Remind me again - who nearly destroyed the world’s economy in 2008 and had to be bailed out?  If we’re trying to claw back their salaries, it must have been Wisconsin’s unionized teachers.

i didnt know it was responsibility of lawmakers and politicians in wisconsin to regulate wall street. i’m pretty sure wisconsin lawmakers and politiccians are picking on the teacher’s unions because thats who they are mandated to regulate when they get elected, and not wall street firms or public companies.

I might be more willing to listen to the argument concerning Wisconsin teachers if their collective bargaining were breaking the bank and the cops and firefighters contracts were too.

But it seems that the cops and firefighters rights are just fine seemingly solely because they vote for the correct party.

Nice dodge, Ken. Corporations in Wisconsin see record profits, but far be it for the state treasury to raise revenues from those who benefit from employing Wisconsin’s workforce. No, faced with revenue shortfalls, a state has no choice but to break contracts with its workers, cops and firemen excepted.

i didnt know it was responsibility of lawmakers and politicians in wisconsin to regulate wall street.

boa doesn’t have banks in WI? neither does jp morgan? weren’t WI banks bailed out? didn’t walker hand out tax breaks to WI banks?

E-6, I don’t understand this. There are 314 police and fire unions in Wisconsin. Four of those 314 endorsed Walker.

I understand the spirit behind that Santayana quote, but in terms of strict accuracy, it’s wrong. History is linear, and even if there are similarities between peoples, events, contexts, etc., history never repeats itself.

/ends rant

what dodge? i’m not taking sides on this one. i dont know close to enough about the situation. i just dont see what wisconsin state lawmakers and the wisconsin teacher’s union fighting over contracts has to do with wall street and the banking crisis of 2008.

Paul,

Walker has exempted the cops and firefighters from collective bargaining ban. It is generally believed that he carved out this special exception because police and firefighters have a tendency to vote Republican.

Where there is smoke, there is probably fire. If collective bargaining is so bad, you’d think it would be bad for the cops and firefighers to have this right as well. How exactly would this work for the state for them but not for the teachers?

Why do you think Walker is exempting them?

Ken - I explained it further up.  State pension funds were pulled into risky bonds that had been stamped AAA, whether through incompetence or fraudulence on Wall St.  Wall St didn’t pay for this; they got bailouts. 

But oh noes, we can’t ask them to pay back more than a fraction of those bailouts to close our revenue gaps...That money needs to come off the backs of working people, just like the Wall St bailouts.

Why does it bother you for tax money to go to pay the salaries of regular people, but giving Wall St 100% of GDP in bailouts generates a big shrug?

#41,

Some factual errors in your post. TARP was $700 billion, or about 5% of GDP. TARP is expected to ultimately cost $25 billion, so the “fraction” that taxpayers will get back is in fact 96.4%.

yeah i’m still pretty sure they dont have much to do with one another. GM got a huge bail out, people got relief on their home mortgages, all sorts of stuff happened. i guess its not that difficult to connect everything to a wall street conspiracy but i’m not seeing it here anyway.

and i’m not sure i follow your last statement. i know bankers and unionized teachers. i consider them all regular people. i havent gotten bothered about how much any of them benefit from receiving tax dollars but i also havent ever looked into it that closely to be honest.

E-6, wouldn’t getting the endorsement of just 4 out of 314 police and fire unions mean cops and firemen generally don’t vote Republican?

Or are you saying the police and firemen union leadership are endorsing and donating to Democratic candidates despite most of its membership being GOP?

That would be a nice racket wouldn’t it? Force cops to join a union, pay union dues, and send that money to candidates and groups that the rank and file oppose?

Sounds fair to me.

@DSG

Sorry, but you’ve got bad info. TARP was only the tip of the iceberg.  Bloomberg put the estimate at $13T as early as March 2009:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=armOzfkwtCA4&refer=worldwide

A small fraction of that was recovered or repaid.

Ken, I think you hit your own nail on the head.  You haven’t looked into this issue that closely, but you’ve got no problem having an opinion on it without evidence.  If we were talking about baseball, Tango would call you out.

Anyways, just to give you some numbers:

Homeowners Affordability and Stability Plan = $73B
GM Bailout = $50B

Wall St Bailout > $10T

So yeah, like you said, everybody got some money, and bankers are just regular guys.

Paul,

I think you are a bit in denial on this issue. Just because they didn’t outright endorse Walker doesn’t mean that they don’t have a net Republican endorsement. In looking a little further into this, it appears that cops and firefighters are basically split when it comes to parties but have a slight lean to the Republicans.

The group is considered a key swing vote and therefore the Republicans don’t want to alienate them by taking away their collective bargaining.

I think the fact that they were excluded speaks for itself.

ok, my bad, i guess the wisconsin legislature should stop fighting with the teachers union and start trying to get all that bail out money from the inhuman bankers. my bad for being so opinionated yet uniformed.

#45,

I’m really not interested in getting into a political argument here so I’m not going to post after this, but you’re truly making things up. Those guarantees ended up costing us fairly little (by government spending standards), about $25 billion. A lot of those programs in fact never really got off the ground, so even though billions and even trillions in spending were authorized, a lot of that spending never happened. If we had lost $13 trillion, the budget deficits in the past few years would have reflected that; instead, they’ve been around $1 trillion a year, and even that is not due to bailout programs.

I understand the spirit behind that Santayana quote, but in terms of strict accuracy, it’s wrong. History is linear, and even if there are similarities between peoples, events, contexts, etc., history never repeats itself.

duh! Santayana said ‘Those Who Ignore History Are Doomed To Repeat It’

I don’t see him saying anything like ‘Those Who Ignore History Are Doomed To Repeat It Exactly’ or ‘Those Who Ignore History Are Doomed To Repeat It In The Exact Same Fashion’ or ‘Those Who Ignore History Are Doomed To Strictly Repeat It’

Damn dude, I’m not making things up.  If you want to say that Bloomberg is making things up, go ahead, but it’s pretty clear that $4.2T had been committed by 3/31/2009, and that a total of $13T was pledged by their count.

And this isn’t a political argument.  Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul are on the same page.  It doesn’t matter who you vote for, you can understand that the banks almost destroyed the country, and they ripped off the taxpayers as we saved them.

E-6,

Even if your speculation on Walker’s motives are right, so what? Are you saying the GOP should keep politics out of politics? That Democrats can fight for their allies but Walker can’t?

Paul,

Nope. I was just responding to your doubt that politics had anything to do with it. He got elected so he can represent who he chooses. He’s probably going to need all the allies he can get come the next election.

Hawerchuk, nice job lumping all bankers together. Real nuanced of you.

Ah yes, you’d like to defend the poor bankers, so unfairly maligned after they destroyed the economy and then took trillions in taxpayer bailouts.  Seriously, what does it take for you to care about people taking your money?

Hawerchuk, I’m surprised someone as smart as you can be so thick-headed. All I’m asking you is to distinguish between the bankers who were the main cause of the financial meltdown of 2008 and the ones who weren’t. I guess that’s too much for your thick skull.

Play nice guys.

I’m not sure why people are so sensitive about the role that the financial sector played in the *financial crisis*.  The government bailed the entire sector out; this is not in dispute...Every banker benefited from this socialism…