WhatFinger


As FDR believed they should be, and as they were before 1962.

Scott Walker: Make federal employee unions illegal



I know that some of you are going to call this an attention-getting stunt because Walker is struggling in the polls. Here's my response to that: A guy who's running for president should seek success in the polls by making solid, serious policy proposals. That's what this is. And if anyone thinks he's not serious, they don't know Walker's governing history. He understands like few governors how the cycle of corruption works between public-employee unions and Democrats:
Unions fund Democrat candidates, who, once elected, offer generous compensation packages to union members so they can conscript more members and collect more dues so they can keep funding Democrat candidates, who, once elected . . . rinse, repeat. Walker also has done his homework, and knows that the patron saint of the left, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, considered it absurd that federal employees should be allowed to unionize for this very reason. But the Kennedys figured out in the early '60s that they could master the gambit described above, so they lifted the ban, which brings us to today. In an op-ed published by Hot Air, Walker proposes that we return to the wisdom of FDR:
Federal unions are also at the forefront of keeping federal employees involved in egregious misconduct on the federal payroll. When an employee at a VA hospital in Kansas City, Mo., allowed a patient to wander out of a secure psychiatry unit in 2014, VA officials sought to fire the employee. But the union representing the worker wouldn’t allow that. Instead, it fought to reduce the penalty to a suspension, and later helped the employee get back pay for the time he was under suspension. Union protection also prevented the government from firing a USDA food inspector who failed to discover a massive rat infestation in a pasta-production plant. The union won back-pay for the employee despite his actions jeopardizing the health of consumers. These are just a few examples.

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And let’s not forget the fact that federal unions interfere with the ability of the government to serve the people. Consider the millions of hours each year federal employees spend working for big-labor bosses, rather than the American people. In 2012, taxpayers subsidized more than 3.3 million hours of “official time,” in which government employees are paid to work exclusively for union bosses, at a cost of $156 million to American taxpayers. At the IRS, which has been busy attacking conservative groups instead of actually helping Americans deal with their taxes, more than 200 employees work full-time for big-government union bosses at taxpayer expense. The situation is even worse at the Department of Veterans Affairs, where in fiscal year 2013, more than 250 employees – including medical professionals – collected taxpayer-funded salaries to work for union bosses instead of veterans. The fact that this is occurring at a time when the IRS and VA lurch from one scandal to another and struggle to provide basic services to those they are charged with serving underscores the need for reform.
Walker is right on all counts. There is simply no benefit to the nation - and certainly not to taxpayers - from allowing federal employees to unionize. It is an arrangement that serves the interests of the employees themselves, their political patrons and the union bosses. That's it. No one else gets anything good out of this unholy alliance. Actually making this happen would require someone to effectively disabuse the nation of its romantic notions about unions, whom many think are responsible for "building the middle class" and preventing workers from suffering through 16-hour days in sweatshops. They have no idea how unions are promoting inefficiency and unresponsiveness in government, nor do they understand how much all this is unnecessarily costing them. Walker has already proven he is not afraid to stand up to public employee unions in Wisconsin. I have every confidence he would do the same at the federal level as president.


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Dan Calabrese -- Bio and Archives

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

Follow all of Dan’s work, including his series of Christian spiritual warfare novels, by liking his page on Facebook.


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