Public Employee Unions

This weekend, the San Diego Union-Tribune editorialized that wealthy Republican gubernatorial candidates Steve Poizner and Meg Whitman should use their cash to fund ballot initiatives undermining union prerogatives--particularly those of public employee unions. The U-T seems puzzled why they haven't.

There are a couple of answers. 1. The strategy of pairing an initiative campaign with a gubernatorial campaign has, at best, a mixed record of success. When John van de Kamp ran for the Democratic nomination in 1990, he built his campaign around three initiatives. Both he and the initiatives went down to defeat. Supporters of the concept point to Pete Wilson's embrace of Prop 187 in the 1994 campaign, but the hard truth about that is that Wilson likely did more for 187 than vice versa. And Prop 187 wasn't Wilson's measure; others qualified the initiative, and he later backed it.

2. Poizner and Whitman are running presumably because they think they might win and have to govern. And as the current governor has demonstrated, engaging in a full war with public employee unions makes it awfully hard to get anything done. (See the entire year of 2005 in California politics). That doesn't mean that Poizner and Whitman shouldn't push these unions and seek leverage. But combining a difficult run for governor with a difficult initiative campaign is not a recipe for political and governmental success

The essence of self-government is the ability to know what your government is doing, who it hires and how it spends its money. But public employee unions have been -- shamefully -- seeking to prevent the public from learning such information.

Within the last year, state public employee unions sought to block -- and then boycott -- the Sacramento Bee for publishing the salary data of state workers. There is no more essentially public record than that. Now comes news from San Bernardino that the county is giving unions heads-up about public records requests in an attempt to block them. Unions there are attacking newspapers that make requests for records on county employees. This is particularly outrageous because public records request from newspapers and the public are often the only way to learn how public employees and their unions behave. Public employee unions are exempt from the federal laws and regulations that require unions representing private sector workers to report on their internal finances to the U.S. Department of Labor.