THEY SAY – California’s Union Skew
David Friedman, excerpted from the Sept. 8 Los Angeles Downtown News:
Building a durable political consensus in favor of growth is crucial if California is to generate sufficient economic opportunities in the future. But convincing key political interest groups that growth is a major priority may be harder in California than elsewhere. Labor, for example, has an obvious and significant stake in new jobs and upward mobility. Yet California’s most influential union leadership has, if anything, become less inclined to support economic development as the state’s economy has lagged. This posture is different than in much of the rest of the county.
In most of the U.S., despite long-term manufacturing and other employment declines, private sector unions are still larger than government employee unions. Historically, private sector unions have long understood that without steel, auto, energy, construction and similar private sector expansion they would be unable to recruit new members and secure better wages and benefits. Most temper their social activism with a keen desire to promote the private sector expansion on which their members depend. But government unions, which rely on public funding and negotiate with a “management”–including city councils and legislators they often help to elect–in a manner that is sharply distinct from the experience of their private sector counterparts, dominate organized labor in California.
Nearly 54% of all public employees are unionized in the state, compared with just 38% nationwide. Their total numbers are larger than the state’s private sector union membership. As a result, while government accounts for less than 20% of total California jobs, public sector perspectives tend to overwhelm what might otherwise be more balanced views of the state’s economic imperatives within organized labor.
