LaborPains.org

Today, the Center for Union Facts released a new analysis proving that public sector employees, on average, earn five percent more in wages and benefits than their counterparts in the private sector. This flies in the face of data from the Economic Policy Institute (EcPI), a “think tank” that has taken millions from labor unions and has released a series of studies making the counterintuitive claim that public sector employees are underpaid by four percent when compared to those in the private sector.

Redoing the same analysis from EcPI’s study, the Center for Union Facts controlled for two key factors that EcPI improperly accounted for: private sector business size and the treatment of full-time, part-year workers (a category that includes roughly one quarter of all teachers). When those two factors are properly considered, the results reverse themselves: public sector, taxpayer-funded employees actually enjoy a compensation bonus of at least five percent.

“We have been hearing for months now about the underpaid public sector workers from outfits that are funded by public sector unions, an obvious conflict of interest,” said Rick Berman, the executive director of the Center for Union Facts. “Unfortunately, the study’s author made two key errors, both of which coincidentally skew the results in the direction that labor unions support.”

The argument that public workers are underpaid has been made in order to deflect attention from public pay in states that are experiencing multi-billion dollar budget gaps.

“The Economic Policy Institute study assumes that every state employee would otherwise be working in a large private sector business  with 1,000 employees or more,” Berman explained. “Using this assumption is like saying that every computer tech in the state capital would qualify for a job at IBM – it’s bogus, and it creates a fictitious gap in wages that EcPI was more than happy to exploit for political gain. They also excluded full-time, part-year workers like certain teachers and recent retirees, another move that inflated that false deficit.”

Berman continued: “And that doesn’t even include other unaccounted for factors, like the ironclad job security in the public sector and the fact that most teachers’ full-time salary covers a work year only 36 weeks long. In times of economic distress, we all have to give a little back; public sector unions can’t hide behind the false pretense that their members are ‘underpaid’ any longer.”

Click here to read the report.

I love every single sentence of this story. You simply must click through to read the whole thing. Some choice bits:

Cops booted an unruly group of city teachers union officials from a posh Albany eatery after they caused a ruckus over their dinner tab, the Daily News has learned.

Paul Egan, the union’s political and legislative director, set off the fracas – claiming the quail he was served, and finished, wasn’t large enough – sources said.

After being convinced by the fuzz to pay his tab, Egan then tried to figure out if he could stiff the working Joes who manned his party’s three tables:

Officers told Egan the dispute was a civil matter and ordered him to pay the bill – to which he followed up by asking if he was required to leave a tip, sources said.

Ah, union bosses. Friends of the working man! Perhaps the best part of this story is that Egan has actually done this before:

“He’s done this more than once, though he never got escorted out by the police before that I know of,” the source said.

The source recounted Egan loudly complaining during a Christmas-time lunch that he didn’t get enough meatloaf and mashed potatoes.

Photo via MissTessmacher.

We’re often told that to get better educational outcomes, we just need to spend more money. If we opened up the pocketbooks a little more, we’d see things turn around.

Unfortunately, throwing more money at the problem won’t solve anything. Until recently, the United States increased spending on education virtually every year on a per-student basis. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Rick Hess noted in the introduction to a Stretching the School Dollar, a collection of essays on education reform he edited, “Per-pupil spending today is roughly double (in inflation-adjusted terms) what it was in 1983.” Test scores, however, have stagnated.

You can see this dynamic at work in individual states. Consider Wyoming. Wyoming has the sixth-highest per-pupil spending rate on education of any state at $13,840. When cost of living is taken into account, Wyoming actually ranks first. We can all agree that Wyoming is spending a lot of money on education.

Yet Wyoming’s educational outcomes are, at best, average. They rank 27th in graduation rate, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). ACT Inc., which administers the ACT test, reports that only 17 percent of Wyoming students who took their college entrance exam met the benchmark for college readiness in English, math, reading and science. Education Week gave Wyoming a D-plus for K-12 achievement despite giving them an A for spending. We can all agree that Wyoming’s public schools are lacking when it comes to results.

Studies have shown that the most important in-class factor when it comes to student achievement isn’t higher spending or smaller class sizes or any of the other “reforms” that teachers unions argue for. No, the most important factor is teacher effectiveness. Having an effective teacher two to three years in a row can even overcome achievement gaps seen between races and economic gaps. Hoover’s Eric Hanushek estimates that replacing the bottom six to ten percent of teachers with competent educators would spring the United States into the top ranks of international testing.

I didn’t pick Wyoming at random: That state’s legislature is currently considering a parcel of education reform bills that would amend “tenure” — the cumbersome process of replacing an ineffective teacher that can take months and cost tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees — and allow administrators more leeway in getting rid of bad teachers. Wyoming has finally realized that throwing more money at America’s education problem isn’t the answer — getting bad teachers out of the classroom and good teachers into the classroom is.

Unfortunately, the Wyoming Education Association is pushing back, and legislators have inserted language into the bill that weakens it. Instead of being able to fire teachers for “any reason not specifically prohibited by law” — i.e., for racially or sexually discriminatory reasons — the law proposes that administrators must have “good or just cause” to fire a teacher. While that sounds reasonable, the fuzziness of the phrase “good or just cause” (and the lack of legal definition as to what constitutes “good or just cause”) means that there will still be months of hearings at great expense to school districts to get an ineffective teacher out of the classroom. In other words, not very much will have changed.

It’s time for Wyoming to step up for their kids. To learn more about what’s going on in the Cowboy State, check out our new webpage, StepUpWyoming.com.

Who said the following?

There are strong forces in America that preach the vision of scarcity, the vision of division and the vision of fear. They try to convince us that we are not a country gifted with great abundance; they try to convince us that there is not enough abundance to go around, so we had better be jealous of anyone who has more than we do. We had better try to take away from someone who has more than us and bring them down to our level of scarcity rather than trying to bring ourselves (and everyone else) up to their level.

That sounds like something that a free-marketer would right, albeit an surprisingly emotive one. After all, unions have been playing the class card for decades, asserting that our abundance is a limited pot and the wealthy need to relinquish their wealth more through taxes. Virtually all union rhetoric hinges on this idea.

As a matter of fact, it was written by United Auto Workers President Bob King in a recent op-ed. King was presumably describing conservatives who think union members are overpaid. Or something. Whatever the case, Bob King accidentally did a pretty good job describing the mixed-up world f Bob King. (Takes one to know one?)

Here’s the rub. King wrote in another op-ed just a few months ago: “But remember, some cynically want this government to fail in order to remove all restrictions on corporations and preserve tax cuts for the ultra wealthy.” Sounds like Mr. King needs figure out which side of the “out-of-step with reality” fence he’s on.

Image courtesy of L4urenZ.

The United Auto Workers have been busy bees lately. Their next target could be Caterpillar, the world’s largest manufacturer of construction equipment:

The United Auto Workers on Sunday voted by an overwhelming margin to allow leadership to call a strike against Caterpillar Inc. if a new contract cannot be hammered out.

UAW members at seven locals – including Local 974 in East Peoria – voted by a 94 percent majority to authorize a strike if necessary. The union did not give vote totals.

The existing six-year contract expires March 1, and UAW and Caterpillar have been negotiating since Dec. 15. Neither side has gone public with details from the talks, which are taking place in Caterpillar’s Building CV in East Peoria and are scheduled to resume Monday.

Caterpillar is staying quiet on the issue. We’ll keep you updated at this develops.

You might have thought President Obama intended to be conciliatory after his fairly moderate State of the Union Address. Think again. This morning the president fired the first shot in the this year’s inevitable partisan battle over labor unions:

Craig Becker, a Democrat on the U.S. National Labor Relations Board who has been criticised by business groups for his ties to unions, was re-nominated by President Barack Obama to serve until 2014.

Becker, a lawyer who represented the AFL-CIO and Service Employees International Union, was appointed in March by Obama after the U.S. Senate failed to confirm his nomination. Republicans and some Democrats sought to block Becker after the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups objected to his academic writings proposing that unions get more power.

The appointment, made during a Senate recess, is set to expire this year and a fresh nomination was required. If confirmed, Becker would serve on the board, which handles disputes between unions and companies, until December 2014.

But a fresh nomination wasn’t required. Becker is a political hot potato whose nomination Republicans fiercely (and successfully) battled. His notoriety stems primarily from an article in the Minnesota Law Review where he essentially argued that employers should be shut out of the unionization elections completely.

In that sense, Becker is a perfect fit for Obama’s vision of the NLRB, which has been discussing limiting employers’ role over their own workers with everything from quickie elections to enforcing a back door card check. Unions believe that if they exclude employers from the unionization process, they can convince far more workers to unionize and ensure their survival. Becker on the NLRB is Obama’s way of giving them a leg up.

Welcome home, Mr. Becker.

The Daily Caller has another fascinating article about an Obama Administration policy that could give unions a membership boost:

By increasing the number of “green” requirements truckers have to comply with in order to get into some major United States ports — like Los Angeles, Long Beach and Oakland — the Obama administration and the Environmental Protection Agency are helping push previously independent truckers into companies, which then makes them vulnerable to unionization or, in many cases, forced to join a union. As these aren’t administrative laws from the EPA per se, trucks that don’t fit this new “green” standard, which is meeting at least 2007 EPA emissions levels, are still allowed to operate throughout the country. But each of the major port authorities won’t let them in if they don’t fit the new environmental regulations, which would force many independent truckers out of business if they resist since many truckers depend on business from the ports to survive.

And sure enough, the Caller goes on to quote a spokeswoman for a coalition of groups (including the Teamsters) saying she wants to stop the “misclassification” of truckers as independent contractors. Far better for distant labor leaders to decide truckers’ employment arrangements rather than truckers and trucking companies.

This is a story to watch for two reasons. First, it’s another example of the government stacking the deck in favor of labor unions, which look increasingly unable to survive without the feds. Second, it shows the continuing efforts by organized labor to co-opt the green movement and use it to gain members. As we’ve noted in the past, the Teamsters have embarked on a protracted effort to eliminate independent truckers — all under the guise of being “environmentally friendly.” Now they’ve enlisted the EPA in their scheme.

Image courtesy of Hugo90.

It’s a slow news day:

Marriott, on whose board Mitt Romney sat until earlier this month, has decided to remove adult content from its in-room movie options–a decision that would appear to have little to do with electoral politics, except that Romney was blasted by some social conservatives in 2008 for his connection to Marriott, in light of the soft-core in-room offerings. …

“When it comes to folks who actually work for a living–and negotiating on their wages, benefits, etc–we always hear the mantra ‘we must maximize revenue and value for the shareholders,’” AFL-CIO spokesman Eddie Vale wrote in a mass e-mail to reporters today. “Interesting how this pillar of corporate philosophy seems to have gone right out the window when it comes to helping their billionaire buddy’s presidential campaign.”

It’s not that the AFL-CIO likes porn on its own merits, according to Vale; rather, it’s the “hypocrisy” of cutting a revenue stream that could be spent on higher wages. UNITE HERE, an AFL-CIO member, represents some Marriott workers.

We’re pretty sure the AFL-CIO doesn’t want to get into a shouting match over the merits of appeasing politicians or spending money on things unrelated to worker wages. (Does 171.5 million on the 2010 election ring a bell?) But we think this begs a greater question: Does the AFL-CIO have to weigh in on everything?