Through a Glass Darkly: Skewed Views of Public Unions

The news on labor ain’t good. In the past few years we’ve seen two big shifts. The first, which can be found among a raft of interesting facts contained in a UCLA study, is that a majority of union members work in the public sector of the economy. The second is that public favorability toward unions, according to a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center has dropped from 58 percent to 41 percent since 2007.

That these two facts are related was brought home to me recently in a conversation with a parent at my son’s school. He just entered first grade, and on the opening day of school we learned that its population had increased by 35 percent, thanks to a decision by the new principal to open enrollment to students outside the school’s neighborhood boundaries. This decision was the result of funding formulas that determine staffing levels in the L.A. Unified School District; without the increase, the school might have lost critical staff, or so said the principal.

The increase occurred almost entirely in kindergarten and first grade; in first grade, there are now 75 or so students, compared to about 50 in kindergarten last year. These 75 kids are in two classes, but a teacher will be added soon to make a third class and get back to normal classroom size.

Now back to this parent, a very nice, thoughtful women who’s extremely involved in the school, and politically liberal. She loves her principal and is pissed at the United Teachers L.A. union because, she explained, our principal knows the teachers she wants, and they’d be great, but UTLA’s seniority rules prevent our school from getting them. Instead, she complains, we must follow the rules and get whatever horrible teacher might be first on the layoff list.

Perhaps this woman’s perspective on workers is that of an employer, not a citizen, customer — or, god forbid, fellow worker. To her, teachers should be viewed through the eyes of Helen Lovejoy. That’s how most people look upon public sector workers. We see them as our employees, and thus we care only about getting the job done and not how they are treated.

It’s for this reason that GOP attacks on public pensions resonate with voters, and why elected officials often become increasingly anti-labor the longer they are in office—they actually are employers, and more and more they view all labor unions, as so many of us do, as public employee unions.

Consider the contempt with which so many view the L.A. Department of Water and Power, which provides energy at some of the lowest rates in the nation and has avoided the major power blackouts of recent years. (Enron shut down much of the state and help cost Gray Davis his job, but we were untouched in L.A. — as we were last month, when so much of Southern California went out thanks to an error in Arizona).

The most obvious example of how ludicrous this has gotten came last year when a local CBS TV news crew conducted a three-month undercover investigation to identify three DWP workers who went to a strip club during work hours. What are the chances Channel 2 conducted a similar investigation of Southern California Edison workers? What are the chances that some workers at any place that employs 9,000 people don’t do that in a three-month period? I’m putting on money on zero on both counts, and taking all bets.

There’s a really good reason for seniority lists at UTLA. Two years ago, the same parent I spoke of earlier helped get rid of a principal many people thought was terrible, and bring in the one they now like. They trust the judgment of this new principal, and want the teachers she wants, and are upset that we can’t get them. But without a seniority list, we’d have to live not just with the favoritism of the principal we like, but also of the one we hated. Not to mention that kids like mine would get the teachers deemed to be great, while kids in neighborhoods with less active parent groups get the teachers nobody else wants.

The conundrum is, if we want to build the labor movement—and we should, since the UCLA report also shows wage rates are about 25 percent higher for union workers—we need to get people to stop thinking like The Simpsons’ Mr. Burns, and start thinking like Homer. Better make that Lisa. And to do that, we need the labor movement to be more than good enough for government work.