I recalled that exchange recently after reading that government employees get an entire week dedicated to their “service.” This year, “Public Service Recognition Week” ran from May 5 to 11, and state government workers got their own recognition day on May 7. The U.S. Senate and House of Representatives honored the occasion by passing proclamations commending the nation’s noble public servants.

Special weeks or not, many of us have no special appreciation for government workers. The vast majority of them perform jobs that should either be eliminated or handled by the private sector (the real private sector, not “private” firms using taxpayer dollars). Besides, even workers who perform arguably legitimate tasks are well paid for their efforts. Roofers, car mechanics, taxi drivers, and journalists perform important services also, but one doesn’t find entire weeks devoted to their heroics. Furthermore, government officials do not behave like noble doers of the public good. Instead, they are regular human beings who use their power and position to advance their own interests. That’s to be expected, so why treat them like heroes?

But the best argument against honoring public “servants” is the one made by my mother in her concise rebuttal: Isn’t every day Public Employees’ Day?

A Public-Employee Smorgasbord

Thanks to craven politicians seeking government-union support, shameless exploitation by those unions of national tragedy (such as the death of firefighters in the World Trade Center collapse), and other factors, including the public’s increasing embrace of big government, government workers have turned themselves into a coddled class that lives better than their private-sector counterparts and is exempt from many of the standards and laws that apply to the rest of us. Instead of offering accolades and honors, the public should be mad at the current situation and ought to question what it says about the nature of our society.

The Orange County Register published a front-page investigation in April about a special license-plate program for California government workers. The drivers of nearly 1 million cars and light trucks—out of a total statewide registration of 22 million—have their addresses shielded under a confidential records program.

“Vehicles with protected license plates can run through dozens of intersections controlled by red light cameras with impunity,” according to the Register’s Jennifer Muir. “Parking citations issued to vehicles with protected plates are often dismissed because the process necessary to pierce the shield is too cumbersome. Some patrol officers let drivers with protected plates off with a warning because the plates signal that drivers are ‘one of their own’ or related to someone who is.”

As I wrote in my newspaper column, “Readers have been shocked to learn that California has about 1 million citizens who are literally above the law. Members of this group . . . can drive their cars as fast as they choose. They can drink a six-pack of beer at a bar and then get behind the wheel and weave their way home. They can zoom in and out of traffic, run traffic lights, roll through stop signs and ignore school crossing zones. They can ride on toll roads for free, park in illegal spots and drive on High Occupancy Vehicle lanes even if they have no passengers in the car with them. Chances are they will never have to pay a fine or get a traffic citation.”

Yes, rank has its privileges, and it’s clear that government workers have a rank above the rest of us.

If officials who claim to be protecting the public’s safety were told that one out of every 22 California drivers had a license to drive any way they choose, these officials would be demanding action and more power to protect Californians from the potential carnage. But until the newspaper series, we’d heard nothing about the situation from police officials and legislators. The reason, of course, is that the scofflaws are the police, their family members, and other government agents.

The special-license program started in 1978 with the seemingly unobjectionable purpose of protecting the personal addresses of officials who deal directly with criminals. Police argued that the bad guys could call the DMV and get home addresses. They could then go and harm the officers and their family members. There was no rash of such actions, only the possibility that this danger could take place.

So police and their families got their confidentiality, but then the program expanded from one set of government workers to another. So now parole officers, retired parking-enforcement employees, DMV workers, county supervisors, social workers, and many other categories of workers get the special protections. By the way, the protections are pointless now, given that the DMV long ago abandoned the practice of giving out personal information to the public. Yet the list of categories keeps growing and growing.

A few days after the newspaper investigation caused a buzz in Sacramento, legislators voted to expand the protections to even more classes of government workers. An Assembly committee, on a bipartisan 13–0 vote, agreed to extend the protections to veterinarians, firefighters, and code officers. One legislator justified the vote with a horrific story about code officials who were murdered after breaking up a dog-fighting ring. After the vote, the story was revealed as largely bogus, but just as government officials constantly parade their heroes in front of the public to secure more funding, so too do they tell tales of the grave dangers they face.

Rationalizations for Special Privileges

One Democratic Assembly member justified her support for the bill this way: “[T]his is a public safety issue. And there are lives of public workers, public safety officers, that are put on the line every day on our behalf that need to be protected.” Said a Republican member of the committee: “I don’t want to say no to the firefighters and veterinarians that are doing these things that need to be protected.” Never mind that there is no longer any need for the protection and that the main purpose of the special plates is to protect government employees and their families from tickets and tolls while they drive in their personal vehicles on their personal time.

With the government employees’ addresses kept confidential, toll-road operators, parking enforcement, and red-light-camera operators either cannot access them or don’t go through the extra steps necessary to find the addresses. So the government employees often rack up thousands of dollars individually in unpaid fines or in tolls. This costs the quasi-private toll operators millions of dollars. Furthermore, when police spot these special plates or pull people over and look up the plates, they realize that the driver is special. They then extend what the police call “professional courtesy”—that is, they don’t ticket other members of the brotherhood of government enforcers.

“It’s a courtesy, law enforcement to law enforcement,” said one police spokesman to the Register.

I have gotten calls from police whistleblowers alerting me to, for example, a local cop’s spouse who allegedly was pulled over stone drunk, then given a courtesy ride home. Any average citizen pulled over for a DUI would end up in the county’s notoriously abusive jail system for a day or more. Don’t ever expect such “courtesy” for a mere citizen or taxpayer! This obviously is the type of thing more appropriate to an authoritarian or totalitarian society, where the rulers get to behave according to a different set of laws than the ruled.

In California, law enforcement gets its own “Peace Officers Bill of Rights,” which offers a comprehensive list of special protections in case officers are accused of wrongdoing. Even the name of that law is offensive—the Bill of Rights is meant to protect the public from the government, but this one offers an added layer of protection from public accountability for the agents of government.

“More”

Being exempt from traffic laws is bad, but government workers are always pushing the envelope. It’s like the union leader who was once asked, ultimately, what it was he wanted for his members. His answer: “More.” That applies not only to salary and benefits but to special protections.

In April the California Assembly Public Safety Committee was set to consider—and most likely pass, with little apparent opposition—Assembly Bill 2819 by Mark DeSaulnier. The bill states, “No firefighters, EMT-1, EMT-II or EMT-P employed by the state or a local agency shall be subject to criminal prosecution for any legal act performed in the course and scope of his or her employment to carry out his or her professional responsibilities.” The only way a firefighter could be prosecuted is if he or she committed an act “with demonstrable general criminal intent”—an extremely high standard for a prosecutor to meet. An earlier version of the legislation would have prevented firefighters from “civil or criminal liability unless the act was performed in bad faith or in a grossly negligent manner with demonstrable, willful criminal intent.”

Despite the words “legal act,” the clear result of the legislation would have been to protect firefighters from prosecution for gross negligence. If, say, a firefighter committed an intentionally illegal act such as murder or theft, he would still be subject to prosecution. But if he was involved in otherwise legal behavior, such as driving, but acted in a grossly negligent way when doing so, he would be exempt from prosecution. This goes far beyond the current civil protections for “good faith” mistakes a firefighter or paramedic might make in the line of duty.

The impetus for the legislation was a controversial prosecution by a district attorney against a firefighter who killed someone because he was driving a fire truck allegedly in violation of department standards. Even though prosecutors are loath to file charges against firefighters, the firefighter unions grabbed onto this one incident as a means to gain blanket immunity for their members, even for outright misbehavior. One Assembly member told me that if the legislation became law, a firefighter or paramedic would be protected from any civil or criminal claim even if he showed up at an accident, saw someone in severe distress, but decided to get a hamburger instead of doing his job.

As the Register opined at the time: “The Assembly Public Safety Committee today is considering one of the most noxious, special-interest pieces of legislation we’ve seen in a while—one that will endanger public safety, tread on the California constitution and reinforce the perception that some government workers are part of a special, coddled group that’s exempt from the normal legal and ethical standards that are applied to other Californians.”

The constitutional problem: The legislature cannot dictate to the executive branch who it can and cannot prosecute. This legislation was first introduced for firefighters, but before long police, animal-control officers, and others would be demanding the same protection. The bill was pulled from the calendar at the last minute due mostly to the bad publicity the editorial generated, but it will surely be back again. Government workers and their unions are quite shameless about pushing their self-interest.

There was a time when government work offered lower salaries than comparable jobs in the private sector, but more security and somewhat better benefits. These days, government workers fare better than private-sector workers in almost every area—pay, benefits, time off, and security.

“Today, government employees in the vast majority of job classifications earn considerably more than those in the private sector doing similar work,” wrote Jon Coupal of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association and Richard Rider of the San Diego Tax Fighters in a recent column in the California Republic. “They have even better job security than before and they enjoy many far superior benefits—including a pension which can exceed the salary they earned while working.”

The Asbury Park Press in New Jersey reported recently that “Federal workers, on average, are paid almost 50 percent more than employees in the private sector.” The reason, according to a Heritage Foundation legal analyst quoted in the article: “The government doesn’t have to worry about going bankrupt, and there isn’t much competition.”

One result is the huge public liability created by government pension and retiree health-care plans. Elected officials are generous in granting expanded benefits to government employees. They buy labor peace and political support, letting future legislatures, councils, and taxpayers deal with the growing debt. This is no minor problem. “The funds that pay pension and health benefits to police officers, teachers and millions of other public employees across the country are facing a shortfall that could soon run into trillions of dollars,” the Washington Post reported in May. “But the accounting techniques used by state and local governments to balance their pension books disguise the extent of the crisis facing these retirees and the taxpayers who may ultimately be called on to pay the freight.”

The second part of that quotation is harrowing. The unions and government agencies have cleverly hidden the extent of the deficit. But courts have ruled that the promises made by elected officials to government unions are ironclad contracts that must be kept. That leaves the nation’s taxpayers stuck footing the bill. Even as private-sector workers must toil longer to shore up their eroding retirement funds, so too must they work extra to make good on the unsustainable promises elected officials have made to government workers. Only the best for our rulers!

Institutionalizing Perverse Incentives

It’s easy to understand why the pension deficit continues to grow. In California, for instance, public-safety employees—police, fire, prison guards, and an expanding number of law-enforcement categories—receive “3 percent at 50” retirements. That means at age 50 they are eligible for 3 percent of their final year’s pay times the number of years worked. So if a police officer starts working at age 20, he can retire at 50 with 90 percent of his final salary until he dies, and then his spouse receives half that for the rest of her life. The taxpayer typically makes the complete retirement contribution throughout the officer’s years of work. Many police—more than half in some agencies—claim an injury (such as back pain or bad knees) a year before their retirement age, which not only gives them a year off for disability, but protects half their retirement from taxes.

Police and firefighters are legally presumed to have a work-related illness when they get common ailments such as heart attacks or cancer. The bottom line: Public-safety officials have many ways to gin up their already generous retirements benefits to astronomical levels. Most garden-variety government employees get lucrative pensions also. It is common for them to retire at age 55 with more than 80 percent of their final year’s pay. Most public employees receive defined-benefit retirement plans, in which the taxpayer promises a set rate of return, as opposed to private-sector workers who have 401(k)s and other defined-contribution plans in which the market sets the return.

The Trouble with Vallejo

This situation is bringing trouble. Vallejo, a city of 120,000 in the San Francisco Bay area, declared bankruptcy because tax revenues remained relatively static while public-employee salaries continued to grow out of control. Police and fire budgets consume three-quarters of the city’s budget, leading to the zeroing out of other government programs (libraries, museums, senior-citizen centers). Despite the enormous spending on public safety, city officials have warned citizens to be judicious in their use of 911. When government overspends, the public has to suffer.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the base salary of firefighters in Vallejo is $80,000 a year, that 21 firefighters earn more than $200,000, and that 77 of them earn more than $170,000. The Chronicle also reported that these excessively paid folks have been spending their time “going abalone diving, grilling tri-tip and drinking cocktails on the public’s dime.” The city manager, by the way, earns a total compensation package of $400,000 a year. The downtown is decrepit, in large part because the city has no money to spend on infrastructure.

Even with bankruptcy, it’s uncertain whether Vallejo can get out from under the outrageous union contracts that are turning it into a Third World city—one that comes complete with an arrogant and corrupt aristocracy that doesn’t care about the public.

Even worse than the fiscal mess is the kind of society we’re creating. It’s one where the government elite get special pay, special benefits, special privileges, and special exemptions from the law, and where the rest of us have to play by the rules and work extra hard to pay for these excesses. And yet so many people believe the private sector is the problem! Go figure.

But first some background. How did this town of 23,000, an independent enclave entirely surrounded by the city of Detroit, get into dire straits to begin with? It’s a case study of unions run amok and politicians unmindful of other people’s money.

Poorly negotiated contracts with city employees’ unions failed to establish a strong link between job performance and pay levels. For example, Hamtramck’s contract with the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the union that represents city clerical and Department of Public Works (DPW) employees, provided for annual wage increases of as much as four times the rate of price inflation. Work rules stymied productivity, and while the city’s population fell by more than half during the last 50 years, the size and expense of the city work force resisted any adjustment. AFSCME-represented city employees were entitled to up to 40 paid vacation days a year, plus 15 paid sick days, 13 paid holidays, three paid emergency leave days, and three paid personal days. On top of all that, each employee also got a paid day for his birthday!

City services deteriorated, driving taxpaying people and businesses elsewhere, but city workers made out like bandits. They neglected their jobs, sometimes to the point of threatening the health and safety of citizens. Garbage lay in the streets for as long as seven weeks, dramatically increasing Hamtramck’s population of rats and other disease-carrying scavengers and pests.

The DPW suffered from poor equipment, inadequate supplies, and lax supervision. The city had 95 fire hydrants that either did not work or were in need of repair, and DPW did not know how to fix them. To make matters worse, Hamtramck officials were prohibited by union contracts from subcontracting out any work, including fire-hydrant repair and garbage collection.

When the governor put Schimmel in charge of the city, the council and mayor were at loggerheads over everything, even as a deficit of $3 million in a budget of $16 million stared them in the face. About his first day on the job, Schimmel told the Metro Times, “Everything was such a mess.”

Yes, dear readers, this was what a government had done to itself and to the citizens it was supposed to serve. All that talk about selfless “public service” was laid bare in terms more vivid and tragic than in any other Michigan city in recent memory. This wasn’t public service; it was more like serve yourself at the expense of the public.

Work Force Slashed

With dictatorial powers that essentially put the mayor and city council out of business, Schimmel lost no time in making big changes. Just weeks into the job he fired nine people and eliminated 21 jobs that had been unfilled for some time. That was only the beginning. By the end of his first year, he reduced the bloated, featherbedded work force by 17 percent, from 162 to 135 employees.

He negotiated a new contract to provide for privatization of all DPW work. This arrangement has allowed the city to contract competitively with private-sector firms for trash pickup, fire-hydrant repair, tree trimming, snow plowing, street repairs, water and sewer line repairs, and nearly all other services formerly provided by the DPW. By public auction, he sold off unnecessary city vehicles and equipment for $186,000. Services have improved dramatically. At much lower cost, garbage actually gets picked up on time now, trees really do get trimmed, snow actually gets plowed, and across the board, a day’s work for a day’s pay genuinely takes place in Hamtramck.

It didn’t come easily. Schimmel had to sit down, look the union bosses squarely in the eye, and tell them in no uncertain terms that times had changed. “You’re going to have to work. You have to put in an eight-hour day,” he advised them from across the bargaining table. They squealed and they squirmed but in the end, they had no choice but to get honest with the taxpaying public that was paying their salaries.

One reason, perhaps the main reason, that the unions came around was that Schimmel’s track record clearly suggested he was a man of action. For four years in the late 1980s, he was the court-appointed receiver for the bankrupt city of Ecorse, about a 20-minute drive downriver from Hamtramck. There he privatized almost everything, disciplined the unruly unions, and eliminated a huge city deficit.

Before the Hamtramck takeover, the city owned a fairly large amount of untapped capital in the form of idle land. Under Schimmel, the city is leasing land for a cell-phone tower that now generates $26,000 annually. He is in the process of selling other land to local commercial enterprises.

Before Schimmel arrived, the city operated a parking-meter system that was in a constant state of disrepair. A large number of meters did not work, and parking enforcement was almost nonexistent. The system has been the subject of scandal, with allegations of money being stolen from the meters. City parking lots were in disrepair as well. Schimmel directed the city to sign a lease with its own Downtown Development Authority (DDA) to provide for the operation of the parking system. The DDA, in turn, is repairing the parking meters under Schimmel’s watchful eye and at the same time, contracting out the management of the parking system.

Schimmel has renegotiated police and fire personnel contracts that had been over generous (annual pay hikes of nearly 10 percent per year for police officers, for example). Wage hikes in the new contracts were adjusted to be more in line with inflation, departments were reorganized, and 15 positions were eliminated. The annual savings from those measures alone have amounted to $1.6 million.

Louis Schimmel is still busy fixing Hamtramck and downsizing its public sector, but he’s looking forward to finishing the job by the end of the year. He’ll leave behind a decidedly smaller city government, lots of newly privatized and spiffed-up services, and a city that has a chance to function and attract people and business once again.

Once again, the private sector has come to the rescue of the public.

The unions and the politicians in their thrall rationalized their actions with the same spurious argument they have always used—the mythical free rider. First, rather than limiting unions to representing only workers who want such representation, the politicians force workers who want to represent themselves, or who want nonunion representation, to accept union representation. Unions, of course, are happy to receive this monopoly bargaining privilege. Next, the unions argue that since they represent workers who want to be union-free those workers must be forced to pay for the representation they do not want. Otherwise those workers would receive the “benefit” of the representation they do not want without paying for it. They would be free riders. Of course, with members-only rather than monopoly bargaining there could be no free riders.

Notice that the free-rider argument rests on the presumption that unions and politicians are anointed with superior wisdom. Workers who wish to be union-free may think that union representation confers harms rather than benefits, but they are benighted. The anointed know the truth. The unions are like charlatans who thrust snake oil into the hands of people and demand payment for it because of its alleged healing powers. But not quite. Politicians usually don’t force people to pay charlatans for snake oil they don’t want.

This is shameless pandering by politicians to the unions in exchange for a share of the loot in campaign contributions. It happens in other states too, but California politicians have reached new depths of shamelessness. SB645 is unlike all other laws empowering monopoly unions in California public education. For example, the 1975 Rodda Act allows unions to steal money from dissident K-12 public school teachers and community college instructors only if the unions can win the privilege through collective bargaining with individual school boards and boards of trustees. Under SB645 covered faculty and staff at the state’s two public universities are commanded to pay tribute to the unions as a condition of continued employment without any bargaining. Apparently California’s union-owned politicians don’t think their masters are skilled enough to bargain for theft rights.

The politicians didn’t stop there. All so-called agency-shop statutes include an escape hatch for the unions’ victims. Those theft rights can be rescinded if 30 percent of covered workers request an election and if a majority of covered workers votes for rescission. In all cases in California except those arising out of SB645, the Public Employment Relations Board, a bureaucracy set up to carry out the terms of the statutes, uses taxpayer money to pay for such elections. Under SB645 those who request the election must pay for it out of their own pockets.

Last February I and two others, represented by lawyers from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, challenged the law in federal district court in San Francisco. We argued that SB645 unconstitutionally denies us equal protection for the two reasons stated above.

Guess what? In March the same politicians who enacted SB645 set out to enact a new statute, SB1960, under which all California public education employees become subject to the two uniquely oppressive provisions of SB645. They decided to meet the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection restriction by taking away as many rights from other public education employees as they took from us. Union-owned California politicians have no shame whatsoever. They will do anything they can to empower unions to steal money from public employees in exchange for getting to share in the loot.

Religious Exemption

It gets even worse. Another of the provisions of SB645 empowers unions unilaterally to decide whether covered employees have any sincerely held religious beliefs that prevent them from supporting unions. To qualify for a religious exemption from the legalized theft we must belong to a religion or sect that has opposition to supporting unions as part of its official doctrine, and the unions get to decide which religions and sects qualify. We argue in our suit that this violates our First Amendment right to freedom of association. The unions are empowered to tell us that we must belong to a union-approved religious organization in order to claim the exemption. We argue, and various courts have agreed in other cases, that our choice of religion is our own and that we can have religious beliefs that preclude supporting unions based on our own understanding of religious obligation.

For example, I am a Catholic. While the Church has no official doctrine against voluntary support of unions, the Eighth Commandment proscribes theft. Moreover, I believe that one of my obligations as a Christian is to refrain from supporting any organizations that promote conflict among people, especially when those organizations have a record of using violence and other forms of coercion to get their way. All laws that empower American unions promote adversarial labor relations, and the historical record is clear—unions and violence go together like left and right shoes.

I, along with hundreds of other faculty members, requested a religious exemption from the legalized theft. Most of us received a form letter from the union, the California Faculty Association, which in part says, “In reviewing your request, we considered whether any statements contained therein about how CFA conducts itself are accurate. We also considered whether the proffered belief is in fact religious, or instead merely personal and philosophical. Finally, we considered whether the proffered belief is sincerely held. Based upon your letter, and in light of the above-enumerated principles, your request for religious accommodation is denied.” Under SB645 there is no appeal.

What arrogance! Since I don’t belong to a religion or sect whose doctrines it will acknowledge, the CFA tells me my beliefs are neither religious nor sincere. With the blessing of the shameless California legislature and governor, the CFA discriminates against me because I am a Catholic rather than associated with a group on the list the union has approved for this purpose.

Finally, just to show to what depths politicians will sink in exchange for their share of stolen money, consider that under SB645 we are forced to pay for “preparation for strikes, slowdowns, and work stoppages regardless of their legality under state law.” In other words SB645 encourages unions to “prepare” for illegal activities. If I collude with others to commit illegal acts I am subject to prosecution even if those acts are never carried out. SB645 exempts unions from the rule of law.

We shall see what the courts have to say about all of this.