Townhall.com ^ | June 1, 2014 | Nick Sorrentino
Public sector unions are out of control. They are extracting wealth from the productive economy and playing taxpayers for chumps. Simple as that. Whether the it’s the teachers unions, the municipal unions, the SEIU, the workers at the myriad of of alphabet soup agencies, the assumption is that somehow taxpayers work for government employees, for the low level cronies. Our money is supposed to fund their pensions and above market salaries. We owe it to them. The average federal worker makes over $120,000 in total compensation. A comparable private sector worker? About $50,000. This should not be. To some degree we need a basic civil service, but what we have now amounts in many ways to a crony cancer on the country and on our economy. Trust me, I’ve spent a good part of my life in Northern Virginia (government worker and government contractor central – also the wealthiest area of the USA) just outside of Washington DC and these workers really do think you work for them. No joke. Let the taxpayer funded workers and retirees wail away in the comments section below but its time to cut the fat deeply. With an axe if need be. Sorry but government should cost the real economy as little as possible and it costs WAY too much now.
(From The Wall Street Journal) The Federal Labor Relations Authority, the agency that mediates federal labor disputes, earlier this month ruled in favor of this union president, in a dispute over whether she need bother to show up at her workplace—the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Martinsburg, W.Va. According to FLRA documents, this particular VA employee is 100% “official time”—D.C. parlance for federal employees who work every hour of every work day for their union, at the taxpayer’s expense. In April 2012, this, ahem, VA “employee” broke her ankle and declared that she now wanted to do her nonwork for the VA entirely from the comfort of her home. Veterans Affairs attempted a compromise: Perhaps she could, pretty please, come in two days a week? She refused, and complained to the FLRA that the VA was interfering with her right to act as a union official. The VA failed to respond to the complaint in the required time (perhaps too busy caring for actual veterans) and so the union boss summarily won her case. The VA battle is only just starting, but any real reform inevitably ends with a fight over organized labor. Think of it as the federal version of Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan and other states where elected officials have attempted to rein in the public-sector unions that have hijacked government agencies for their own purpose. Fixing the VA requires first breaking labor’s grip, and the unions are already girding for that fight.
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