At the root of California’s poor public services is legislation signed by Governors Ronald Reagan and Jerry Brown in 1968, 1975 and 1977 that conferred collective bargaining rights on the public employees who provide those services. In the private sector, labor and management report to different parties (eg, United Airlines’s CEO reports to shareholders while the heads of UA’s labor unions report to union members) but in the public sector, management can end up reporting to labor. That’s because the role of management in the public sector is played by officials elected with the assistance of others, including public employee unions. Ever since those bills became law, public employee unions have engaged in persistent political action but taxpayers have not. The result has been deteriorating public services amid rising spending on compensation and benefits that now reaches $240 billion per year. Public employees even influence accounting, which has helped to saddle California with hundreds of billions of stealth debts to retired public employees.
Unless those bills are repealed, the only effective counterforce is persistent political action by taxpayers and other collective interests. To succeed, they must meet “The John Kerry Test,” a phrase I coined after a conversation with then-Senator Kerry during which I asked why his party always did the bidding of public employee unions, to which he responded, “They’re always there for us.” From that I drew the inference that supporters of lawmakers who challenge public employee unions must do the same. That’s a BIG challenge because, while lawmakers know that unions will always be there, they don’t know the same about individual political donors. Donations from (say) Michael Bloomberg are great but what assurances do recipients have that Bloomberg will always be there? It’s impossible for a lawmaker to pull together a majority of legislators to pass legislation opposed by a public employee union when they know they might face retribution without protection.
That’s why one of our priorities is boosting organized political philanthropies in California. That endeavor is tough because while unions get annual dues, political philanthropies constantly must raise funds (and no, you can’t create an endowment for political spending). That means vigilance must also be constant, but then again, that’s what the founders of our country expected from us. Had we been vigilant in 1968, 1975 and 1977, perhaps we could’ve stopped those bills. Last week we hosted representatives of more than a dozen political philanthropies from San Francisco, Oakland/Berkeley, Los Angeles and Sacramento to discuss best practices. We will do whatever we can to help them. We need them — and more like them — to succeed.
