The Party of Government. Literally.

How Democrats ended up being beholden to public-sector unions.

By
141

The Democratic Party is often called the party of government. Ideologically, this is so obviously true it’s not worth belaboring. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. We have a federal government for a reason, and there are things it should do. Reasonable people can debate what those things are. 

But there’s a difference between being the party of government in the ideological sense and being the party of government in the literal sense. A core constituency of the Democratic Party, both in terms of voters and donors, is people who work for the government.

Members of teachers’ unions regularly constitute around 10 percent of delegates to Democratic Party conventions. There are about 3.5 million public school teachers in America, comprising about 1 percent of the U.S. population. That means teachers’ union members are overrepresented among the activist base of the Democratic Party by a factor of about 1,000 percent. In 2019-2020, according to Open Secrets, of the roughly $52 million that the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association spent on political donations, $130,000 went to Republicans or Republican groups, and the rest went to Democrats or Democratic groups—a ratio of about 400-to-1.

Of course, it’s not just teachers’ unions. In the 2020 election cycle alone, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) dedicated 99.1 percent of its political spending to Democrats. The American Federation of Government Employees gave 95.6 percent to Democrats. 

Keep reading with a free account
Create a free Dispatch account to keep reading Get Started ALREADY HAVE AN ACCOUNT? SIGN IN
141
By
Comments (141)
Join The Dispatch to participate in the comments.
 
  1. Avatar photo
    Paul Heuring

    Scott Walker would like to talk to you about Act 10. Still his best accomplishment in my opinion.

    Collapse
  2. Avatar photo
    Bruce Mamont

    I would like a Remnant episode dedicated to discussing public employee unions, unions in general, or police and fire unions.

    I did a little thinking about cop unions last Spring. It seems true that public employee unions (like all unions) advocate for employees facing disciplinary and other sanctions by employers. Sometimes the unions protect employees who deserve to be fired; that seemed to be the case with some of the police officers accused of misconduct and brutality last year. However, I also reflected on the feckless municipal governments who would throw their officers under the bus to assuage mobs. Unions protect them, too.

    I think there's a middle ground: unions should be advocates for due process. If there's doubt, absent a preponderance of evidence of misconduct (not the "beyond reasonable doubt" standard which is appropriate for criminal behavior)...I'd be open to an argument that the officer should benefit from it.

    So maybe there's justification for public employee unions for those jobs that are inherently dangerous. It's hard to believe that we can ask them to trust in the leadership and good faith of politicians.

    I'm not advocating a position, only requesting a discussion on the Remnant.

    Collapse
  3. Avatar photo
    The Stray Goose

    In the past year we've seen the detrimental effects of both the police and teacher's unions. If we can't end them now, we never will. I suggest we end them now.

    Collapse
  4. Alex DeLarge

    Public sector unions are an abomination but Jonah is wrong about why.

    First, it's totally incorrect to suggest that private market labor conditions are somehow inherently "horrifying" without government regulation or unionization. It won't belabor all the economic reason why that is. But Jonah is just uncritically adopting the left's talking point and worldview right off the bat.

    Second, the real problem isn't simply that the government is a bad negotiator. (Most public sector unions aren't allowed to strike anyway, so they could be ignored if the government wanted to.) It's that public employee union "negotiations" are an inherently corrupt bribery and money laundering operations. The politicians use taxpayer money to fund ridiculous wages and benefits, the union then skims a bunch off the top as mandatory dues and recycles it back to the same politicians as financial contributions and in-kind campaign help. In return, the politicians give yet more taxpayer-funded goodies in the next contract. Rinse and repeat.

    Public sector unions are like a giant colon that ingests tax revenue and excretes Democrat political funding.

    Collapse
  5. Avatar photo
    Matmos

    I appreciate the fact-driven approach to this article that helps me better appreciate where Jonah is coming from. One quibble however. Jonah asks whether education has improved 280% since the 60s, and clearly the answer is expected to be obviously not. However there are groups for which education has improved radically between those times. The 60s were the era of desegregation and while no one will argue that the state of public schools in low income minority neighborhoods is fantastic. It is a world away from what it was in the early 60s, no doubt about that. Similarly since that period educational access has exploded for girls who have regular access to a higher quality education, especially around STEM topics, than was the norm back then. So I think the question “how much better is education now” depends a lot on whose education you are talking about.

    Collapse
    1. Avatar photo
      Paul Britton

      Points well taken. We had to increase spending on education a LOT in the effort to make sure black American kids had an equal shot at learning. We also had to increase spending a LOT so that special needs kids got any education at all. (One of my grandchildren is a special needs kid who's doing really well -- she wouldn't have gotten any education AT ALL in my day back in the 60s.)

      I must say, though, that when I was in high school from 1968 to 1971 -- and this was in a rural part of western Pennsylvania -- girls were taking all the STEM classes that us boys did and doing just as well (or as poorly!) Or so it seemed to me.

      Collapse
      1. Avatar photo
        Matmos

        Great point about special education, that had escaped my radar.

        Collapse
        1. Avatar photo
          Paul Britton

          So, in a sense, when everything is taken into consideration, the notion that education is 280 percent “better” now than it was in 1966 when I was in eighth grade is actually probably not that far fetched!

          One other factor possibly accounts for a significant part of the increased cost of education in 2021, and that relates to the law of supply and demand. One of the reasons I had a better public school education than my four children or my grandchildren (four of whom are in high school now) is that I had better teachers. And one of the reasons is that, in my own mother’s time, many of the smartest, most capable young women went into teaching (or into nursing or secretarial work) because other career options were limited. The plentiful supply of good female teachers before 1970 drove down teaching salaries. Now women have many more options, the market has corrected itself, and salaries have necessarily risen.

          Collapse
      2. Avatar photo
        Matmos

        You’re certainly right that girls in principle could generally take these classes, but there’s a big difference between being tolerated in the classroom and the proactive outreach from the early grades that exists now. It’s only because I am stubborn and contrary that I made it through STEM education to my current position.

        Collapse
        1. Avatar photo
          Paul Britton

          I don’t doubt it!

          When I entered law school in 1975, the profession was still mostly male, but nearly 40 percent of my incoming class was female. The tide had turned. I don’t suppose the percentage was anything close to that in engineering, science, or tech programs.

          I think today there are slightly more women than men in law school.

          Collapse
  6. Avatar photo
    Kevin Johnson

    Well argued and timely. Thanks.

    Collapse
  7. tla

    I think the question we should be asking is not so much how do eliminate unions but how do improve them. While I am not fan of most unions, I also respect the need to be able to collectively bargain with a monopsonistic employer as is the case often with public unions.

    The pandemic has really revealed the worst problem with unions (specifically in this case the teachers unions) , the inability to innovate and solve problems. Unions are setup to to be adversial and to fight tooth and nail against change. Give an inch and they'll take a mile is the motto. This philosophy while appropriate in negotiating wages and basic work conditions is very problematic when we're attempting to attack structural issue (as in the case police or education reform).

    Collapse
  8. Avatar photo
    Logical

    I've been observing the TPAC in FL. Also observing what the NR, TD are writing about. Two separate worlds! It's hilarious if not for the seriousness of the situation.

    If anyone on this board still has some "feelings" for the GOP, I cannot help but consider the range of possibilities:

    - you were too naive to know what it "was" all about, therefore grow up

    - you knew what it was, but looked for fringe benefits of association

    - you are one of them

    I don't see too many other possibilities. Sorry.

    Collapse
  9. Avatar photo
    Beth


    As to the rising costs of education since 1960. I don't care at all about the period prior to 1975, and really prior to the early 1990s, when we rightly strengthened the protections and services for students with disabilities. These children were previously regularly left out of the school system, or left behind, and yes, it is expensive to provide needed services. But it is certainly appropriate for a wealthy, industrialized, developed nation to do so.

    Moreover, since we don't have a federal school system, looking at national averages of spending ignores the wide variation in how schools are funded, to what degree, and what the trends have been in those districts. Disaggregated state data on NCES (which I think is the source for Jonah's data), shows that as of 2016-17 (latest available), many states' spending per pupil in constant dollars was down from pre-Recession levels and in some cases was not much more than it was in the 90s: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_236.70.asp?current=yes

    But even state data is misleading since the majority of school districts are primarily funded with local tax dollars. The community has a say in how their schools are funded and run - by voting for (or running for) school board, voting on budget proposals, bond issues etc. Perhaps spending is increasing significantly more than inflation in some districts because when it really comes down to it, most local communities actually _want_ to spend more on the education of their youth, and so they do when they can, not because they are beholden to teacher unions.

    Collapse
    1. Avatar photo
      Pat Riot

      I'll be a broken record on this, but show me a non-unionized school somewhere that is running things with any sort of discount on the equivalent public school with equivalent load profile.

      There's no point in getting into *why* schools are more expensive today (although you listed some factors) when we already know that they *just are* and nobody has figured out a way to do it any cheaper for the equivalent requirements and students.

      Collapse
      1. Avatar photo
        Beth

        Agree. I think this was a pretty lazy article.

        Collapse
  10. Ben Moser

    I generally attribute good faith to JG because he generally deserves it but I just can’t on this issue. I’m a teacher in Wisconsin district with one of the only powerful unions in the state and I’m not even a member of the union because I have qualms with how it acts and who is in charge of it at the school level so I’m not coming from a place of blind union loyalty, far from it in fact.

    I’ve never seen a Republican policy proposal on education that doesn’t involve paying teachers less, lowering the standards (because anyone can do my job it’s just babysitting), raising my healthcare costs, raising class sizes, cutting support services like school psychs, or just randomly making us standardize test the kids more.
    Most teachers I know would be thrilled and interested in policy proposals that might fix our school system but instead all we get from the right generally and even JG sadly is blame/testing/rants about public sector unions that sometimes tepidly invoke cops and firefighters but never with the same passion.

    In one of the previous pods Isgur (I think) pointed out that school reopening is a complicated thing and as an Org y’all haven’t really interacted with experts/people with experience on the topic (no someone working at AEI on education does not have experience if they haven’t recently worked in schools) so I’ll challenge Jonah and the rest of the Dispatchers interview a teacher, he’ll interview a principal. I’m working with mine on building student schedules so we can reopen soon and she can tell you how not simple this all is.

    JG you are right dogma is important but right now you are letting the dogmatic blinders that we all have keep you from looking for nuance and fact.

    Collapse
    1. Alex DeLarge

      "school reopening is a complicated thing"

      Is it? The odds of kids catching or transmitting the virus are essentially zero. I think you open the schools by just opening the schools.

      Collapse
      1. Ben Moser

        So I think your hyperbole and flip attitude don’t really match the issue. A former student of mine died earlier this year before he had a chance to graduate HS from COVID. If you need proof google “Madison student COVID death.” I’m not claiming that one persons death means we can’t open schools but it does mean we need to be serious in discussing the issue.

        I’ll lay out some complications for you. Not all parents WANT to send their kids back especially because none of these awesome vaccines are approved for kids. I’ve got a kiddo with severe asthma, they shouldn’t/ won’t come back until next year. So far about 60-70% of responding k-5 parents (60-70%) want to come back in our district. That means we still have to direct some instruction/resources toward virtual. Once we know who those parents are we might discover that we have a ton of kids with IEPs staying home, then we need (legally) to direct more resources at those kids.

        Furthermore if we have all kids come back at the same time there is no possible way we could enforce even 3 feet of social distancing. Transmission among kids is really rare but it does happen, if we have 125 kids in a MS grade and they all basically have class with each other than that means that we would need to have them most of them quarantine for a few days if just a few test positive since they would count as close contacts.
        Instead we are cohosting kids so they are in close contact with a minimum # of their peers but even that is complicated (I have tables with various schedule options to prove this).

        And none of this even speaks to the teacher issue. The scheduling option I’m advocating for maximizes our exposure to students disease wise but also maximizes f2f time which makes it worth it in my eyes. Problem is if I get get sick our sub pool pre COVID was insanely shallow. In a big HS we routinely were short 2-3 full subs every day and the difference had to be made up by staff teaching extra class on prep time. This problem is only exacerbated by COVID because so many of our subs are retired often elderly teachers who don’t want to risk it to earn 150/ a day.

        Again I support school reopenings but those are just the issue we are trying to solve in my district. In every school the problems are going to be slightly different and while they aren’t insurmountable your cavalier “well just do it” attitude really only serves to show just how outside your ken the particulars of this issue are.

        Collapse
        1. Alex DeLarge

          All of the problems you discuss are solely related to people's subjective *perceptions* and *fears* and not to the objective risks. Contrary to the fear-mongering, the odds of anyone under 50 dying of Covid are statistically insignificant. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographics

          Schools are open in lots of states and countries and it's just not a problem anywhere. If grocery store workers can run the risks, teachers can to.

          The Madison student might, or might not, have actually died from Covid. It's impossible to tell. He might be one of the people who happened to have Covid when he (sadly) died of something else. The press reports don't give any information to tell. Stories like that naturally do scare people, of course.

          Collapse
          1. Ben Moser

            So you aren’t actually dealing with the reality of what I offered. So I’ll just choose to call game on this one. Generally I’ve found most commenters on her to be far more interested in substance. My bad luck I guess.

            Collapse
    2. Avatar photo
      AaronT

      Thank you for this.

      I, too, tend to look suspiciously at teachers’ and other public sector unions for many of the reasons already cited. However, your comment points out an important fact - these unions do help shield government employees from the pendulum effect of our politics - the pruning back of structure/spending by elected Republicans, followed by expansion of those things by elected Democrats. Unfortunately, in protecting the employees they serve, they also tend to shield voters from the outcomes/consequences of their decisions - both positive and negative.

      I am coming more and more to the opinion that voters need to feel the effects of their votes. If government entities work to subvert efforts at reform, then politicians can at once point to them as a bogeyman and not have to face the practical effects of their proposed policies. For this reason, I am also in favor of reforming the filibuster. Elected leaders should not be able to make promises to their voters that they know they won’t have to keep.

      Collapse
      1. Ben Moser

        I think that’s actually a good point and it’s the biggest reason I support reforming/gutting the filibuster. We do need to feel the consequences of our choices. The liberal in my hates saying this but this where JG’s constant high chair spoon banging about devolving power to the lower levels makes a lot of sense because even if funding was radically cut at the federal level that wouldn’t have as big of an effect in locales where the local govt didn’t also do the same.
        It’s not really relevant to your comment but I will say if you want to see where federal dollars are spent in schools you are 90% looking at the SpEd and ESL depts. most of the those teachers have allocation that comes out of federal funds to comply with laws like IDEA that mandate all public school actually teach all kids.
        Fun fact if you want to see how many private schools do so well without federal money it’s because they mostly just aren’t teaching/accepting ELLs or kids with disabilities beyond a token fee.

        Collapse
Load More