After the worst recession since the Great Depression, as state and local governments struggle to meet budgets with dwindling revenues, public union workers have become targets of politicians, pundits and ordinary citizens who think their salaries are too high and their jobs too cushy.
That has left many public union workers feeling misunderstood.
“We make $35,000 a year, and they want to throw stones at public workers,” said Roland Bell, 44, a sanitation worker in Wilmington, Del. "They don’t know half of what our jobs entail.”
- Faces of the public sector
- The end of an era?Public union workers have become targets of politicians, pundits and ordinary citizens who think their salaries are too high and their jobs too cushy.
- Loud and clearA Connecticut fire dispatcher says his union wages have kept him solidly 'lower middle class." But, he says, "I didn’t take this job to get rich."
- Trash talkA Delaware sanitation worker considers taking a second job to make ends meet. He bemoans shrill anti-union talk: "They don’t know half of what our jobs entail."
- Taught a lessonA Wisconsin teacher wonders — four years into the career she's wanted her entire life — if she made the right choice as the state attacks her union.
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“Several things came together that have resulted in the fiercest attack on public workers that I can remember,” said Harley Shaiken, a professor at University of California at Berkeley who specializes in labor issues.
The campaign to curtail public union power has played out in a wide variety of state moves:
• In Wisconsin, Republican lawmakers have pushed through a law that severely curtails many union workers’ collective bargaining rights and asks most public workers to contribute more to pensions and health insurance. The effort has been stalled by legal challenges, however, and an effort to recall politicians who voted for it is under way.
• In Ohio, a Republican-backed bill to restrict public union workers’ rights to strike and bargain collectively has moved through the Legislature. Democrats and union workers are planning to fight it with a referendum.
• In Indiana, Democrats fled the state for five weeks to protests proposals that they saw as restricting worker rights and lowering wages. They returned only after gaining some concessions from Republicans.
• In Idaho, a bill restricting public teachers’ bargaining rights has already passed.
• In Florida, Gov. Rick Scott recently signed into law a bill that limits teachers to one-year contracts and bases merit pay in part on how much improvement students show.
• In Maine, the newly elected Republican governor Paul LePage ordered the removal of a mural depicting the state’s labor history because it was at odds with his administration’s pro-business agenda.
"Workers and employers need to work together to create opportunity for Maine’s 50,000 unemployed," said Adrienne Bennett, LePage's press secretary, in a statement. "We understand that not everyone agrees with this decision, but the Maine Department of Labor has to be focused on the job at hand."
The proposals have left workers grappling with potential pay and benefit cuts, changes to working conditions and accusations that they don’t work hard. For some, it’s been enough to question whether they want to continue in careers they love if it means facing insults and pay cuts.
“This isn’t the career that my mom went into 35 years ago,” said Greta Voit, 27, a high school physics teacher in New Berlin, Wis. The push has been spurred by the recession and housing bust, which has left many state and city governments in the red and desperate to cut costs.
Some lawmakers also have argued that a good way to keep costs down in the long term is to curtail public union workers’ collective bargaining rights, the basic tool used by organized labor to negotiate everything from retirement pay to working conditions.
Opponents contend the movement is just a ruse to break unions.
Politicians versus unions In some states, the austerity proposals have divided two interest groups that often co-exist in relative peace: public workers and politicians.
Shaiken said that in better budgetary times many politicians didn’t think it was necessary or wise to pick a fight with powerful union forces, or to risk an anti-union effort that might be publicly challenged. As a result, only a few state houses took on public unions in a major way.
“Private-sector employers … have been able to be much more aggressive in anti-union campaigns than public employers are,” said Joseph Slater, a professor of law and values at the University of Toledo College of Law in Ohio.
The percentage of private-sector workers represented by unions has been on the decline for many years, falling from 18.8 percent in 1983 to 7.7 percent as of last year. Many big unions, such as those in the auto industry, have had to accept major concessions in recognition of the weak economy and the growing ability of employers to move work overseas.
In the public sector, however, the percentage of union-represented workers has dropped only slightly since the mid-1980s, to its current level of 40 percent. That includes workers who are not formally union members but are represented by unions for the purposes of contract negotiations.
Americans in general have similar feelings about public and private sector unions. A survey conducted in February by the Pew Research Center found that the same percentage of Americans — 48 percent — view both public and private unions favorably. Forty percent of those surveyed viewed public unions unfavorably, while 37 percent viewed private unions unfavorably.
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