Are public employee unions too powerful?

In most union negotiations, the boss sits one one side of the table and the workers’ representatives sit on the other.

They argue, they fume, they threaten, they cajole. Worst case scenario, there are strikes or slow-downs. In the end, a contract is usually hammered out and it’s back to work.

With public employee unions, there’s one more step in the process. It’s called an election.

I don’t mean the vote that union members take to choose their leadership.

I mean real elections, the ones that we use to choose local, state and Federal leaders.

The Watertown Daily Times reported recently that unions pumped more than $600,000 into the election campaign of Rep. Bill Owens.

Labor also provides field staff and phone bank workers to the candidates (i.e. the bosses) that they favor.

And as the Joe Bruno trial revealed, it’s not just Democrats who have intimate, longstanding political and financial relationships with unions.

This entanglement makes it hard for taxpayers to believe that their interests are being guarded.

When New York was fat and happy, the massive political influence of labor groups wasn’t so noticeable. Everyone’s boat was rising.

But now, with private-sector workers losing jobs and benefits, with the state coffers empty, public workers are still demanding (and getting) raises.

Where’s the money supposed to come from to pick up the tab? No one knows.

Meanwhile, public workers are retiring (sometimes still in their late-40s or 50s) with hefty pensions wildly disproportionate to what their private-sector counterparts can expect

Those retirement checks will be mailed out, in some cases, for twice the amount of time that the employee actually worked for the government.

No one wants to return to the pre-union days, when government workers were underpaid or when public jobs were distributed largely as patronage.

But it’s also unsustainable for public employee workers to emerge as a new privileged class, enjoying income, benefits and job security that their neighbors pay for through taxes but can’t hope to share.

The best answer is for taxpayers to scrutinize the public employee contracts that their politicians agree to, before they’re signed.