California’s public employee unions enjoy a vast array of special benefits, ranging from the power to collect union dues to exemptions from the kind of campaign contribution and reporting restrictions that apply to most other organizations. It seems only reasonable, though, for unions to pay the full tab for their own collective-bargaining efforts.
A new bill from Sen. Connie Leyva, D-Chino, would eliminate one of the meager ways that the state limits taxpayer support for teachers’ union activities in particular. The measure might not cost a significant amount of money, but it does send a troubling message to taxpayers – especially at a time when the California Teachers’ Association has used its lobbying might to keep public schools closed because of the pandemic.
“Teachers, like other public employees, accrue service credit toward their pensions for each year they work,” according to the Sacramento Bee. “Under current law, teachers may work full-time for their unions while continuing to accrue service credit, but not for more than 12 years.” Senate Bill 294 would allow teachers to accrue pension credits even if they work for their unions indefinitely.
California funds its generous pensions through contributions from employees and public agencies. Those systems are, theoretically, self-sustaining. Pension funds, such as the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) and the California State Teachers Retirement System (CalSTRS), invest the contributions in the market and the returns help pay a promised level of benefits to retirees.
Unions must compensate the state for their officers’ salaries and benefits, but when employees spend their time working for the union rather than the public, the public is at least partially subsidizing them. Because of benefit boosts over the last 15 years, and spotty stock-market returns, most pension funds face unfunded liabilities that taxpayers ultimately secure. The pension funds are, by some estimates, hundreds of billions of dollars in debt.
Frankly, we were surprised to learn that teachers may work a dozen years as union officers while still accruing these pension benefits. That seems unfair to taxpayers. Yet, astonishingly, the unions make a fairness argument to support the removal of that cap simply because police, firefighters and other non-teacher public employees face no time limits on pension accruals when they work on union business.
“This limit unfairly singles out education employees,” argues the CTA, “harming the ability of elected leaders to take a leave of absence to represent their union without losing benefits during their time of service.” In our view, a “leave of absence” would mean a few months or perhaps a year, but teachers already may do this for 12 full years.
To make the system fair, we’d suggest imposing tougher time limits on all public employees. Yet California is going in the other direction. As a Senate bill analysis explains, the state in 2018 “provided compensated leaves of absence of non-school public employees for their service as union officials” and did something similar for classified school employees in 2012.
Unions are highly political organizations, which use their power to extract benefits from public agencies. Their goals are not public goals, but self-interested ones. Why should the public help compensate unions as they lobby for additional taxpayer benefits? Leyva’s bill only compounds this imbalance. The Legislature should promptly nix this appalling special-interest legislation.
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