The modern era has been described as the Age of Anxiety, fitting all too nicely with the present circumstances with which public sector workers are forced to contend. How else to describe the current situation – where it is nearly impossible to keep track of every new measure proposed at both the state and local level, either to slash retirement and other benefits or to end collective bargaining outright for public employees? In just the week since I began writing this month’s column, three new initiatives attacking public workers’ pay, benefits, and bargaining rights have been introduced in Sacramento. It is as if public-sector labor were facing an almost existential crisis.
And such developments are hardly limited to our own corner of the world. Indeed, we live at a time where nearly the entire planet seems hardened against public-sector unions. As the conservative British weekly The Economist recently opined, public employee unions worldwide are “discovering that many people in the private sector regard their public-sector colleagues as an overprivileged elite. Spanish civil servants were shocked at how little support they got when, last June, they protested against a 5% cut in pay. And a recent poll showed that 65% of people in stick-in-the-mud Greece want civil servants to lose their job security.”
In other words, this is a global phenomenon, and one risks ignoring what appears to be – at least for the moment – the tide of history at one’s peril. The anxiety a public employee may feel is certainly not misplaced. Our challenge is real.
Accordingly, one of the first traps to avoid is the age-old and quite natural response of anyone who has ever faced event-provoking anxiety: a refusal to acknowledge the underlying event itself. As SFPOA President Gary Delagnes aptly put it after squaring off in numerous debates with would-be “pension reformer” Jeff Adachi, “The first thing we have to do is acknowledge that there is a problem.”
Some on our side of the aisle might argue that because public employees didn’t create the problem, it should be left to someone else to fix. Why, after all, should public employees be blamed for simply having negotiated benefits that public employers now feel severely constrained to pay, given the economic downturn?
The simple answer is that the public doesn’t much care who created the so-called “pension crisis;” they simply want it fixed. The more profound answer lies in the notion that we are all stewards for future generations. Who wants to leave a desiccated police department or a faltering retirement system and health care plan to one’s son or daughter who aspires to be a police officer?
Indeed, we need to stare unflinchingly at the problem and help find a solution. An even stronger metaphor would be to seize the proverbial “pension crisis” by the throat and wrestle it to the ground. For it will do absolutely no good, as SJPOA Vice President Jim Unland continually and rightly reminds us, simply to sue whatever local or state agent of government threatens to rollback benefits, without tackling the problem itself. If by winning in court we achieve what turns out to be a pyrrhic victory – benefits remain unchanged but more police officers lose their jobs and pension funds stagger on a less-than-solid footing into the future – who precisely wins? Such a prediction is not too dire: in a mere ten years’ time, the City of Chicago’s police and fire pension system will be all but bankrupt if serious corrective measures are not taken soon. In the words of the great legal theorist James Bradley Thayer, “Under no system can the power of courts save a people from ruin; our chief protection lies elsewhere.
And that is why both the San Francisco and San Jose Police Officers’ Associations have risen to the tremendous challenge of working to solve the problem. In San Francisco, the SFPOA labored tirelessly with civic and business leaders to craft a ballot measure that, if passed by the voters, will help ensure the solvency of the City’s retirement system while also preserving vital public services. In San Jose, the SJPOA successfully completed the initial stages of negotiating an “opt-in” provision that will allow police officers to opt voluntarily into a tier of lesser retirement benefits, saving both the officer and the City from ever-escalating contributions into the retirement system, which, in turn, dramatically reduces the risk of future burdens on the taxpayer. It is no surprise that the City of San Jose’s own, more draconian (to put it charitably) pension reform measure now bears an opt-in provision.
There is obviously much more work to be done, but these initial steps should prove invaluable in putting us on the right path. If public-sector labor is to survive the current crisis, it must play a substantial role in fixing the problems that brought us here in the first place. And not simply for the sake of proving to the public that we are more than willing to shoulder our fair share of the fiscal burden, but, moreover, because our very future depends on our ability to do so successfully in order to find a way out of this mess. There is no greater antidote to an Age of Anxiety than successfully snuffing out the underlying cause.
“Roll the Union On . . .”
