We Americans have always been suckers for sacred cows, whether it’s in slogans like “X is as American as apple pie” or in our commercial obsession with Mother’s Day. Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against apple pie or mothers. The most important women in my life have all been mothers and, next to spaghetti and meatballs, apple pie is my favorite all-American food. Apart from calorie count and cholesterol, these gustatory favorites are “comfort food” and mothers throughout the ages have always been comforters.
Some sacred cows, though, are artificial and very bad for our nation’s health. One of them is the notion that government workers should be able to engage in collective bargaining. As Amity Shlaes has explained, it all started back in 1912 when presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft “placed gag orders on postal employees to prevent them from communicating with Congress on any matter, including wages.” This so inflamed such progressive party members of Congress as Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette that he pushed through the Lloyd-La Follette Act of 1912, which “gave federal workers the right to organize.”
Fast-forward to 1962 when President Kennedy signed Executive Order 10988, giving federal employees the right to collective bargaining. This act not only widened federal workers’ right to union membership but also “signaled national approval of unions for state and local employees.”
Kennedy’s order kicked off an avalanche of public sector unionization initiatives, perhaps the most notable of which was the National Education Association. The NEA had originally been founded in 1857 as a loosely linked association of “professional educators” with no collective bargaining power. By 1973, though, it was a full-blown labor union. When it merged with the American Federation of Teachers in 2002, the NEA sealed its fate. By 2006, NEA membership grew to 3.2 million, making it the largest and most powerful lobby in Washington, D.C.
Here’s how the NEA website describes itself today: “The National Education Association (NEA), the nation’s largest professional employee organization, is committed to advancing the cause of public education. NEA’s 3 million members work at every level of education—from pre-school to university graduate programs. NEA has affiliate organizations in every state and in more than 14,000 communities across the United States.”
Shlaes does not mention the NEA in her 2010 column, but she notes that throughout the Reagan, Clinton and both Bush presidencies public employee “tenure rules, pay schedules and compensation packages” were signed into law. As a result, we are now faced with the bizarre situation in which private sector workers must accept lower wages and lesser benefits while paying higher taxes to support the higher wages and better benefits packages of public sector workers.
“How did we get here?” Shlaes asks. “Early 20th century strikes by police and other public sector workers,” she explains, “were effective but proved politically damaging. Over time, the unions opted for a more quiet form of coercion—what might be called compensation coercion. Their success in this area brought them to the privileged ground they hold today.”
As the editors of the Wall Street Journal more recently observed, “Teachers unions have spent hundreds of millions squashing legislation and citizen initiatives that would subvert their political monopoly such as private school vouchers (1993), tenure reform (2005) and bans on automatic paycheck dues deductions (1998, 2005 and 2012).”
This nationwide war on public schoolchildren has had the most devastating effect in big blue states like New York, Illinois and California.
“On last year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress, California fourth-graders scored 47th in reading and 46th in math nationwide.”
Obviously, this “privileged ground” for public sector workers is something we can no longer afford, either here in California or in our nation at large. This is one sacred cow we need to euthanize.

Bruce Robinson is a writer and former Benicia resident.

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