The Battle for Chicago and Beyond

[Valin]

City Journal:

Facing down government unions is essential to America’s future.

Steven Greenhut

9/14/12

 

As I read Mallory Factor’s Shadowbosses, Chicago Teachers Union members walked out on strike, yelling into bullhorns and denouncing Rahm Emanuel, the Democratic mayor who has insisted on reforms to improve education in the city. As the New York Times reported, “In the view of some here, the toxic relationship between Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, and Mayor Rahm Emanuel, whom Lewis has called a ‘bully’ and a ‘liar,’ has helped push the city’s teacher contract talks to the point of a crisis, forcing 350,000 students out of their classrooms in the nation’s third-largest school system not long after the new academic year began.”

 

But despite the Times’s contention, the loud and angry strike over educational reforms—such as teacher evaluations and a longer work day—along with some financial concessions, is not about bad blood between a union boss and a big-city mayor. It’s a reflection of a more fundamental reality: no elected official anywhere in the United States can seriously reform public schools—or any public service, from police to firefighting to trash collection—without confronting the power of public-sector unions, which have had their way for decades. They control the negotiating table: often, government employees negotiating on behalf of taxpayers are members of the union with which they’re negotiating. And the unions often elect their bosses—city council members, county supervisors, and school board members. Factor’s timely book tells an important story about how we’ve reached this point in Chicago and elsewhere.

 

(Snip)

 

His chapter “The Union Fist” is particularly important, as he explains the degree to which violence, or the threat of it, is part and parcel of union tactics. He notes how a 1973 Supreme Court decision gave unions special protection from prosecution for such violence. Under that decision, “if union officials or members commit violence, they can’t be prosecuted under federal extortion laws as long as they were doing the violence in pursuit of a ‘legitimate’ union aim, like striking for higher wages.” Factor also cites a 1975 case in Pomona, California, where striking police officers vandalized police cars and harassed volunteers providing police services.

 

(Snip)

 

Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind

Mallory Factor with Elizabeth Factor

Center Street, 336 pp

[Casino67]

This was the same SCOTUS that found abortions legal in Roe v. Wade.

[Valin]

This was the same SCOTUS that found abortions legal in Roe v. Wade.

 

 

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