The lack of public support for the strike is striking in that the union is arguably the state’s most sympathetic public employee union. The union says that 99 percent of its food workers, custodians and respiratory therapists are income-eligible for some form of public assistance, which it contrasts with the bloated salaries and lavish benefits provided to top UC administrators.

Despite the clear income inequality among the 190,000 faculty and staff at the University of California, a majority of Democrat elected officials have failed to publicly comment on the upcoming strike.

High-paid BART employees undermined low-paid UC workers

Since last summer’s strike by Bay Area transit workers, Democrat politicians have become fickle friends of organized labor.

Described by the San Francisco Chronicle as “among the best-off in the country,” the 2,300 BART mechanics, custodians, station agents, train operators and clerical staff earned an average base salary of $71,000 per year plus $11,000 in overtime pay. That was before the union received a 15.38 percent pay increase over four years in exchange for increased pension contributions. Previously, BART paid both the employee and employer pension contributions.

Several Democrat leaders, including Assembly candidate Steve Glazer, publicly opposed the strike, signaling an intraparty split on labor issues.

“The prospect that well-paid Bay Area Rapid Transit system workers with lavish benefits and little-known perks might inconvenience rich white-collar liberals in the San Francisco area,” wrote CalWatchdog’s Chris Reed, “has finally triggered an intraparty battle of the kind that California Democrats have somehow managed to avoid for decades.”

Field Poll: Public sours on unions

Following that bruising battle at BART, for the first time, Californians have a negative view of organized labor. Last December, a Field Poll found that a plurality of registered voters said that unions “do more harm than good.” Forty five percent of those surveyed viewed unions negatively, a 16-point swing in just two years.

Union approval has even fallen among union households. Thirty one percent of union households have a negative view of unions, a huge increase from the 18 percent result reported in March 2011.

“It seems like they keep winning the battles,” Field Poll director Mark DiCamillo said back in December when the poll was released. “The question becomes, ‘Are they moving the public in the direction where they may lose the war?’”

That first casualty in the war against unions are the low-paid service workers at the University of California. Earlier this month, AFSCME 3299 released a  list of elected officials throughout California who “have united in support of AFSCME 3299’s pursuit of a fair contract settlement with UC.” Just eight state legislators were included on the list.

Even former union members are jettisoning their union credentials. State Sen. Norma Torres, D-Pomona, who recently launched her third campaign in three years, wasn’t among the small group of state legislators to publicly back the lowest-paid workers at the University of California. Her absence was noticeable given that she’s a former member of AFSCME. Since being elected to the Legislature, Torres has distanced herself from the union by omitting her union activities from her official biography.

Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez stands with UC workers

Not all Democrats are shunning labor unions out of political expediency. Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, D-San Diego, a former secretary-treasurer of the San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council, has repeatedly offered support for UC’s lowest-paid workers.

“UC continues to disregard the well-being of its lowest wage workers,” said Gonzalez, one of the eight Democrat legislators to publicly stand up for UC workers. “It makes no sense for the Legislature to continue to write the UC system a blank check while they continue to increase the wages of those at the very top, while leaving our service workers to be subsidized by taxpayers through safety net programs.”

She added, “All work is dignified and all workers should be accorded respect by our public university system.”

In addition to Gonzalez, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who serves on the UC Board of Regents, has voiced his support for AFSCME 3299 on various social networks. The union adds that more members are silently with them.

“Whether on picket lines, phone lines, in letters or in statements to the press, the overwhelming majority of the state Legislature’s Democratic Caucus has stood shoulder to shoulder with AFSCME 3299 members throughout their struggle for fairness and dignity at the University of California, and we are deeply grateful for their support,” AFSCME 3299 said in a statement. “We are equally grateful to the members of the GOP Caucus who have stood with us.  Our fight is not a matter of right and left, but right and wrong.”

96 percent of UC service workers and patient care workers voted in favor of the strike authorization. AFSCME 3299 represents 8,300 service workers and 13,000 patient care technical workers.

The eight legislators who publicly back AFSCME 3299

• State Senate Majority Leader Ellen Corbett
• Assembly member Marc Levine
• Assembly member Paul Fong
• Assembly member Jimmy Gomez
• Assembly member Lorena Gonzalez
• Assembly member Shirley Weber, Ph.D.
• Assembly member Rob Bonta
• Assembly member Reggie Jones-Sawyer

So it was inevitable that Californians would turn against the state’s powerful public-sector unions. When you’re on top and people become dissatisfied, you inevitably become the scapegoat.

California supposedly is “prosperous,” which it certainly is for Silicon Valley billionaires and public-sector unionized workers. But California also has the country’s highest poverty rate, as a U.S. Census Bureau study revealed last month.

A new Field Poll…

“finds the proportion of voters believing unions do more harm than good has increased ten points, from 35% to 45%, while those believing unions do more good than harm has declined six points from 46% to 40%. Thus, there has been a net sixteen-point swing in voter sentiment from the positive to negative side over this period.”

That’s a sharp decline in less than three years. Currently, the opinions are 40 percent favorable to 45 percent unfavorable.

Transit worker strike

Here’s another finding:

“California voters are split almost evenly on the issue of whether public transit workers should be allowed to strike when their leaders are unable to reach agreement with management on a new contract. Statewide 47% believe they should continue to have this right, while 44% think they should not.”

And dig this. The Bay Area is by far the state’s most liberal area. Californians generally are slightly favorable to public transit workers’ right to strike. But…

“One significant exception to this relates to voters in the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area. While a slightly larger proportion of Bay Area voters views labor unions positively than negatively overall, by a 52% to 41% margin they oppose allowing public transit workers the right to strike.”

The reason, obviously, is the BART strike in July, which snarled transportation throughout the Bay Area. Even liberals get ticked off when they can’t get to work.

Other factors

Meanwhile, other factors militating against the unions include the ongoing pension crisis, which contributed to the municipal bankruptcies in Vallejo, Stockton and San Bernardino; and the possible bankruptcy in Desert Hot Springs.

And the most powerful union in the state, the California Teachers Association, has to take at least some of the blame for the state’s students’ continued performance near the bottom of national testing. The influx of new money to education from the Proposition 30 tax increase, and from Gov. Jerry Brown’s shifting of money from rich to poor schools, is unlikely to change that — especially with the new national Common Core standards dumbing down testing. The problem isn’t a lack of money, but a lack of competition, and of choice for parents.

The teachers’ unions also continue to stifle even modest reforms to reduce the scandals of teachers abusing students.

Can Republicans take advantage of this dissatisfaction with unions so identified with the state’s Democratic Party? Only a little. The GOP’s brand remains too sullied.

But that means the Democratic Party will suffer fissures, with black and Hispanics especially upset at the public schools failing, year after year, to educate their kids. With money flowing in and Republicans irrelevant, who but the unions can take the blame?

As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle on October 19:

“That discussion has already begun, in letters from California lawmakers to Gov. Jerry Brown, from state Sen. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord, who said he is 'looking into legislation that could prevent future strikes,' a petition drive by a Democratic Assembly candidate in the East Bay seeking the same, and a piece by editorial page editor John Diaz in Sunday’s Chronicle supporting a Republican proposal that BART unions be made to honor the no-strike clause in their last contract.”

The aforementioned Democratic Assembly candidate is Steve Glazer, a “political strategist, longtime adviser to Gov. Jerry Brown and, most recently, city councilman in the prosperous East Bay suburb of Orinda.” In an October 15 article in the San Francisco Chronicle, Glazer described himself as “a progressive Democrat who is fiscally conservative — supportive of public-pension reform and more business-friendly regulations, and willing to take on labor, the biggest special interest in the state.”

Glazer, reportedly among the top money-raisers statewide so far for next year’s Assembly races, went on to say that “Not one drop” of his campaign contributions has come from labor. “I’m redefining what it means to be a Democrat,” Glazer said.

By apparently recognizing that fiscal conservative values require taking on unions like those representing BART workers, Glazer is on to something. But how far will he take it?

Right to strike?

When questioning the right of BART workers to strike, the underlying principle is that workers who hold monopoly power over a vital public service cannot be permitted to withhold that service, holding members of the public hostage, in order to extract concessions from management. This ability has served BART well over the years.

Here, taken from information provided to the California State Controller from their “Raw Export” page (refer to “2011 Special District Data), with analysis from the California Public Policy Center available to download in an Excel spreadsheet, is how much the average full-time BART worker made in 2011:

This is only part of the compensation, however.

Benefits

Here, taken from a BART employment brochure, are the benefits offered BART employees:

Nice work if you can find it. How many veteran workers get six weeks' paid vacation per year, plus 14 paid holidays, a generous pension (“2% at 55” equates to a retirement benefit at least three times better than Social Security) that costs them nothing, and health and dental coverage with an average value of $15,885 per year, for $92 per month? Plus long-term disability insurance, life insurance and a host of other benefits including unlimited free rides on BART?

If BART were a self-supporting, non-monopolistic entity, providing its unionized workforce with this sort of largesse would be a private matter between the employees and their management. But if you review BART’s 2013 Budget, you will see that, of the $672 million of total revenues expected in 2013, only $415 million comes from operating revenue — passenger fares, parking fees, etc. The other $257 million comes from taxpayers, mostly through sales taxes. BART’s biggest 2013 expense, by far, is the $381 million they have budgeted for labor.

Electing own management

Which brings us to a teachable moment.

BART’s compensation relies partially on the ability of its workers to strike. But unionized public-sector workers, who have only limited ability to strike, still benefit from binding arbitration rules, as well as major advantages that BART’s unions do not have — they elect their management. California’s public-sector unions collect and spend more than $1 billion per year, with about one-third of that (a staggering amount) going to explicitly political activity, but nearly all of it used to advance a political agenda — how we manage our public agencies.

The financial consequences of the ability of public-sector unions to decisively influence the election of politicians they negotiate with should be obvious by now, especially to “fiscal conservatives,” regardless of their party. Here are a few examples of the average total compensation — direct pay plus employer paid benefits — for California’s city workers:  San Jose — $149,907, Anaheim — $146,551, Costa Mesa — $146,863, Irvine — $143,691.

And here is a study showing California’s total state and local government debt, when you include the present value of unfunded liabilities for pensions and retirement health care at realistic rates of return, to exceed $1 trillion.

What politicians and voters need to understand is that public-sector unions wield leverage even more potent than BART’s unions. This leverage has resulted in an overpaid public-sector workforce and potentially catastrophic levels of state and local government debt.

So what will fiscally conservative Democrats do? What will voters do?

It is healthy to appreciate the contributions made by our public servants. But to pay public servants literally two to three times as much as the average private-sector worker is to invert the relationship. Public servants have no right to exempt themselves from the economic challenges facing private-sector workers. Until public-sector workers cannot inordinately influence our politicians, and until public-sector workers earn taxpayer-funded benefits according to the same formulas and incentives as private-sector workers, the challenge of achieving a financially sustainable government will have no chance of success.

*   *   *

Ed Ring is the executive director of the California Public Policy Center.

By Chris Reed

When San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi took on the enormous pensions that were hollowing out the city’s budget in 2011, nearly all the big name Democrats in the Bay Area wouldn’t back him up. Led by Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein, they instead supported a much more modest reform that had been crafted with public employee unions’ input.

But have times changed in the most liberal chunk of California? Maybe. As John Wildermuth pointed out on Fox & Hounds Daily, the BART strike triggered fury in the Bay Area — with strikers, not management.

“Instead of local politicians joining union workers on the picket line, civic and political leaders pushing behind the scenes to have BART settle and little kids handing out cookies to the strikers, there was plenty of anger and it was all aimed at the union.

“Union leaders failed to recognize that it’s a new day in California. In the past few years, retirees have seen their nest eggs evaporate, people have been forced from their homes and workers who have been employed their entire adult lives suddenly found themselves with no job and no prospects.

“Sure, BART workers have gone four years without a raise, but that average annual salary of $50,000, $60,000 or $70,000, plus healthy benefits, sounds pretty good to people trying to raise a family on part time work or unemployment payments.

“To show just how strong the anti-union sentiment was, the day after the strike ended BART officials were forced to warn commuters not to berate, harass or threaten the workers who were back on the job.”

No longer partisan to question union members’ extreme pay, benefits and clout

That actually lowballs what BART workers make, according to the San Jose Mercury-News: