More than 90 percent of the 23,000 workers at 23 CSU campuses represented by the California Faculty Association campuses have voted in favor of striking unless they receive three years of annual pay raises of 5 percent, not the 2 percent annual raises offered by the state. A rally last week in Long Beach called by the CFA was attended by more than 1,000 people, Reuters reported. The wire service’s story illustrated a seemingly united CSU faculty:

“People are suffering and hurting financially,” said Theresa Montaño, a vice president of the California Teachers Association. “Faculty members can’t pay off their debt, raise a family or buy a home.”

 

During the march, many protesters said that if faculty members don’t get the salary increase, they are ready to walk off the job. …

 

Jennifer Eagan, a president for CFA, said it’s “unfair to ask professors keep sacrificing year after year without a significant pay increase.”

Faculty seek help from union-friendly state agency

The CFA further escalated its fight with the state government on Thursday by filing an unfair labor practices allegation with the state Public Employment Relations Board. This description is from the CFA’s website:

The charge is based on language in HEERA [the Higher Education Employer-Employee Relations Act] which requires that the CSU and CFA reach an agreement on salary before the university sends a budget request to the Legislature and governor.

 

In fact, in both 2015-16 and 2016-17 the CSU made Support Budget requests that included their plan to implement a 2 percent faculty salary increase for each year. By making a budget request prior to reaching agreement with CFA on what would be needed to offer an adequate salary pool and by arguing that they have “allocated $65.5 million for a 2 percent compensation pool for all employees,” and limiting discussion of salary to that predetermined pool, the CSU has “violated its duty to meet and confer with CFA in good faith.”

 

In his remarks to the Board of Trustees on Wednesday November 18 Kevin Wehr highlighted the problem. “What you fail to understand is that deciding what you think is fair compensation for your employees before the bargaining process even begins is not bargaining in good faith,” Wehr said. “Indeed Section 3572b HEERA of recognizes that fact and says that once we reach an agreement ‘an appropriate request for financing or budgetary funding for all state-funded employees … shall be forwarded … to the Legislature and the Governor.’ You have put the cart before the horse.”

PERB has consistently ruled in favor of local government unions challenging “bad faith” decisions by governments on changes in compensation. This time, however, the ultimate target isn’t the cities of San Jose or San Diego or the Los Angeles Unified School District — it’s Gov. Jerry Brown, who cleaned house at PERB in 2011 and removed leaders chosen by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had fought with the California Nurses Association for years.

Here’s the lead of the story:

“A vandal smashed the window of San Luis Obispo Mayor Jan Marx’s Prius Monday while she attended a luncheon Rotary Club meeting at the Madonna Inn.

“It was the only vehicle damaged in the busy parking lot.

“Although the mayor was quick to say she has no idea who was behind the vandalism, it occurred shortly after the City Council decided to appeal a recent ruling that could require the city to restore binding arbitration to the city’s charter.”

PERB thwarted San Luis Obispo voters; council chose to appeal

Requiring binding arbitration to resolve differences between elected officials and public employee unions often leads to split-the-difference resolutions of pay disputes. It can make it close to impossible for city leaders to, yunno, lead — binding them to a future in which their employees’ pay always goes up, up and away.

San Luis Obispo residents understood this; in 2006, for example, the police officers’ union rejected a 20 percent, four-year raise, knowing it could get more after arbitration. That is why residents voted overwhelmingly to strip the binding arbitration requirement from city law in 2011.  But a PERB administrative judge recently ruled that the public vote must be thrown out because the city charter can’t be changed to ban binding arbitration — without binding arbitration!

Sheesh. Shades of PERB rulings that existing state laws should be subject to collective bargaining.

As former San Luis Obispo Councilman Andrew Carter explains here, this ridiculous PERB ruling is what the City Council voted to appeal.

LOL: No evidence, only one group of suspects

Back to the SLO Tribune story and its coverage of the vandalizing of the PERB-doubting mayor’s car. The piece can only be read as building off a 100 percent assumption a cop or firefighter was to blame:

“The presidents of the city’s firefighters and police unions issued a joint written statement Tuesday expressing dismay over the vandalism to Marx’s car.

“‘We have nothing but the highest respect for our elected officials and the process they are working through. The decision to appeal the recent PERB decision was not a surprise to us,’ they wrote. ‘We understand why the City is appealing the decision, and we respect the process of the appeal. We are upset that it appears someone may have intentionally broke the Mayor’s car window, and we hope that the person responsible is brought to justice.'”

Yeah, sure you do. Then you’d have one less person paying dues.

By Chris Reed

Jerry Brown’s nonstop self-accolades for his alleged genius in bringing California back to solid ground are rather dubious. But it is with pensions that Brown’s self-congratulation is most incoherent. While he congratulates himself for achieving moderate pension reform via the Legislature last summer, his appointees continue their anti-reform rampage on the state Public Employment Relations Board.

On Tuesday night, the latest PERB outrage arrived with the release of a ruling from a PERB administrative law judge which gives labor unions a leg up in their push to invalidate Proposition B, the unprecedentedly ambitious pension reform measure approved by San Diego voters in a landslide last June. The judge held that state courts should find the measure illegal because city officials should have engaged in collective bargaining with city labor unions before pursuing a ballot initiative, a ruling in keeping with PERB’s emerging view that collective bargaining trumps state law.

Brown appointees go where no bureaucrats have gone before

As I detailed for CalWatchDog.com in September, the radicalization of PERB came as an unexpected consequence of the California Nurses Association’s war with Brown’s predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. The CNA was furious with PERB for preventing illegal strikes at UC hospitals as a tactic to win raises, and the union got Brown to install former CNA counsel M. Suzanne Murphy as PERB’s general counsel, and to appoint union-beholden members to the agency’s governing board.

The result of this turnover has been much more than the CNA getting its way on a new contract. Instead, it’s resulted in a widening of the war on direct democracy from the California Attorney General’s Office, whose Democratic occupants always write dishonest ballot language to undercut initiatives that unions don’t like; and from a previously obscure government bureaucracy:

“In February 2012, PERB’s radical change in course first became apparent when the agency for the first time in California history sought to keep a pending San Diego pension reform ballot measure from going before voters in June. Murphy’s argument held that, because elected officials in San Diego were involved in drafting the measure, it amounted to an attempt to circumvent and thus violate union collective bargaining rights — even though the San Diego City Council had taken a stand against the measure and it had been organized by private groups.

“This argument, if upheld, arguably would set a precedent under which elected officials could never join in ballot petition campaigns to try to force changes in government policies, because such changes would have affected employees, and thus needed to be collectively bargained.”

Dan Borenstein’s recent column underscores another example of Brown’s incoherence on pensions. In his bizarre effort to declare California’s structural deficit as having vanished, the governor simply ignores the vast underfunding of the California State Teachers’ Retirement System. By doing so, he makes the problem more intractable, as Borenstein detailed in his Bay Area News Group op-ed:

“Gov. Jerry Brown’s claim that he balanced his proposed 2013-14 budget ignores that he’s driving the state teacher pension system deeper into debt by shortchanging it at least $4.5 billion.

“Teachers will almost certainly receive retirement payments they have earned. It’s our children, the next generation of taxpayers, who will suffer. They will be stuck with an astronomical bill we should be paying now.”

But at least Brown doesn’t have to stop patting himself on the back if he ignores CalSTRS’ woes.

San Diego city attorney: Real judges will do right thing

As for PERB, San Diego City Attorney Jan Goldsmith predicted in an email Tuesday night that the administrative law judge’s ruling would be seen as a rogue act and wouldn’t hold up in court — a real court, not the PERB kangaroo court.

“We expected it. Barely mentioned are the 120,000 voters who signed petitions to get Prop B on the ballot and had a constitutional right to have it placed on the ballot or the voters who approved it last June,” Goldsmith wrote. “We look forward to returning to the courts where the constitution and the rule of law applies. Recall that PERB filed a lawsuit to stop the city from placing Prop B on the ballot and proceeded to lose three attempts to get an injunction in court; then, PERB dismissed its lawsuit.”

Goldsmith did a good job in an op-ed last summer of exposing the absurdity of the PERB stance:

“Citizen initiatives have been around for over 100 years. Yet never before has any initiative that qualified for the ballot through petition signatures been deemed a ‘sham’ citizen initiative. Governors (including Jerry Brown on his current tax initiative), mayors and other political leaders have regularly supported citizen initiatives and never has that support rendered those citizen initiatives ‘shams.’

“Since 1911, the right to place citizen initiatives on the ballot through voter petitions has been a constitutional right in California reserved by the people to bypass politicians and special interests. This right is not conditioned upon the approval of those special interests and is not something to be bargained over.”

The issue the San Diego city attorney identifies is even bigger than pension reform. It’s likely that the Yale Law School graduate who governs this state understands this.

But Jerry Brown would rather pretend he’s figured out how to make California thrive than acknowledge the undemocratic ways his appointees are behaving at the state Public Employment Relations Board.

By STEVEN GREENHUT

I recently documented how the state’s pro-union attorney general, Kamala Harris, crafted an unfair and dishonest title and summary for a pair of pension reform ballot initiatives submitted to her office, effectively killing the measures.

Then, last week, the government employee unions tried — and almost succeeded — with an even nastier stunt designed to undermine democracy.

In San Diego, unions are fearful of a new pension reform measure supporters call Comprehensive Pension Reform, or CPR, which has qualified for the June ballot. Instead of simply gearing up to fight this political battle, the unions petitioned one of those ridiculous commissions that most Californians have never even heard of, the Public Employment Relations Board, which is unfriendly turf for taxpayers. The union contended that placing the initiative on the ballot amounted to an unfair labor practice, and PERB called for a court injunction to stop the election until it could complete its sham proceedings.

In essence, the unions and this unelected board insist that the people of San Diego have no right to vote on pension reform. This is just the latest reminder of the totalitarian tactics of a public-sector union movement that doesn’t care about anything other than protecting its benefits.

“Never in the history of this state … has there ever been a requirement to meet and confer over a citizens’ initiative placed on the ballot by voter signatures,” San Diego City Attorney Jan Goldsmith said in a toughly worded letter to PERB. Pension reform advocate Carl DeMaio, a San Diego councilman and mayoral candidate, criticized PERB’s assault on Californians’ constitutional rights.

Fortunately, a judge agreed with the city, but expect the unions to head back to court if their campaign against CPR fails.

No Serious Reform

The unions that dominate Sacramento are not about to permit any serious reform, given that real reform — especially in light of frightening new estimates about the scope of unfunded pension liabilities — means that the days of millionaires’ pensions (meaning you would need millions in the bank to receive the lifetime payouts commonly received by recent California government retirees) eventually have to end. Unions don’t mind undermining the public’s right to vote. They don’t care if our taxes go through the roof, and businesses flee the state. They don’t care if services are slashed. They want their money.

Even Gov. Jerry Brown’s modest pension reform proposals are going nowhere in a Democratic-controlled Legislature that continues to promote expanded benefits for public employees, including a recently introduced Public Employees Bill of Rights. That leaves few other choices than a continuing gallop toward the fiscal brink.

While other liberal states, such as Rhode Island, are addressing their pension problems, and some Midwestern states — Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana — are fighting battles over union power, California does basically nothing. I appreciate the governor’s pension proposals, but he continues to view hefty tax increases as the only real solution to the state’s budget problems. The deficit has shrunk a bit, and Standard & Poor’s pushed up the state’s credit rating a tad, but the fundamentals here have not improved very much.

Where does that leave us?

Economist Allan Meltzer once quipped that “capitalism without failure is like religion without sin. It doesn’t work.” Americans have been witnessing this axiom on a broad scale, as government efforts to prop up industries, bail out the financial sector and protect politically favored private businesses from failure have only prolonged the financial crisis. Without failure, there is no day of reckoning and no effort by the failed party to make the fundamental changes needed to avert future crisis.

No Government Failure

The problem in the public sector is that government never is allowed to fail. There never is a day of reckoning no matter how poorly a government agency may provide its so-called services. Often, the worst agencies are rewarded for their failure with more public dollars. California governments have continually ramped up pension promises, and governments can’t go out of business, so they just keep piling up the debt.

When there’s no money left, officials play games with the numbers or — as Gov. Brown continues to do — make it their main objective to raise taxes.

Since reforms are blocked because of union control, some have proposed wider use of the bankruptcy option so municipalities can reorganize their debt. The main critics of the bankruptcy option are the unions. They know that bankruptcy would enable governments to abrogate unaffordable labor contracts. The public-employee unions championed a bill, signed into law by Brown in October, that makes municipal bankruptcy more cumbersome by forcing localities to seek approval for such actions by additional committees.

Some even see the bankruptcy option as something that should be allowed for states. In January 2011, GOP stalwarts Jeb Bush and Newt Gingrich ignited this debate with a Los Angeles Times op-ed titled, “Better Off Bankrupt.” They argued that an organized bankruptcy process might help states overcome staggering budget deficits. But other conservatives, concerned about the impact of bankruptcy on bond markets, have been campaigning against this idea. They note that the highly publicized bankruptcy of the city of Vallejo ultimately did little to reform its supersized pensions for public employees.

I’m not advocating for bankruptcy per se, but what happens when all other reform options are taken off the table? What happens when the politics of a state won’t allow the reforms necessary to save that state? In other words, what happens when failure is not an option? If the likes of Harris and PERB and the unions continue to get their way, we in California very well may get to see the answer.