If unionism is supposedly bad for public employees, why is it somehow good for cops?
SB 13 by state Sen. Joan Huffman - which is one of Lt. Governor Dan Patrick's stated priorities - would eliminate payment of union dues directly from public employees' paychecks except for police, fire and EMS unions.
Include police unions in the ban and Grits might go for that idea. They're the main source of public-employee-union generated economic headaches at the local level, from excessive salaries bloating the budget in Austin to vitriolic attacks on the city manager in San Antonio to massive unfunded pension liabilities threatening to bankrupt the city of Dallas. They're also the unions most frequently throwing their weight around in local elections, to the detriment of both officer accountability and city budgets.
If the goal is to reduce organized labor's stranglehold on local budgets and politics in Texas, police unions are the place to start.
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16 comments:
Big cities are run by elected democrats while the state is run by elected Republicans that generally like police officers. If anything, state officials wanting to apply pressure to cities, should make police unions stronger as a means of furthering GOP goals.
I'm curious which "GOP goals" do police unions further? Mainly they generate high local taxation and underfunded pension obligations. I know the GOP is in a transition moment, but I thought it was still against those things.
That useless blowhard governor of Wisconsin did the same thing. Busted every union except the police. I despise republicans, every single one should be put down like a rabid animal.
You sound rabid yourself Anon 02:16:00
Freedom isn't free, brotha. Russians have been telling us that for how long?
Reminds me of the story my husband tells about his rich older brother. He had run for mayor, but the police union did not like his platform. Two cops enter his home in a gated community, through his locked doors and beat him. They were in uniform and did not hid their names. He was hospitalized. He was told to drop out and he did. This goes back many years and his platform addressed issues with the local police. My husband's brother never went back into politics. Can you say Houston cops?
The FOP endorsed Trump 2016. Our heavily-armed LEOs are consolidating their position as secret state police and Imperial Guards.
The under funded pensions are the result of the city and county governments not contributing at the rate proposed by the actuary. It takes decades of short changing the pension contributions to create the huge problem that exists all across the country.
Please remember that the public entities negotiate contracts with their police and fire unions with very specific contribution rates for each employee. So each month there is a report that goes into the pension fund listing employees and pension benefit contributions. Again, very specific.
The dirty little secret is that the pension trustees use investment earnings assumptions that are too high which allows for pension benefits to be awarded that are not funded and for contributions rates to be set that are too low. Over time this creates a financial bomb because it is extremely hard for awarded pension benefits to be rolled back. Thus the "unfunded liability" builds, and builds and builds. You might not know this but Vallejo, California filed for bankruptcy due to this problem.
By the way I owned a benefits administration firm that serviced union pension plan. I did not make this up.
Me to the tealiban have no desire to lead!
Me to the tealiban have no desire to lead!
Republicans suck
Republicans suck
Ya'll are all wrong. Republicans are pro law and order and will support law enforcement as a tool of their platform, however they hate cops just like all the other labor groups. Cops are the biggest drain of their government budgets, and are always whining about low pay, just like coal miners and auto workers. They want cops to write more tickets to fill the county and city coffers. Where's are the big unions like AFL-CIO in Texas? Police unions are a joke in Texas unless your in a big city.
Too many ticks on that dog.
Peter Marana, given that unions do not have any say in pension matters here in Texas, your comments lack any credibility. Union leaders cannot even be on pension boards per state law so your claim to own a business that serviced union pension plans sounds like gibberish. While some pension plans are based on a static rate negotiated by an organization, many more are not, hence the conversation the adults are having regarding some plans moving from defined benefit plans to defined contribution plans, each of Houston's plans averaging more than 7% until just recently. But there is no dirty little secret regarding setting assumptions too high, the dirty big secret being that voters are shown that the fault is tied to the people they keep electing yet those same voters continue to vote for the same people causing the underfunding.
Grits, police best represent the "haves" of society, not the criminals you cuddle up to so often. Individual police officers also tend to be far more conservative than their unions. As such, the GOP and police are very chummy no matter how some on the ultra left try to play them against one another.
Anonymous 1/04/2017 02:16:00 PM, Governor Walker of WI offered public safety unions a deal to impact them less harshly if they supported him. They wisely took the deal to retain most of their benefits with only marginally increased costs. This caused jealousy from other unions that wanted similar deals but make no mistake, aside from some extremely fringe teabag enthusiasts of the GOP, republicans remain very police friendly across the country. Legislation is written with this friendship in mind, courts typically bend over backwards to display such support, and most jurors march along to the tune as well. Before you shoot the messenger, consider this a casual observation from the peanut gallery.
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