The No-So-Little Dirty Secret: Government Unions and Their Enablers

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Maureen Martin

Maureen Martin passed away in February 2013. She was a long-time senior fellow for legal affairs at The Heartland Institute. Formerly a newspaper reporter, she became an attorney and has practiced law for nearly 30 years, generally concentrating in litigation and environmental law. She was an adjunct professor of environmental law at Loyola University Chicago for more than 10 years. Her op-eds were published in the Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily, the Washington Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the Chicago Tribune, among other outlets.Her favorite lawyer joke: “What’s the difference between a carp and a lawyer?” Answer: “One’s a scum-sucking bottom feeder; the other’s just a fish.”

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Government employee unions — like those now demonstrating in Madison, Wisconsin — have always been able to stack the deck in their favor in an unconscionable and even corrupt way. But not any longer.

The unions make hefty donations to politicians, often guaranteeing their election. Then they negotiate their union contracts with the very politicians to whom they donated. Taxpayers put up with these blatant and immoral conflicts of interest for decades, until the unions got too greedy and got ginormous wage increases and lavish benefits packages. And until politicians became dependent on union campaign contributions to win reelection  and forgot to even pretend to be engaging in arms-length union contract negotiations.

This dirty not-so-little secret is now exposed, and Wisconsin taxpayers aren’t going to put up with it any more. Neither the unions nor Wisconsin Democrats are willing to face reality. The “new-normal” is that the days of wine and roses for both government union workers and politicians are over.

It’s about time.