Earlier this week, Mark Mix, President of National Right to Work, was published in the Washington Examiner warning about the threat the Police and Firefighter Monopoly Bargaining Bill (pdf), which just passed the House last week, poses not only public safety workers' rights, but also state and community budgets. As we noted before, public officials across the country are waking up to the fact that public sector forced unionism is behind the financial crises in their communities.

From Mark Mix's commentary:

(I)n the 22 states which prohibit forced union dues for government employees and most of which don’t authorize public-sector union monopoly bargaining, fewer than 30 percent of public workers are unionized. Not one of these 22 states was to be found on last month’s Business Insider’s list of the states “most likely to default.”

Business Insider ranked heavily unionized California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New York, New Jersey, Ohio and Wisconsin as the worst default risks. And the Hirsch-Macpherson data shows that an average of 61 percent of public-sector employees in these nine states were under union monopoly bargaining -- 20 percent higher than the typical state.

In these nine worst default-risk states from 1999 to 2009, aggregate private-sector jobs fell by 4.2 percent, but heavily unionized state and local government jobs increased by 9 percent. Since annual state and local government employee compensation costs nationwide come to $1.1 trillion, or half of all state and local government spending, it’s not hard to see that the Big Labor-driven growth in government payrolls is a fiscal catastrophe for states like California, Illinois, and New Jersey.

...

But government union bosses are expecting to have the last laugh if fed-up taxpayers and their allies limit themselves to going after just bloated public-sector payrolls and unsustainable public pension plans, rather than root of the problem itself.

Laws empowering government union officials to negotiate the contract terms for all front-line employees at a public agency, even for those employees who want nothing to do with the union, are behind the messes in Sacramento, Springfield and Trenton. And laws that authorize the firing of public servants for refusing to pay union dues or fees to an unwanted union make matters even worse.

Long-term solutions to state budget crises will require addressing the core problems of union monopoly bargaining and forced union dues in the public sector.

Until then, hopefully the Senate will spare police officers, firefighters, and EMTs from forced union “representation” that will make budget matters worse for the numerous states that have already rejected it.

Read the entire Washington Examiner guest commentary by Mark Mix here.

Today, National Right to Work President Mark Mix was published in the Investor's Business Daily exposing how General Motors (GM) and United Autoworker (UAW) union bosses colluded to use taxpayer dollars to "pay back" the taxpayers for the government bail out it received last year:

...GM leaders and the UAW officials who colluded with them to extract $43 billion out of taxpayers in exchange for arguably worthless stock are now patting themselves on the back for paying back on April 21 the balance of a $6.7 billion loan they took out from taxpayers as part of the 2009 bankruptcy package.

In a weekly radio address to the nation late last month, President Obama suggested that the fact that taxpayers have now recouped 14% of the taxes he diverted into GM coffers on their behalf vindicates his decision to bail out GM and the UAW brass.

But ordinary Americans, with whom the GM and Chrysler bailouts have become overwhelmingly unpopular over the past year, are unlikely to agree. Especially not if they learn that GM was able to "pay back" the loan only because it had not yet spent all of the other $43 billion in taxpayer money it raked in last year.

But, as Mix further notes, the mirage that GM and UAW officials are being fiscally responsible with the taxpayer's money is just part of their plan to ask for even more money from the government:

...[T]he apparent motive of Obama-selected GM CEO Ed Whitacre and UAW officials in repaying the $6.7 billion now is to pave the way for the company to secure a new $10 billion loan from taxpayers at an interest rate of just 5%, two points lower than the previous rate, to pay for the retooling of its plants to meet the government's new, stricter fuel-economy standards.

If the GM/UAW "zombie" corporation obtains the new $10 billion government loan, it will end up even more deeply in hock to taxpayers than before, after having gotten good PR and kudos from the president for having paid off its original loan "in full."

Fortunately, the American people are not as easily bamboozled as President Obama and his cohorts in the GM and UAW union hierarchies seem to think they are.

Mix concludes that "the president's fork-tongued reassurances that all is going well with the bailouts are likely to make Americans angrier and angrier as time goes on" because his special deals and political paybacks to his Big Labor buddies are more than American families can bear, and serves no purpose other than to enrich Big Labor’s coffers.

To readers who followed Big Labor's record-breaking political contributions last election, it should come as no surprise that the AFL-CIO and the SEIU officials are hinting at big union debts. Of course, so long as the union bossses have a basically unrestricted right to to collect (and jack up) forced union dues, they will not have trouble raising revenue until most American jobs are destroyed.

But don't be surprised to see the union bosses lining up at the federal bailout trough (again) to exploit the situation.  Here's the Wall Street Journal:

Alarm is coming even from inside the AFL-CIO -- specifically, from Tom Buffenbarger, president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, who sits on the AFL-CIO's finance committee. Bloomberg News reports that he is circulating a report claiming the AFL-CIO engaged in "creative accounting" to conceal financial difficulties heading into last year's Presidential election. As recently as 2000, the union consortium of 8.5 million members had a $45 million surplus. By June of last year it had $90.6 million in liabilities, or $2.3 million more than its $88.3 million in assets. "If we are not careful, insolvency may be right around the corner," Mr. Buffenbarger warned.

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As for the SEIU, as recently as 2002 total SEIU liabilities were about $8 million. According to its 2008 disclosure form, the union owed more than $156 million, a 30% increase over the $120 million it owed in 2007. Its liabilities now equal more than 80% of its $189 million in assets. Net assets fell by nearly half last year, to $34 million, from $64 million in 2007. The debt includes an $80 million loan the SEIU took out in 2003 to purchase a new headquarters in downtown Washington, D.C. But the liabilities also stem from political spending, including at least $67 million last year on political and lobbying expenses, twice what it spent in 2007.

Adding insult to injury, the SEIU is initiating another vicious "corporate campaign" to intimidate one of its biggest creditors:

By the end of 2008, the SEIU also owed Bank of America nearly $88 million, including its headquarters loan and another $10 million for unspecified purposes. This is the same BofA that the union as spent the past months attacking as the face of Wall Street excess. The SEIU has protested outside of Bank of America offices and demanded the resignation of CEO Ken Lewis.

Keep in mind that any union debt is paid off by rank-and-file workers across the country, many of whom are unwilling contributors to Big Labor's massive political apparatus. No wonder unions are having more and more trouble convincing workers to join, which is why they're going all-out to get Congress to pass "card check" instant-organizing legislation:

One irony here is that the SEIU's Mr. Stern, the most powerful labor leader in America, loudly broke from the AFL-CIO in 2005 because he said it spent too much in Washington and not enough on organizing. But unions can't resist the lure of the Beltway precisely because they fare so poorly in the private marketplace. The union red ink helps explain why Mr. Stern and AFL-CIO chief John Sweeney are lobbying so hard for Congress to rig the rules to make it easier for unions to gather more dues-paying members.

The Journal also notes that union bosses are working overtime to rollback basic transparency guidelines, something the Foundation sounded the alarm on back in March:

Unions have a long history of corruption in part because they mix large amounts of cash from dues with political purposes and little oversight. Yet the same union leaders who denounce failures of corporate governance bitterly resisted the Bush Administration's expanded disclosure, and now they want the Obama Administration to water down those rules. The news about rising union debt shows why that transparency is more necessary than ever.

Keeping basic transparency regulations in place would be marginally beneficial, but the reality is that union bosses will continue to extort money from unwilling workers for a variety of activities as long as they enjoy exclusive monopoly bargaining and forced dues privileges. Making union membership and dues-payment strictly voluntary is the only effective way to combat union corruption and encourage financial restraint, which is why state Right to Work laws are so important.