Right to Work President Mark Mix sat down with nationally-syndicated radio host Lars Larson yesterday to discuss the Police and Firefighter Monopoly Bargaining Bill, a Big Labor power grab that is poised to pass during the "lame duck" congressional session. Click here to listen or use the embedded player below:

As always, you can also listen to the Foundation's podcast via iTunes or manually subscribe to the feed.  

Today, Mark Mix, President of National Right to Work was published in the Washington Times regarding today's U.S. Senate vote on Senator Harry Reid's Police and Firefighter Monopoly Bargaining Bill (S. 3991). Despite voters sending a clear message to Washington last month, it appears some pro-forced unionism senators didn't quite get the message:

If Mr. Reid cared one whit for what ordinary Americans think, he would respond to such electoral drubbings for his fellow Big Labor Democrats and GOP fellow travelers by backing away from federally mandated union-boss control over public-safety officers. Instead, he announced over the weekend that he will file for cloture and force a vote on this draconian bill on Wednesday. Among those voting will be 14 defeated or retiring senators who won't be back in January.

Federalizing union monopoly bargaining over public-safety employees would be ill-advised under any circumstances, but at a time when taxes are already poised to skyrocket and cities and towns across America are already struggling to get through the worst fiscal crisis in decades, Congress would have to be incredibly reckless to enact this harmful legislation.

By tipping the scales even further in favor of government employment growth over job growth, S. 3991 could damage the hopes of reviving America's private-sector economy. Moreover, as former Service Employees International Union second-in-command Anna Burger boasted, a federal public-safety union mandate would "create a national collective," i.e. monopoly, "bargaining standard for all [state and local] public workers."

Meanwhile, the Washington Post came out with a hard-hitting editorial against the bill:

...the Senate is about to take up a measure that might compound the financial predicament of state and local governments. Pushed by Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), the Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act would require all states to give police and fire unions "adequate" collective bargaining rights - as determined by the Federal Labor Relations Authority. Unions could sue states deemed "inadequate" in federal court. Mr. Reid is trying to get this measure through the lame-duck Congress as a reward to the firefighters' union, which backed his reelection campaign. But it also enjoys support from several key Republicans. 

We share the sponsors' high regard for first responders. But this measure would trample long-standing state autonomy in public-sector labor relations, to no obvious national purpose. Of the 10 states with the lowest violent crime rates in 2008, three did not require collective bargaining for police and one, Virginia, forbids it for all public employees.

The bill could disrupt the law in both Virginia and Maryland, the latter of which lets counties decide whether and how to bargain with employees. The predictable result would be higher costs for employee contracts or legal bills - or both - at precisely the moment when cash-strapped states and localities can least afford them.

It's no wonder that the Fort Worth Star-Telegram declared today that "The Senate would do taxpayers a big favor by killing this bill."

At National Review, John Berlau explains how the Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act - better known to Freeom@Work readers as the Police and Firefighter Monopoly Bargaining Bill - threatens public safety:

But as with health care, liberals want to take away federalism in fire protection and force all American communities into a one-size-fits-all unionized model. The biggest congressional priority of the IAFF over the past few years has been the so-called Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act, which would force unionization and collective bargaining on every one of the nation’s local fire departments.

And far from delivering fire protection that is quick and efficient, this legislation is almost guaranteed to bring big-city slowdowns to every town. According to the watchdog Public Service Research Council, public-employee strikes quadruple, on average, in the years after state laws mandating public-sector collective bargaining take effect.

So the question is, to paraphrase Krugman: Do you want to live in the kind of society in which this happens? Too bad if you answered “no,” because Krugman’s allies are determined to take the choice of non-unionized fire departments away from fire fighters and homeowners.

Read the whole thing here. As Berlau notes, the consequences of union-instigated fire department strikes have been devastating:

Similar damage and destruction occurred in the 1975 fire fighters’ strike in Kansas City, Mo. In The Municipal Doomsday Machine, his 1970s exposé of corruption in public-safety unions, journalist and National Review founding editor Ralph de Toledano vividly described a city paralyzed by union violence. According to his and other accounts, when fires hit — in suspiciously high numbers, as in Memphis — non-striking firefighters found fire extinguishers that had been filled with flammable liquid, oxygen tanks that had been emptied, and fuel tanks of fire trucks that had been fouled with water.

The 23-day Chicago fire fighters’ strike in 1980 was mostly free of the violence that plagued Memphis, Kansas City, and other places, but its duration made it much more deadly. On February 14, all but 400 of Chicago’s 4,300 fire fighters gave the Windy City a valentine by walking off the job. They formed picket lines in front of its 120 fire stations, shutting down more than half of them.

During the strike, “24 people died in incidents involving calls for help from the fire department,” the Chicago Tribune would recount 20 years later. One tragedy that could have been avoided was the death of brother and sister Tommie and Santana Jackson — ages 1 and 2, respectively — who perished in a fire in an apartment that, according to Time magazine, was “just half a block from a closed fire station.”

The risk of public safety strikes is just one more reason why the Police and Firefighter Monopoly Bargaining Bill is such a bad idea. For more information on the bill, click here. 

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.

Right to Work Vice President Doug Stafford sat down with nationally-syndicated radio host Lars Larson to discuss Big Labor's Police and Firefighter Monopoly Bargaining Bill. Click here to listen or use the embedded player below:

You can also listen to the Foundation's podcast via iTunes or manually subscribe to the feed.