10 News Conference Wingmen, Episode 20 (Pension Reform Mediation)

This week on News 10 Wingmen, Bob Plain and I discussed the process by which pension reform is bouncing between branches of government — I’d say, in a way that’s subverting the rule of law.

The video is below, but one point that I don’t think I made sufficiently clear is that the whole issue serves to illustrate the fundamental corruption of public-sector unions.  With the subject of pensions, the labor unions want government employees to be treated truly as a special class, getting the benefits of government authority in every direction and every capacity.

Breaking things down to their very core, there are two ways to interact with government: as a government or as an organization.  People who approach from the government angle are constituents, voters, and taxpayers; those who approach from the other angle are service providers, whether contractors or employees.

Obviously, some people have both roles; that’s unavoidable.  What’s important is to have delineations so it’s clear what role a person or group is in for a particular transaction, and to have protections to keep those who fill both roles from taking advantage of that fact.  Key to these delineations is the expectation that all contractual relationships are explicitly described within the contracts, with no vague overlap between what the contract implies outside of itself and what employees can accomplish as voters.

The pensions are set up in law, not contract, which means for practical purposes that the employees are beneficiaries in their capacity as constituents.  This has been why the legislature can loop in people who aren’t actually contractual employees (like, ahem, legislators).  And as I say in the video below, it served the purposes of the unions, because it made it easier never to discuss the value of the pensions, which otherwise would have come up every three years, when renewing the contracts.

Think of the talk about how the general treasurer and legislature should have “come to the table” and negotiated the reform with the unions.  Even assuming the unions have standing to negoatiate on behalf of retirees as a group (they shouldn’t), this is nakedly a request for special treatment.  Otherwise, state employees would simply have come forward as constituents and testified about the effects of public policy… and then held legislators accountable through the electoral system.

What the unions want — and what the travesty of justice in Rhode Island courts appears to be allowing — is a situation in which one privileged group of constituents gets to negotiate with elected officials behind closed doors and then approach the rest of us with the deal that they’ve worked out.  Then, having followed the avenue of labor law to their fullest advantage, the unions will still get to participate in the political process, too.

(The cherry on top of it all, of course, is that they’re ultimately doing it with taxpayer money.)

The unions want to be employees when it comes to labor law, and they want to be constituents when it comes to political activism.  This pension situation illustrates how thin the walls are between those two.

Taxpayers don’t get to sue the legislature for breach of the “implied contract” that pension reform made with them, or when the unsustainable pension system rockets their taxes (every tax) beyond what they could reasonably have been expected to consider when they set up their lives and businesses in the state.

This is fundamental corruption of our system of government, and it shouldn’t be doubted that, as the state continues to shirk its obligations to the people of Rhode Island, they’ll increase the rate at which they sever their ties with the state and leave fewer and fewer people with bills that can’t be changed.

Click here if video does not appear above.

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