Betsy DeVos

Betsy's Page

Thomas Sowell speaks up to defend Betsy DeVos and to point out that the opposition to her is being generated by teachers unions objecting to her support of charter schools.
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My daughter works for KIPP schools in Washington, D.C. and the stories of the dedicated work of the teachers and administration to help students who otherwise would be condemned to failing regular public schools is truly inspiring. I work at a charter school for which we regularly have over 1000 applications for about 80 spots in the entering class. Like KIPP, we are a public school, a fact often ignored in the overwrought rhetoric against charters. We have to educate students with the same per-student allotment that the regular public schools get. The difference is that we have to pay all our capital expenses out of that amount as well as teachers' health insurance and pensions. And still our students regularly achieve at the highest level in our state. No wonder the teachers' unions see the threat.

The Real Democratic Party - WSJ

The Real Democratic Party - WSJ

The Senate made history Tuesday when Mike Pence became the first Vice President to cast the deciding vote for a cabinet nominee.

The nominee is now Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. The vote came after an all-night Senate debate in a futile effort by Democrats to turn the third Republican vote they needed to scuttle the nomination on claims that the long-time education reformer isn’t qualified. Republicans Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins had already caved, so Mr. Pence had to cast the 51st vote to confirm Mrs. DeVos.

She can now get on with her work, but this episode shouldn’t pass without noting what it says about the modern Democratic Party. Why would the entire party apparatus devote weeks of phone calls, emails and advocacy to defeating an education secretary? This isn’t Treasury or Defense. It’s not even a federal department that controls all that much education money, most of which is spent by states and local school districts. Why is Betsy DeVos the one nominee Democrats go all out to defeat?

The answer is the cold-blooded reality of union power and money. The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers are, along with environmentalists, the most powerful forces in today’s Democratic Party. They elect Democrats, who provide them more jobs and money, which they spend to elect more Democrats, and so on. To keep this political machine going, they need to maintain their monopoly control over public education.

Mrs. DeVos isn’t a product of that monopoly system. Instead she looked at this system’s results—its student failures and lives doomed to underachievement—and has tried to change it by offering all parents the choice of charter schools and vouchers. Above all, she has exposed that unions and Democrats don’t really believe in their high-minded rhetoric about equal opportunity. They believe in lifetime tenure and getting paid.

This sorry politics means that no Democrat could dare support Mrs. DeVos, even if it meant a humiliating about-face like the one performed by New Jersey Senator Cory Booker. As the mayor of Newark, Mr. Booker supported more school choice and he even sat on the board of an organization that would become the American Federation for Children (AFC), the school reform outfit chaired by Mrs. DeVos.

As recently as May 2016, Mr. Booker delivered an impassioned speech at the AFC’s annual policy summit in Washington. He boasted about how Newark had been named by the Brookings Institution “the number four city in the country for offering parents real school choice.”

He described the school-choice cause this way: “We are the last generation, fighting the last big battle to make true on that—that a child born anywhere in America, from any parents, a child no matter what their race or religion or socio-economic status should have that pathway, should have that equal opportunity, and there is nothing more fundamental to that than education. That is the great liberation.”

Some liberator. On Tuesday Mr. Booker voted no on Mrs. DeVos.

His calculation is simple. Mr. Booker is angling to run for President in 2020, and to have any chance at the Democratic nomination he needs the unions’ blessing. He knows that a large chunk of both the party’s delegates and campaign funding comes from the teachers unions, and so he had to repent his school-choice apostasy.

The unions can’t even tolerate a debate on the subject lest their monopoly power be threatened. All that chatter about “the children” is so much moral humbug.

Mrs. DeVos is a wealthy woman who could do almost anything with her time and money. She has devoted it to philanthropy for the public good, in particular working to ensure that children born without her advantages can still have an equal shot at the American dream. She knows education should be about learning for children and not jobs for adults.

All you need to know about today’s Democratic Party is that this is precisely the reason the party went to such extraordinary lengths to destroy her. We trust she realizes that her best revenge will be to use every resource of her new job to press the campaign for charter schools and vouchers from coast to coast.

Who’s Afraid of Betsy DeVos? - WSJ

Who’s Afraid of Betsy DeVos? - WSJ

Perhaps Mrs. DeVos’s most important qualification is that she has the courage of her convictions. Progressives are willing to brook billionaires who use their wealth to expand government or augment their political influence. Hyatt heiress Penny Pritzker, whose family is a major Democratic patron, served as President Obama’s Commerce secretary. But a conservative who’s dedicated her private fortune to liberating poor kids trapped in lousy public schools? The horror!

The DeVoses have donated tens of millions of dollars to charity including a children’s hospital in Michigan and an international art competition in Grand Rapids. They’ve also given to Christian organizations, which the left cites as evidence of concealed bigotry. Yet education has been their main philanthropic cause.

During the 1990s, they patronized a private-school scholarship fund for low-income families and championed Michigan’s first charter school law. In 2000 they helped bankroll a voucher initiative, which was defeated by a union blitz. The DeVoses then turned to expanding charters, which have become Exhibit A in the progressive campaign against her. Unions claim Michigan charters are inferior to the state’s public schools and that 80% are run for profit.

These claims are spurious. Detroit charters are low performing—only 19% of students are proficient in English—but they’re better than the alternative. Charter students in Detroit on average score 60% more proficient on state tests than kids attending the city’s traditional public schools. Eighteen of the top 25 schools in Detroit are charters while 23 of the bottom 25 are traditional schools.

Two studies from Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (2013, 2015) found that students attending Michigan charters gained on average an additional two months of learning every year over their traditional school counterparts. Charter school students in Detroit gained three months.

Eighty-percent of Michigan charters utilize a private education service provider. Yet only about half are operated by a for-profit entity, and almost all of these are mom-and-pop businesses run by Michigan residents. While unions have fought to keep failing public schools open, Mrs. DeVos backed a 2009 law allowing the state to close public schools—charters included—that scored in the bottom 5% of the state for three consecutive years. Only seven of the 54 schools with two strikes in the past two years were charters.

The real reason unions fear Mrs. DeVos is that she’s a rare reformer who has defeated them politically. Prior to being tapped by Mr. Trump, she chaired the American Federation for Children (AFC), which has helped elect hundreds of legislators across the country who support private school choice. Last year AFC and its affiliate groups spent $5 million on elections compared to the teachers unions’ $138 million. Yet 108 of the 121 candidates AFC supported won their races.

And while we're at it, here's Reason Magazine:

Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump's pick for Secretary of Education, doesn't want to destroy public education. Public educators—and Title IX zealots—want to destroy Betsy DeVos. Passed in 1972, Title IX is the federal statute banning gender-based discrimination in any educational institution that receives federal funding. It effectively covers all public K-12 schools, many private elementary and secondary schools, and effectively all colleges, public or private.

Among DeVos's staunchest critics are so-called victims' rights groups. Know Your IX, an activist organization that works to diminish due process protections for students accused of sexual assault on university campuses, is tweeting under the hashtag #DearBetsy in hopes of pressuring her to continue the Education Department's misguided and legally suspect campaign against fairness and justice in university misconduct hearings.

"Ms. DeVos must fully explain whether she supports the radical view that it should be more difficult for campus sexual assault victims to receive justice," Sen. Bob Casey, a Democrat and member of the committee that will vote on DeVos's confirmation, told Politico.

Title IX supporters portray their critics as radicals who believe that every rapist should go free and that every woman is a liar. Of course, this is not the case. The Education Department's Office for Civil Rights's (OCR) interpretation of Title IX has come under fire precisely because OCR has taken a radical position: It believes that university students accused of sexual misconduct should be left with very little means of proving their innocence before poorly trained bureaucrats. It is OCR's opinion—not Congress' or the Supreme Court's—that federal law requires universities to investigate wrongdoing in accordance with a definition of sexual harassment so broad that it threatens academic freedom and free speech while denying fundamental due process to the accused.

That's why civil liberties organizations including the American Association of University Professors and PEN America have expressed serious concerns about OCR's handling of Title IX under President Obama. These are not radical organizations, and they consist mostly of liberal thinkers who want to protect free speech and due process for all.

All that said, it's unclear whether victims' advocates have anything to worry about—DeVos's opinion on Title IX is not widely known. She has met with Sen. James Lankford, a Republican and major critic of OCR, to discuss the subject, but that's about it.

Devos is a donor to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), and this fact has activists particularly worried:

The donations are "a red flag," said Lisa Maatz, the top policy adviser at the American Association of University Women, which advocates for strict enforcement of Title IX, the federal law that governs sex discrimination, harassment and sexual assault on college campuses. "In the absence of an actual record … I think these kinds of donations take on even greater importance, because we have to rely on her contributions to inform us on particular issues."

FIRE is primarily a free speech organization, and DeVos might have donated $10,000 to the group for reasons other than a desire to eviscerate Title IX. But even if DeVos shares FIRE's attitude toward Title IX (and I hope that she does), this would not make her a radical about the issue of campus sexual assault. As FIRE explains:

The basic protections for which FIRE argues—the right to the active participation of counsel; the right to see the evidence in one's case and to meaningfully question witnesses; and the right to an impartial tribunal, among others—benefit all parties and do not impede the pursuit of justice. Outside of the campus context, nobody would argue that reducing due process protections, including the burden of proof, is necessary to secure a just outcome.

Public university students who are accused of misconduct deserve a fair hearing and a chance to defend themselves: This is the idea that Title IX loyalists deem radical. If Betsy DeVos wanted to take a second look at OCR's directives, this would not make her an extremist. It would put her in the company of countless civil liberties groups that believe OCR is currently operating outside the law.

But the crusade to portray DeVos as a dangerous ideologue is mulit-faceted. Critics have not been content to hound her for possibly thinking that OCR has overstepped. They also accuse her of wanting to destroy the public education system entirely. Sensing that an education secretary who supports school choice reform is a threat to their political power, teachers unions and their allies are relentlessly insisting that DeVos is some kind of radical anarcho-capitalist or religious fanatic when it comes to private schools.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, had this to say: "In nominating DeVos, Trump makes it loud and clear that his education policy will focus on privatizing, defunding and destroying public education in America. Every American should be concerned that she would impose her reckless and extreme ideology on the nation."

Of course, there's nothing extreme or reckless about DeVos's support for school choice reforms. School choice is broadly popular, well-liked by fair-minded policy experts, and draws support from Democrats as well as Republicans. New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, a rising leader in the Democratic Party, was a supporter of school choice, at least until recently. He formerly served with DeVos on the board of the Alliance for School Choice, in fact. Here's what Booker had to say about school choice, according to Breitbart News:

I cannot ever stand up and stand against a parent having options because I benefited from my parents having options. And when people tell me they're against school choice, whether it's the Opportunity Scholarship Act or charter schools, I look at them and say, "As soon as you're telling me you're willing to send your kid to a failing school in my city or in Camden or Trenton, then I'll be with you."

Now that it's politically inconvenient for Booker to say anything that would perturb teachers unions—huge power brokers in the Democratic Party—Booker has changed his tune. He claims to have "serious concerns" about DeVos.

It's not just the Democratic Party stumping for the teachers unions. The New York Times, ever the enemy of a well-educated populace, accused DeVos of "damaging" the fabric of public education in her home state of Michigan, where she spent considerable money promoting charter schools:

She has poured money into charter schools advocacy, winning legislative changes that have reduced oversight and accountability. About 80 percent of the charter schools in Michigan are operated by for-profit companies, far higher than anywhere else. She has also argued for shutting down Detroit public schools, with the system turned over to charters or taxpayer money given out as vouchers for private schools. In that city, charter schools often perform no better than traditional schools, and sometimes worse.

That Times editorial relies on reporting from the Times' Kate Zernike, who claims that DeVos is a "believer in a freer market than even some free market economists would endorse" and "pushed back on any regulation as too much regulation."

DeVos did nothing of the sort, as National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru explains:

You might think, then, that DeVos got legislation enacted that, well, reduced oversight of charter schools. The linked article, although biased against DeVos, makes no such claim. Rather, it shows that DeVos intervened to force the modification of legislation about charter schools. She opposed the creation of a commission that would have given traditional public schools a say in which charter-school networks could expand and which charter schools could continue to operate. (More on that dispute here and here.) The legislation that was eventually enacted omitted that provision and instead "allow[ed] the state to close the schools at the bottom of existing state rankings." There was, in other words, no reduction in oversight and accountability.

The Times is also waging war on established facts about charter schools. Studies consistently show that not all charters succeed, but providing kids with more education options leads to better outcomes in many cases. The Times editorial states that charter schools in Detroit "often perform no better than public schools, and sometimes worse." That's a curious misreading of the data, though, according to The Cato Institute's Jason Bedrick:

To claim, as the NYT does, that Detroit "charter schools often perform no better than traditional schools, and sometimes worse" based on these figures is a highly distorted way of presenting the data. It's equally true to say "Detroit charter schools almost always perform as well or better than traditional schools."

The Times has already proven that it has no interest in telling the truth about charter schools Just recently, a University of Michigan education professor was given room in the paper of record to argue that economists are generally skeptical of free market alternatives to public education. But the data she used to make this point was both out of date and misrepresented in the article. According to the most recent survey data, 44 percent of economists thought a voucher system would leave most students better off, 34 percent weren't sure, and just 5 percent thought not. Among economists with an opinion on the subject, the consensus overwhelmingly favored school choice.

That's because school choice is fundamentally un-radical. Education reformers don't want to defund public education and bring back child labor, they want to provide publicly funded alternatives to government-run schools that have failed their students, who are typically the poorest and least-privileged students.

In the policy battle over school choice, it's the teachers unions who are the radicals. They believe that they are entitled to an unbreakable monopoly on providing K-12 education, in defiance of a wealth of evidence suggesting that such a system is marred by bad incentives and serves only to protect public employees at the expense of kids and families. They smear any suggestion that competition could improve the system as an attempt to destroy public schools.

No, Betsy DeVos doesn't want to destroy public schools. Nor is there any reason to believe she wants to turn rapists loose on college campuses. Those who say otherwise are the real extremists.

Commentary: Black Lives Matter vs. charter schools

Commentary: Black Lives Matter vs. charter schools

The Movement for Black Lives Matter coalition has recently issued education-policy "demands" that demonstrate that not all the lives of black children matter to the group.

In the preamble of the BLM demands, the group uses language that seems drawn straight from teacher-union talking points. BLM talks about "an international education privatization agenda," which sounds very similar to a recent National Education Association tweet claiming, "Privatization is a global threat to public education." And like the NEA, the BLM authors believe that deregulated public charter schools are an instrument of this feared privatization agenda.

Despite the fact that charter schools are government funded and must receive initial and periodic approvals by local school boards, the fact that charters can be operated by private education management organizations causes BLM to froth about "corporate school reformers" who turn schools into "test subjects of experimental, market-based education reforms." BLM thus demands "a moratorium on charter schools."

In a hypocritical twist, The Atlantic reports that a child of Jonathan Stith, one of the authors of the BLM demands, is "enrolled in a charter school." Yet, Stith told the publication that his desire to eliminate charters "comes from a lived experience" - whatever that means.

What empirical research shows is that the lived experience of black children in charter schools has been very positive.

A 2015 study by Stanford University's Center for Research on Education Outcomes found that low-income black students in urban charter schools had higher achievement in math and reading than their peers in traditional public schools.

Looking across all 41 urban regions examined in the study, the Stanford researchers found, "Black students in poverty [in charter schools] receive the equivalent of 59 days of additional learning in math and 44 days of additional learning in reading compared to their peers in [traditional public schools]."

Urban charter schools were also more effective for black students who were not from low-income backgrounds. The Stanford study found that black students not in poverty gained the equivalent of 43 additional days of math learning and 29 additional days of reading learning in urban charter schools compared with similar students in traditional public schools.

Charter schools in cities such as Newark, New Orleans, and Memphis, which have large black populations, had some of the largest impacts on student achievement.

Further, the study found that charter schools in heavily black Detroit, the District of Columbia, and Newark have "small shares of low-performing [charter] schools and a majority of charters outperforming their local traditional public schools."

Yet, despite this overwhelming evidence that charter schools help improve the learning of black students, BLM would cut off this educational lifeline to the very children and parents for whom they purport to speak.

Why would BLM throw black children overboard? It is instructive to note that Hiram Rivera, one of the authors of the BLM document, is executive director of the Philadelphia Student Union, which has received funding from the American Federation of Teachers.

Also, the NEA and the AFT are members of the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools, which is listed in the BLM document as a resource on education policy.

In addition, the NEA has passed a resolution supporting BLM and the head of the union has said, "The NEA is honored to stand in solidarity with Black Lives Matter." No wonder the BLM document specifically worries about how privatization would "destroy organized labor."

The authors of the Stanford charter-school study concluded: "[T]hese charter sectors clearly refute the idea that some groups of students cannot achieve high levels of academic success. They need only to be given the opportunity."

Black Lives Matter would destroy that opportunity and, along with it, the lives of thousands of black children.

Lance Izumi is Koret is senior fellow in education studies and senior director of the Center for Education at the Pacific Research Institute

The Truth About Wages in Right-to-Work States

The Truth About Wages in Right-to-Work States

Private sector wages are not reduced in right-to-work states as union advocates have argued, according to a new report released Tuesday by The Heritage Foundation.James Sherk, a research fellow in labor economics at The Heritage Foundation and the author of the study, cited an Economic Policy Institute paper that claimed right-to-work laws reduce wages by 3 percent.Sherk found the conclusions “fundamentally flawed” because the study only partially accounted for the cost of living differences across states. He said this is a problem because companies in states with higher costs of living pay their employees higher wages to account for steeper expenses.Every state with compelled union membership and Virginia, a right-to-work state, has living costs above the national average, which is how EPI arrived to its finding that right-to-work states have lower wages.Once cost of living was accounted for in the Heritage study, Sherk said EPI’s results “disappeared” and right-to-work laws had no effect on private sector wages.
Sherk’s study did find government employees make about 5 percent less in right-to-work states, but he attributed this to government unions’ ability to affect wages by electing “political allies” who will give them “favorable contracts.”“All of these arguments of right-to-work wages really evaporate when you look under the hood of all these studies,” Sherk said.Though more than three-quarters of Americans believe union membership should be voluntary, 25 states still have compulsory unionization.

Maxford Nelsen: 'Living Wage' Laws Are Union Lifesavers - WSJ - WSJ

Maxford Nelsen: 'Living Wage' Laws Are Union Lifesavers - WSJ - WSJ

Los Angeles became the latest to join the movement when the city council approved a law on Sept. 24 requiring large hotels to pay employees at least $15.37 per hour and provide generous paid sick-leave benefits. But the ordinance includes a provision, increasingly common in similar ordinances, that permits unions to waive the requirements in collective bargaining.
This waiver enables labor organizers to approach a nonunion employer struggling to pay the new minimum with the following offer: assist them in unionizing employees by signing a "neutrality agreement," in return for which the union will use the collective-bargaining waiver to allow the employer to pay less than the new statutory minimum.
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With minimum wage and mandatory paid sick-leave regulations spreading across the country, reports of unions using collective-bargaining waivers to their advantage are starting to accumulate.
In 2013 the Long Beach Business Journal cited the collective-bargaining waiver built into the city's $13 minimum wage law as an important factor in the unionization of two large hotels, the Hyatt Regency Long Beach and the Hyatt Pike Long Beach.
In February, following the passage of a countywide living-wage law, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that the Service Employees International Union approached a local home-care business owner and offered to give her an exemption from the wage law "if she agreed to deduct union dues from all of her employees' paychecks."
A survey conducted in May by the Seattle, Wash., city auditor found that 37 of the 56 surveyed Seattle unions had waived the citywide paid sick-leave mandates in some or all of their contracts with employers.
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After unions succeeded in narrowly passing a $15 minimum wage ordinance in SeaTac, Wash., the local United Food and Commercial Workers union boasted in a newsletter that the initiative "provides an incentive for employers to collectively bargain with their employees." Similarly, when asked why unionized firms are exempted from L.A.'s new minimum-wage law, Unite Here union representative Leigh Shelton complained to the Huffington Post that "because it is so hard to organize a union, we have to do it any way we can."

Edward Niedermeyer: Romney's Plan Would Also Have 'Saved' Detroit - WSJ.com

Link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204712904578090461206142072.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_h

When the president forced GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy court, the White House's auto task force used the process to execute a prearranged reorganization it had masterminded with political allies. By contrast, Mr. Romney called for a true bankruptcy, in which creditors and stakeholders negotiate reorganization together, with the government merely providing the minimum support needed to prevent disorderly liquidation. In retrospect, Mr. Romney's approach not only would have produced outcomes superior to the president's, it was actually the braver course of action.

To understand why, it is necessary to examine GM and Chrysler's behavior in the weeks and months that preceded their bailouts. Thanks to inept management and a rapacious union, GM and Chrysler had been shedding market share and jobs for decades before the credit crunch of 2008 brought the global economy to its knees. Despite rocky shores and rough waters, the managements of GM and Chrysler and their United Auto Workers partners never imagined they would have to pay the true cost of their failure to compete.

In fact, when Mr. Romney's op-ed was published in November 2008, the leaders of both GM and Chrysler were insisting that "bankruptcy is not an option," because they were sure nobody would buy a car from a bankrupted company, despite both having already repeatedly begged Congress for a government bailout. Industry watchers later discovered that, despite an emergency transfusion from the Bush administration, the auto makers never prepared contingency plans before President Obama decided to initiate a bailout and reorganization.

This failure to prepare bankruptcy plans was more than inexcusable mismanagement, it was akin to blackmail. Without responsible preparations in place for a worst-case scenario, GM and Chrysler could argue that unless the government intervened they wouldn't be able to secure financing for a bankruptcy in the necessary time frame. They would have to liquidate their holdings and assets, which would jeopardize if not crush America's entire auto-manufacturing supply chain.

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The White House auto task force pushed a dealership cull on the auto makers that eliminated over 2,000 GM and Chrysler dealerships, forcing tens of thousands of Americans onto unemployment rolls, all with no appreciable benefit to either company.

Making matters worse, the Treasury Department issued notices which let "New GM" acquire $45 billion in tax write-offs from its defunct predecessor, a blatant violation of basic bankruptcy law. This not only deprived the government of billions in tax revenue, it hid the true cost of the bailout while disproportionally benefiting the UAW, an unsecured creditor.

By giving the UAW's unsecured claims against GM and Chrysler a higher priority than those of secured creditors, the government's reorganization further damaged bankruptcy precedent. The net result was a $26 billion transfer to a key Democratic ally and political donor, according to analysis by scholars from the Heritage Foundation and George Mason University.

GM and Chrysler could have averted tens of thousands of lost jobs, and the government could have preserved billions of dollars in tax revenue, by undergoing a true bankruptcy reorganization, even if the government had provided full debtor-in-possession financing.

In a true bankruptcy guided by the law rather than by a sympathetic, rule-bending political task force, GM and Chrysler would have more fully faced their competitive challenges, enjoyed more leverage to secure union concessions, and had the chance to divest money-losing operations like GM's moribund Opel unit. True bankruptcy would have lessened the chance that GM and Chrysler will stumble again, a very real possibility in the brutally competitive auto industry.

“Unions Built The Middle Class.” : The Blogmocracy

Link: http://www.theblogmocracy.com/2012/09/17/destruction-of-my-favorite-myths-unions-built-the-middle-class/ (via shareaholic.com)

When ever I get into a debate on the topic of economics with some of the good people I know, I can always tell when their debating chops come entirely from reading and then parroting propaganda they've been fed. One of the most laughable of all of the standard lines is the ubiquitous, "Unions built the middle class," statement. The statement ignores history that a vibrant middle class existed several decades prior to the start of the union movement in our country, the fact that in those nations where the union movement started sooner, their development of a vibrant middle class was delayed by decades when compared to that development taking place here. It also ignores the fact that even at the height of union activity here in America, union participation in the private sector never grew beyond 12%.

Franklin Roosevelt's policies did not pull us out of the great depression, they prolonged the agony for a full decade, where if we had just allowed the free market to work, it would have ended much sooner. Unemployment at the time never actually reached double digits until Herbert Hoover instituted the first of his stimulus packages. Unemployment remained at double digits until America entered WWII. Even after the war, our economy did not begin to come out of the malaise until the Presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, and his return to free market principles.

Answering Scott Walker's critics

Answering Scott Walker's critics:
"John Fund publishes the answers that Scott Walker has for his critics. Beyond the slogans and union chants, there are common-sense answers to all those criticisms.

Mr. Walker, like Mr. Thompson before him, hopes to contain the excesses of the past—to enable the modern welfare state to live within its means.

Mr. Walker says that the employee rights that people care about are protected by civil-service rules, not collective bargaining. 'We have the strongest protections in the country on grievance procedures, merit hiring, and just cause for disciplining and terminating employees,' he says. 'None of that changes under my plan.' Mr. Walker notes that the single largest group affected by his proposal are the 30,000 workers at the University of Wisconsin who were only granted collective-bargaining rights in 2009. 'If they only got them two years ago, how can you say they're set in stone?'

And of course, President Obama has set himself up as a protector of workers' rights. But the irony is that Obama doesn't think that those rights are so precious that they should be extended to the federal workers in the Executive Branch that Obama heads.

The governor knows he has become a national lightning rod, but he says he was nonetheless surprised when President Obama jumped into the fray last week by saying that the governor's proposal to limit collective bargaining sounded like 'an assault on unions.' He finds it ironic that Mr. Obama criticized his collective-bargaining changes when federal workers lack the power to bargain for wages or benefits—a fact demonstrated last month when Mr. Obama imposed a wage freeze on all federal workers. Under Mr. Walker's proposal, Wisconsin unions could still bargain for cost-of-living raises or more if approved by a voter referendum.

As Robert Samuelson details, the private-sector unions have been in retreat ever since it became clear that their demands were pricing their businesses out of the global market.

That changed in the 1970s and 1980s. Imports and 'transplant' factories created new competition in steel and autos. Airlines, trucking and communications (telephones) were deregulated, allowing new low-cost rivals into the market. Digital technology and the Internet transformed communications and threatened many industries, including traditional phone companies and newspapers.

For unions, this pitted present members' expectations - for high wages, generous fringe benefits - against companies' needs to lower costs and, thereby, protect future jobs. By and large, union concessions were too little, too late. Corporate managers, their business models besieged, were also slow. Both executives and union leaders underestimated the vulnerability of once impregnable market positions. The downfall of the 'Big Three' automakers epitomized this disastrous cycle. Nonunion firms gained market share; union membership fell. Unions also had a harder time organizing other companies, because both managers and workers feared job loss.

And now the same reality is hitting public-sector unions.

Public-sector unions now face a similar predicament. Among government workers, 36.2 percent are unionized. Their growth partially offset the erosion of private-sector unions (the combined unionization rate for private and public workers: 11.9 percent). Traditionally, public-worker unions flourished in an alliance with liberal Democrats. But the huge loss of state and local government revenue has - like new competitors for firms - transformed the economic and political climate. Labor costs put upward pressure on taxes and downward pressure on public services.

This is why the unions will fight to their utmost against Governor Walker. They can see the writing on the wall and it isn't saying great things about their role in state budget shortfalls.

When people talk about workers' rights, remember what rights the unions have won for themselves. As Robert Barro, Harvard economics professor, writes, the majority of our states have laws in place that force workers to join unions and pay their dues. Only 22 states have right-to-work laws that prohibit such mandates. I guess that the right to work is not one of those rights that liberals want to protect. And they don't care about the economic damage that they do not only to government budgets, but the economies of the states where they have blocked right-to-work laws.

There is evidence that right-to-work laws—or, more broadly, the pro-business policies offered by right-to-work states—matter for economic growth. In research published in 2000, economist Thomas Holmes of the University of Minnesota compared counties close to the border between states with and without right-to-work laws (thereby holding constant an array of factors related to geography and climate). He found that the cumulative growth of employment in manufacturing (the traditional area of union strength prior to the rise of public-employee unions) in the right-to-work states was 26 percentage points greater than that in the non-right-to-work states.

Such reality is anathema to those union workers protesting across the country. And that is why they must resort to slogans rather than reality.

Card Check and Unions

From Clayton Cramer's blog:

"Card check" is a proposal for streamlining union elections, by deleting the "election" part.

Just to be sure about this, I went and read the version that went nowhere in Congress last year, proposing to amend 29 USC 159(c):

 

(6) Notwithstanding any other provision of this section, whenever a petition shall have been filed by an employee or group of employees or any individual or labor organization acting in their behalf alleging that a majority of employees in a unit appropriate for the purposes of collective bargaining wish to be represented by an individual or labor organization for such purposes, the Board shall investigate the petition. If the Board finds that a majority of the employees in a unit appropriate for bargaining has signed valid authorizations designating the individual or labor organization specified in the petition as their bargaining representative and that no other individual or labor organization is currently certified or recognized as the exclusive representative of any of the employees in the unit, the Board shall not direct an election but shall certify the individual or labor organization as the representative described in subsection (a).

Now, I can somewhat understand the argument that if a majority of the workers have signed union cards, then perhaps there's no need for a union election. (Hence the bill's description of this as "streamlining" the process.) But according to Dr. Lott, the union only wins these elections about 60% of the time. Huh? If a majority are willing to sign union cards, why would a majority not vote for the union at election?

The term "union thug" comes to mind.

 ...from my experiences, and that of many others that I know, I am more inclined to suspect that a lot of people sign the union authorization cards because they are either strongly encouraged or even directly threatened to do so. Labor unions are fundamentally institutions of organized violence. A friend who has since passed on left me this account of working in a union shop in California during World War II (when the federal government leaned pretty heavily on employers to accept unions):

 

Our next problem was that after three months on the job, workers were required to join the paper workers union. Those who did not received disfiguring beatings after hours. Having seen what happened to another girl in same position as Wanda and I, we decided that rather than face the same treatment we would quit our jobs before the three months ended.

I remember being quite young and surprised that my father was home during the day. He explained that his union, the Boilermakers/Blacksmiths, had gone on strike. "Can't you go to work anyway?"

 

"Not if you want to live."

 

And unfortunately, this wasn't just his imagination. There's a fascinating decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. v. Enmons (1973), that held that the Hobbs Act that "makes it a federal crime to obstruct interstate commerce by robbery or extortion" did not apply to labor unions engaged in destroying power company transformers with rifles and explosives because such use of violence did not qualify as extortion.