Fate of the Unions

Governor Patrick’s compulsive hope-mongering has always struck me as a bunch of sweet-smelling nonsense, but earlier this year, I had a glimmer of what he was getting at. It happened during the debate over whether to allow municipal workers in Massachusetts cities and towns to join the state’s Group Insurance Commission, or GIC. According to an independent analysis, bringing these workers into the state pool—which offers more flexibility and lower premiums and administrative costs—would save cash-strapped cities and towns an estimated $100 million in healthcare costs in 2009, and $2.5 billion annually by 2018. But there was a potential roadblock: The municipal unions weren’t into it, because every aspect of the plan wouldn’t be subject to collective bargaining. That the unions were blockading some critical cost-cutting was unsurprising—in Massachusetts, that’s what unions are for—but what was different this time was that it looked as if, for once, they might not get their way. At least that’s how it seemed when House Speaker Sal DiMasi suggested we might leave it to the towns, and not labor leaders, to decide.

The audacity of hope! Together we can! And so forth! In the end, of course, lawmakers gave away the store to the unions, telling towns they could join the GIC only if 70 percent of their union members voted for it. Though DiMasi warned if the unions didn’t cooperate, he’d “take them out of the equation,” it sounded a shade too blustery to be true. Naturally, the response has been whopping: Five of the state’s 351 communities signed up by the November 5 deadline.

Still, just entertaining the idea that anyone would do anything in this state without first kissing the hems of the unions’ garments had me walking on air. I felt like a moonbat. Not the Deval-worshipping species of moonbat, but a kind of genetic mutant that only modern-day Massachusetts could produce: one that dreams of a day when the populace will finally rise up and overthrow the tyranny of…organized labor. (Hardly the sort of thing you think of when you hear the phrase “movement of the people.”) A string of recent villainies perpetrated by unions, along with Deval Patrick’s tentative sorta-suggestion that he may “look at” ending police details (greeted by gales of laughter), has only intensified the feeling.

Certainly, something must be done here. Formed to prevent the powerful from preying upon the powerless, our public employee unions have themselves become the powerful—their incessant wails for “fairness” are minor masterpieces of Orwellian doublespeak—and it’s the rest of us who are powerless against the flabbergastingly senseless status quo they spend their days defending. With municipalities more reliant on rising property taxes than they’ve been in 25 years, and unions squashing anything that would help cut costs or increase efficiency, I started to wonder whether we’re approaching a time when voter anger will outweigh union clout, and politicians will be able to take a stand without being carted off in pails afterward.

So I called Sam Tyler, the Boston Municipal Research Bureau’s president, to run it past him. “You think that day has come?” Tyler said. And then he laughed. And it wasn’t a sarcastic laugh, or a laugh for effect. He was actually laughing. And while he kept laughing, I began to feel like a college freshman who’s asked a hard-bitten soldier how many drum circles he thinks it would take to stop all wars.

Yet mocking laughter, however rooted in reason, truth, and history, only serves to strengthen the moonbat’s resolve. As municipalities resort to a steady parade of Proposition 2½ overrides just to keep the lights on, and the state performs its grotesque courtship dance for casino developers, the situation looks more and more like a tipping point or, better yet, a tinderbox. It’s a juncture ripe for revolution. All that’s needed now is a few real revolutionaries.