We attended the public hearings in Des Moines yesterday regarding changing the public employee bargaining statute. For forty years in Iowa, civil service governed public employees have possessed collective bargaining hegemony incompatible with good government due to political influences they famously exert. With civil service protections not enjoyed by others AND irresponsible collective bargaining advantages, they have “had their cake and eat it to.”
We don’t want to see Iowa become another Illinois or Wisconsin, driven to conditions those states have experienced in no small part due to public employee “bargaining” systems that aggravate/aggravated fiscal solvency. The time is now to prevent unsustainable burdens, and correct actions of weak-kneed legislators and administrators not in the long-term interests of taxpayers.
The cries heard throughout the evening by union protestors that “this is all so sudden”, is ignorant if not intentionally phony. The Iowa GOP has been advocating in its platforms for years that public employee unions should be eliminated. However the proposed legislation, so intensely opposed by unions, does not end unions or collective bargaining but does seek to limit it and especially unpredictable growth in costs characteristic of non-cash benefit packages and gives administrators needed flexibility to better manage personnel matters.
More on the warm-up to votes on legislation revising Iowa’s public employee laws in coming posts.
