Damien and the Lepers

I went to a “meet the candidates” meeting in Kansas in the 1970s. It was the scene out of the movie Damien and the Lepers, where Fr. Damien was landing at Molokai Hawaii after a trip for medicine and supplies. All the Lepers he was caring for showed up at the dock to greet (see maul) him. There were 150 state employees, 3 young candidates pronouncing their support for the state employees and a couple of us managers from manufacturing plants. The most vociferous lobby is government employees. It was clear to me at the time that allowing state employee unions to contribute to political campaigns was not a good idea.

Fast forward to 2010, California has an unsustainable debt and is being held hostage by their government employee unions and their functionaries (see elected representatives). The relationship between government employees and elected representatives should be the same as any top management group and the rank-and-file employees of an organization. The management is appointed by the boards elected by the stockholders’ , rather than being elected by the employees. It should be a team oriented relationship and the customer is the voter, who should give guidance to priorities and attack waste. In our current system , the customer isn’t in charge, except that they can move from state to state; however nothing but moving from country to country helps when the federal government is also infected. We can resort to “Propositions” , as California is known to do, but this strategy has failed.

In 1972, despite civil service rules, which were very similar to union rules, government employees were allowed to join unions. Prior to this, they were not. This allowed unions to survive and direct dues revenue to be targeted to campaign contributions. Over time, this caused candidates to be hesitant to take positions in opposition to the unions, despite the rising costs of operating (think extortion). This has now resulted in government employee union influence trumping voter concerns and sound fiscal management. What we get from government is not only overpriced, most of it is unwanted. Only 20% of the population (see Liberals), are in favor of the government union agenda.