EDITORIAL: Labor reforms help ‘working families’

To see world-class contortion in Nevada, you can buy a ticket to a Cirque du Soleil show or other acrobatic act on the Strip, or you can go to a legislative hearing and watch union leaders try to construct credible arguments against badly needed, money-saving labor reforms.

The 2015 Legislature isn’t even a week old, and already unions are overreaching in every direction. Republicans have seized control of both the Senate and the Assembly from Democrats, who had long protected the public employee unions that fund their campaigns. New Assembly Speaker John Hambrick, R-Las Vegas, last month sent a letter to local government officials seeking suggestions for collective bargaining reforms that will give elected bodies more control over spending.

Cue the alarms from labor.

“It’s as if they declared war on working families,” said Danny Thompson, executive-secretary treasurer of the Nevada AFL-CIO. “Our 200,000 members won’t stand idly by this legislative session.”

He had better hope not. Only a few dozen people showed up at a Jan. 27 union rally to fire up opposition.

GOP lawmakers are focused on changing or repealing the laws that affect public-sector unions, or private-sector union members who work on government projects. Nevada is already a right to work state, so legislators can’t do much to change private-sector collective bargaining.

But that won’t stop unions from misrepresenting the Legislature’s reform agenda. Labor must convince lawmakers and the public that collective bargaining reforms hurt everyone and help no one. Hence Mr. Thompson’s reference to “working families” instead of “local government employees.”

Under current Nevada law, the collective bargaining process is overwhelmingly tilted in favor of public employees and against the taxpayers who pay their salaries. Bargaining for wages and benefits takes place in secret, and contract impasses are settled by labor-friendly arbitrators, not elected boards. Thus, elected officials have no control over the largest expense of local government: personnel.

This process allows government wages and benefits to grow even when the private economy is contracting. According to the Nevada Department of Employment, Training &Rehabilitation, only government employees saw their wages grow during the Great Recession. Every other state industry experienced real wage declines. Study after study has shown that Nevada has one of the highest-paid government workforces in the country, and the wage gap between Nevada’s public employees and private-sector employees is growing.

This strains government budgets, limits services and creates pressure for tax increases. A number of collective bargaining reforms help would local governments control their costs, from repealing prevailing wages on construction projects to opening contract talks to the public to eliminating binding arbitration to prohibiting the unionization of supervisors — or eliminating collective bargaining for local government workers altogether. After all, state employees can’t bargain for wages and benefits.

Unions and their allies were howling Wednesday at one of the first hearings to address cost-boosting, union-friendly laws: Senate Bill 119, which would exempt school and university system construction from inflated, state-mandated prevailing wages. Allowing contractors to provide market wages, as they do on private construction projects, would stretch capital dollars and create more jobs. If the Clark County School District did not have to pay prevailing wages on desperately needed new school construction, it could build five schools for the cost of four.

Labor argues that ending prevailing wages will reduce construction wages on government projects. But the dollars that pay those wages come from the pockets of Nevada taxpayers. Prevailing wages certainly benefit trade unions, but they hurt everyone else. And the assertion that prevailing wages guarantee higher-quality, on-time work is a real laugher: the UNLV library, the Regional Justice Center and recently constructed schools with defects prove otherwise.

The idea that labor reforms hurt “working families” is absurd. Less than 15 percent of the Nevada workforce is unionized. And unionized government workers are a sliver of that share. What about all the “working families” who grossly overpay for their local government services — and are being asked to pay even more for wages and retirement benefits far more generous than their own?

There is great irony in Nevada’s unions wailing about Republican legislation that couldn’t get a hearing in Carson City before this year. The AFL-CIO and its members helped deliver a Democratic Party landslide in 2008, then joined regular folks in railing at the result: Obamacare. So unions refused to turn on their turnout machines in 2014, abandoned Democrats and enabled a Republican sweep. And again, they’re unhappy with the outcome of their political strategy.

The Legislature’s Republican majorities must see through this twisting and move forward with their agenda. Over the next four months, you’ll hear unions claim time and again that they’re looking out for the state’s “working families.” They’re not. They’re looking out for themselves.