Opinion

Big labor’s backlash

All eyes should be on Ohio tomorrow as voters decide whether to roll back Gov. John Kasich’s bold public-employee reforms. Passed this year, the much-needed course correction sharply curtailed collective-bargaining privileges for the state’s 350,000 taxpayer-funded workers, giving the state — facing an $8 billion shortfall — a fighting chance to get its budgetary house in order.

It’s another battle in a war under way all across the nation.

Just as in Wisconsin, where a similar law was the subject of a prolonged, anti-democratic wrangle that ultimately went the Republicans’ way, Big Labor has gone all out against reform. Well-funded organizers fanned out, gathering 1.3 million signatures to put a repeal measure, Issue 2, on the ballot.

Sadly, the odds favor repeal. The pro-union group We Are Ohio has amassed a $24 million war chest to roll back Kasich’s sensible reforms — far larger than the rival Building a Better Ohio’s $8 million campaign in favor of them. A late-October poll showed repeal leading by 57 percent to 32 percent, and Kasich now ranks as the most unpopular US governor, with a 54 percent disapproval rating.

Repeal would deal a serious blow to other states as well, including Wisconsin, where the never-say-die Democrats — having lost repeatedly at the ballot box and in the courts — are launching an effort to recall Gov. Scott Walker.

Walker got a taste of what’s coming last week, when thugs from the Occupy Chicago rabble disrupted his speech to the Union League in the Windy City with mass chants of “Union busting, it’s disgusting,” and “We are the 99 percent.”

It would only encourage the foot-dragging we’re seeing in such deep-blue states as Massachusetts, whose Democratic governor, Deval Patrick, has mounted a feeble and foundering effort at public-sector reform. In Boston, the corrupt, one-party state House — where the traditional career path leads from the speakership to the penitentiary — is debating whether to raise the retirement age for new hires from — gasp! — age 55 to 57 (the House) or even 60 (the Senate).

Meanwhile, back in the real world of the struggling private economy, workers slog on to 65 and beyond, carrying public-sector parasites on their backs as they try to meet mortgage payments and put their kids through college.

Perhaps no place illustrates more vividly the magnitude of the public-employee problem than San Francisco. The City by the Bay now supports 26,000 public employees — and 28,000 retirees, ballooning its pension “obligations” by $100 million a year.

That’s right — San Francisco is effectively supporting an invisible, nonworking “work force” even larger than its official one.

With Calif. Gov. Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown stalemated by the state Legislature in his attempt to effect modest pension reform, San Francisco and other cities, including San Diego and San Jose — on the front lines of confronting the entrenched might of the state unions and the Lawyer Left — are putting pension reform on the ballot, seeking to save more than a billion dollars over the next decade.

But courts have largely been sympathetic to arguments that defined-benefit retirement plans for public employees are enforceable contracts — and to hell with the economic disaster that will surely follow.

Recently, the city of Vallejo, Calif., the gateway to the Napa Valley wine country, emerged from three years of bankruptcy protection. Vallejo had to slash its fire department, libraries and other public services and largely stiff its creditors — and is still on the hook for about $225 million in overall debt.

Why?

“Eighty percent of the city’s budget — and the lion’s share of the claims that had thrown it into bankruptcy — were wrapped up in the pay and benefits of public-safety workers,” writes Michael Lewis in Vanity Fair.

Vallejo may be (temporarily) out of bankruptcy, but it’s the future, not the past. Decades of sweetheart deals “negotiated” between politicians of both parties and public-employee unions (whose campaign donations and “ground troops” regularly sway elections) are about to bring many state and local governments to their knees.

The counterattack against “public-service” reform has been ferocious, as unions claw to protect superfluous jobs and/or obscenely overgenerous benefits. It’s also been extraordinarily well-financed — as bloated wages make for bloated union dues.

It’s this simple: If Kasich loses tomorrow, we all lose — including the public-employee unions. After all, we all know the fable of the Golden Goose.

Don’t we?