Immediately following the 9/11 attacks in New York City, Americans were reminded just how brave and important first responders, including fire fighters, police, and EMTs, are to us. Nearly a decade on, though, Big Labor and politicians are using them as a bargaining chip to push bad legislation.
As fellow BG blogger Warner Todd Huston writes in Investors Business Daily last week, through the benignly named Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act (H.R.413), Sen. Harry Reid “wants all first responders represented by collective bargaining rules emanating from Washington D.C.” He adds: Naturally this legislation is being pushed as a matter of ‘national security.'”
The problem is that the law not only is a giveaway to unions that would increase the cost of services for local and state governments, but the bill is just plain badly written. It would force significant changes in state laws for at least 16 states.
You know the bill is bad when the Washington Post editorial page is coming out against it — and the Post clearly sees through the attempt by Big Labor to leverage the public’s respect for firefighters and police.
The editors warn:
We share the bill sponsors’ esteem for first responders. They should be adequately, even generously, compensated. Still, many outsized pensions now threatening state and local governments were awarded by politicians to curry favor with public-safety unions. To be sure, the bill includes a compromise provision assuring states that they don’t have to bargain over pensions. But it hardly matters. The bill further empowers an already strong lobby that could use its additional clout to pressure state legislators to allow pension-bargaining anyway — or to enact such benefits by statute. This bill is a bad idea whose time, we hope, has still not come.
Photo credit: Flickr user trommetter
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