Supreme Court decision in Janus threatens the quality of public-sector jobs and public services
In the last decade, an increasingly energized campaign against workers’ rights has been waged across all levels of government—federal, state, and local. Much of the focus of this anti-worker campaign has been on public-sector workers, specifically state and local government workers. For example, several states have passed legislation restricting workers’ right to unionize and collectively bargain for better wages and benefits. Beyond these legislative attacks, public-sector workers have been targeted by repeated legal challenges to their unions’ ability to effectively represent them. The Supreme Court will soon issue a decision in the most recent of these challenges, Janus v. AFSCME Council 31. As a previous EPI report explained, the corporate interests backing the plaintiffs in Janus are seeking to weaken the bargaining power of unions by restricting the ability of public-sector unions to collect “fair share” (or “agency”) fees for the representation they provide. In this new report, we argue that the decision in Janus will have significant impacts on public-sector workers’ wages and job quality as well as on the critical public services these workers provide.
Fallout from legislative attacks on state and local government workers
If the Supreme Court rules in favor of the plaintiffs in Janus, the decision will weaken the bargaining power of state and local government workers. Other attempts to weaken the bargaining power of public-sector workers and cut their pay have hurt public servants and the services they provide. These other attempts have often been framed as defending taxpayer interests—taxpayers who are supposedly forced to subsidize allegedly overpaid government workers. In reality, state and local government workers—who, as we later show, are if anything underpaid—provide services on which the vast majority of taxpayers depend. These workers are teachers, social workers, police officers, and firefighters. In fact, in dollars-and-cents terms, efforts to shrink state and local workforces and reduce public-sector workers’ compensation in order to reduce taxes disproportionately benefit the wealthiest households. Wisconsin provides an important example of this impact. Lawmakers there passed $2 billion worth of tax cuts in 2011–2014, paid for by the layoffs and wage and benefit cuts of public employees. Far from benefiting the average taxpayer, fully half of the tax cuts went to the richest 20 percent of the state’s population.
Further, an examination of Wisconsin’s education system reveals negative outcomes following the passage of a law that virtually eliminated collective bargaining rights for most state and local government workers. Far from improving public services, after the law passed, teacher turnover accelerated and teacher experience shrank; nearly a quarter of the state’s teachers for the 2015–2016 school year had less than five years of experience, up from one in five (19.6 percent) in the 2010–2011 school year.4 These data demonstrate that attacks on state and local government workers are likely to result in reductions in the quality of public services on which most state residents depend. For families who depend on public education, maintaining a stable, experienced education workforce is critical. And it is the stability and experience of state and local government workers—and the quality of services they provide—that is at stake in the Supreme Court’s decision in Janus.
State and local government workers provide critical services
The effects of decimated collective bargaining rights on Wisconsin’s education system should be especially concerning given the sheer number of educators—over 8.8 million—employed in state and local government nationwide and thus potentially affected by Janus. The vast majority (6.9 million) of state and local workers employed in education are in elementary and secondary schools. Table 1 shows the industries that employ state and local government workers. Workers in education make up more than half (51.0 percent) of all state and local government workers, with elementary and secondary school workers alone making up nearly 40 percent (39.9 percent). In addition to education, millions of state and local workers work in justice, public order, and safety activities (primarily police officers and firefighters); hospitals; individual and family services; bus service and other urban transit services; museums and similar institutions; libraries; home health care services; waste management services; child day care services; and on and on. These are the critical public services that are put at risk when attacks on public-sector collective bargaining erode compensation and job quality for these workers.
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https://www.epi.org/publication/supreme-court-decision-in-janus-threatens-the-quality-of-public-sector-jobs-and-public-services-key-data-on-the-roles-these-workers-fill-and-the-pay-gaps-they-face/?utm_source=Economic+Policy+Institute&utm_campaign=016e3ce17e-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_06_14_07_59&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e7c5826c50-016e3ce17e-59078569&mc_cid=016e3ce17e&mc_eid=56485f06ea
