I was Manager of Database Administration at a large bank in the late 1990âs. My group happened to be a part of modifying the payroll transaction system of which many school districts used our payroll because we managed the unions accounts. While discussing DB2 changes with a DBA working for me. He said â Boss you would not believe what I saw during testing (this test was done using production data). We did an SQL in testing for the teacherâs paycheck. It is a summary report on the line item amounts per pay check. WE multiplied by 12(Monthly) or 26Biweekly.â On this summary report for all the school districts the item that clearly stood out to me was total union dues collected...
A few days later during a big important database reorganization that would take many hours. I stayed late to watch over it. This job was being done by the same DBA who I had chatted with about the teachers. He stated âI was poking around in accounts payable during my spare time. I was curious where all those union funds end up. â
I lightly chastise him for doing those queries and reminded him that DBAâs are only concerned with database integrity and were not interested in content.â He said âI know that. But I was just looking to see where all that union money went. What I did was write a quick SQL to list the unions biggest payees. No biggee, but you still may want to take a peek at my summation SQL Group By query result just the same â¦.â
I did look at his report because of my curiosity. It was not that many lines of output. It contained a summary list of the teacherâs union biggest payees. Most of the names I did not recognize until my voting district reps organization name came up on the list. There he was with a 6 figure number in the listing and campaign donation as reason under one of the codes⦠â It took my breath away for a second. I mumbled to myselfâ¦.So,⦠that is where all those teachers union dues are goingâ¦â
Then the DBA stated his brilliant conclusion âBoss you and I are in the wrong business. I see no way you can lose an election if you got those education guys behind you. All you have to do is keep giving âem more pay and benefits each time you are elected and you got an elected job for life. Who is going to beat you with a war chest that big in each election? Hell, you could bribe each voter with a reasonable amount and still have a ton of funds left over. â
So this simple story has to have been going on all over the country for decades. Public union buys politician. Bought politician rewards the pubic union. Then it starts over the next election. All these years these two have just sat back and assumed â⦠the public will Payâ¦â And now this is just one more of multitude of political promises that are coming due for these giant handouts and the money is just not there.
Someday soon the locals, states and feds will max out their credit cards in America. When this happens politicians will be forced to finally rescind their false political handouts by finally going to a heavy austerity at all levels of government. At that time they will cut the current and future pay and benefits of all kinds of government workers to more realistic levels. I expect once this takes effect that the U.S. will look like a battle zone patterned after Greece that has become with continuous marches and strikes.
