by Ray Keating
The Keating Files – June 15, 2020
I wrote weekly newspaper columns for nearly 20 years (for Newsday and then Long Island Business News) specifically covering Long Island politics, policy and economics. And one way to drive home the point of how completely out of whack the costs of government were (and still are) was to ask the following...
Question: What’s a Long Island power couple?
Answer: A cop married to a public school teacher.
In many parts of the country, that might seem bizarre. But consider that, according to a Newsday report last year, for example, the average annual pay for a Nassau County police officer was $104,000, while in Suffolk County, it’s $138,000. (Long Island’s two counties are Nassau and Suffolk.) Just a few years earlier, the average was $145,000 in Nassau, but the recent decline apparently has to do with older, higher-paid cops retiring.
As for public school teachers, the norm is for the median teacher pay in school districts on Long Island to top $100,000 per year (and keep in mind that teachers have summers off, so a true annualized pay estimate is much higher). According to the Empire Center’s SeeThroughNY.net, the median teacher pay in Nassau County public schools ranges from $93,534 to $148,888. In Suffolk, the range goes from $72,026 to $136,733.
Remember, “median” is the middle point, so that half the teachers make more than that amount.
So, if a police officer and a public school teacher living and working on Long Island get married, and just stick around in their respective jobs, it’s well within reason that they’d be raking in a cool quarter-of-a-million dollars annually, courtesy of the taxpayers.
Such luxurious compensation is about powerful government labor unions and elected officials who care little about how taxpayer money is spent. And everyone involved in doling out and accepting these big bucks sells it to the public as being about educating the children and providing public safety. But it’s not – in either case.
Make no mistake, labor unions only care about their members. So, during this time of racial strife, if we take a serious look at issues that matter – education and law enforcement – then it’s time to deal with governmental abuses and incompetence, and the roles played by public sector unions in representing police and teachers.
For the police unions, it’s not about serving and protecting the community. Instead, it’s about maximizing pay, including pensions, minimizing the work done by members, and protecting members against disciplinary actions.
On the pension front, the Empire Center noted last year: “Fully three-quarters of the 242 Nassau County and Suffolk County police department officers retiring last year, as well as two-thirds of the 39 newly retired Yonkers city police officers, were eligible for annual pensions of more than $100,000, the data show. The pension amounts do not include added severance payments for accumulated sick or vacation time.” One Nassau County retired cop walked away with an annual pension of $221,086.
Regarding police discipline in New York, consider the following as reported by Ken Girardin, also of the Empire Center:
On June 13, 2019, the Senate unanimously passed a bill (S5803) that would make the final determination of disciplinary penalties a subject of collective bargaining...
The bill—which failed to pass in the Assembly and didn’t emerge from committee in this year’s pandemic-truncated session—was the most recent in a long line of attempts by police and fire unions to nullify a unanimous 2006 state Court of Appeals decision affirming the New York City police commissioner’s ultimate power over disciplinary matters in the NYPD...
Between 2006 and 2010, proposals to make all stages of police discipline a mandatory subject of collective bargaining were passed overwhelmingly by the Legislature, only to be vetoed by Governors Pataki, Spitzer and Paterson. When the same measure reached Governor Cuomo’s desk in 2014, he took the more passive approach of leaving it unsigned and allowing it to die via a pocket-veto. The bill passed the Senate in 2018 by a 62-0 vote, but died in the Assembly that year.
And guess what? Police unions lead the charge against reforms that would make real improvements, such as use of body and patrol car cameras; ramping up ongoing training requirements significantly; removing special protections that other citizens don’t have; instituting merit pay rather than compensation being tied to seniority; seriously researching if having police officers live in the local communities in which they work would improve policing; and implementing far more selective hiring practices, such as getting at why someone wants to be a cop (is it a calling to help and protect the community, or something else?).
Meanwhile, the teacher unions not only stand at the forefront of boosting compensation for public school teachers (again, based on seniority detached from performance), but also in actively opposing changes that would help students. In fact, teacher and other education unions have stood against all real solutions to our education problems. While the public education system talks about working to improve, students’ lives continue to suffer year after year in terms of failing schools, and poor education translating into fewer opportunities and lower earnings, on average, over lifetimes.
Real changes in education policies that would start to immediately make improvements in the lives of students – such as school choice via vouchers, tax credits, and homeschooling – are always opposed by teachers unions. Students and families can’t afford to wait for public schools to eventually get around to improving. And factory-like, government schools filled with too many poor and mediocre teachers are recipes for failure. Students and families need options to get out.
On its list of misleading reasons for opposing school choice, the National Education Association (NEA) has the nerve to declare, “Vouchers provide less accountability for public resources than public schools.” In reality, few entities are less accountable than government, including public schools, along with the teachers and their unions. Accountability comes when consumers – not politicians or unions – are in control.
Substantive reforms in both policing and public education likely will require bringing union representation of public sector workers to an end. Public sector unions were long opposed across the political spectrum, even by pro-union Democrats, such as President Franklin D. Roosevelt. But by the 1960s, the move to unionize government employees was pushing ahead. Today, the largest labor union in the U.S. is the NEA, and unions provide enormous campaign dollars and volunteers to politicians – mainly, Democrats. Therefore, the interests of elected officials wind up being aligned with those of public sector workers, and not in a constructive way. But instead in a way whereby politics supports union efforts to benefit union members to the detriment of those who government is supposed to serve.
No one should be surprised that government labor unions stand as major obstacles to positive reforms in policing and education. But that doesn’t mean these union roadblocks must persist.
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Ray Keating is a columnist, economist, podcaster and entrepreneur. You can order his new book Behind Enemy Lines: Conservative Communiques from Left-Wing New York from Amazon or signed books at RayKeatingOnline.com. His other recent nonfiction book is Free Trade Rocks! 10 Points on International Trade Everyone Should Know. Keating also is a novelist. His latest novels are The Traitor: A Pastor Stephen Grant Novel, which is the 12th book in the series, and the second edition of Root of All Evil? A Pastor Stephen Grant Novel with a new Author Introduction. The views expressed here are his own – after all, no one else should be held responsible for this stuff, right?
Also, tune in to Ray Keating’s podcasts – the PRESS CLUB C Podcast and the Free Enterprise in Three Minutes Podcast
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