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State and local pensions have been a cost-effective way to ensure that those retiring from public service will have adequate retirement income after a lifetime of work. Despite their strengths, opposition to public pensions has emerged in recent years. This chapter examines the economics of public pensions and outlines the role of public perceptions, politics, and interest groups in the public pension debate.

Starts with an account of the Spanish administration over the last two decades (to 1997); includes a definition of the Spanish civil service bureaucratic élite as composed at the top level (which must be filled by public employees) and of senior civil servants who hold political posts. Followed by an analysis of the historical legacy of the Spanish civil service. The next section looks at exactly who the senior civil servants are in relation to the other public employees in the central administration, and in relation to educational background: three different circles of senior bureaucrats are distinguished: a political circle, a politico‐administrative circle, and a bureaucratic circle. Further sections discuss the sociological characteristics of senior officials, the position of the civil servant in the organization, and Spanish civil servants in relation to politics. The conclusion discusses the main structural problems of the Spanish civil service and the constant demands for transformation that there have been over the last two centuries.

It is often argued that compensation patterns for public sector employees are higher than in the private sector. This chapter examines some of the reasons for the observed differences in total compensation costs between US state and local government employers and private industry employers. The author examines compensation costs by industry, occupation, union status, and employee benefit participation.

Many public pension funds engage in activism by using their pooled ownership of stock to affect changes in the corporations they own. The merits of activism depend on (1) the conflicts of interest between corporate managers and shareholders, and (2) the conflicts of interest between portfolio managers and investors. These conflicts lead to two types of activism: shareholder activism and social activism. Portfolio managers can use their position to monitor conflicts that might arise between managers and shareholders (shareholder activism), but they can also abuse their position by pursuing actions that advance their own moral values or political interests at the expense of investors (social activism).

This chapter highlights the city's contentious debate over the right of public employees to bargain, strike, and otherwise enjoy the same economic and workplace rights as unionized private-sector workers. As the numbers of public employees increased throughout the decade, both blue-and white-collar city workers increasingly asserted their rights. Their efforts raised questions anew about the role of government and the extent to which workers should have control over their working conditions. The concerted push for public-employee bargaining rights that began in Milwaukee ultimately resulted in Wisconsin becoming the first state to adopt collective bargaining for public employees. Yet municipal workers unexpectedly encountered some of their strongest opposition in City Hall, where the mayor and some liberal members of the Milwaukee Common Council proved unlikely opponents.

This chapter examines the legislative attacks on the public sector aimed at eliminating employee union rights and slashing public services. Corporate lobbies and their legislative allies saw the 2010 elections as an opportunity to restructure labor relations, political power, and the size of government. With no guarantee that their dominance would last into the future, the 2011–2012 legislatures were driven by an urgency to pursue ambitious reforms while it was politically feasible. The chapter analyzes the extent of this legislative offensive as well as its underlying motives and ultimate objectives. It also asks why large, private corporations would spend significant time, money, and energy fighting public employee unions in Wisconsin or Ohio, and whether public employees are to blame for state budget deficits. Finally, it discusses the political and economic impacts of antiunionism and who benefited from cutting public employee compensation and pensions.

This chapter examines the relationship between bureaucratic efficiency and bloat and the expansion of the welfare state. It proposes two crude measures of efficiency and of bureaucratic bloat to test the idea that big spenders achieve economies of scale. The findings validate the hypothesis that at high levels of development the welfare state enjoys economies of scale, like an insurance company with a broad base of clients. This chapter also attempts to explain convergence and divergence in the size of bureaucracies and the national differences in nonmilitary public employees as a percentage of the civilian labor force for nineteen rich democracies.

In the private sector, the expansion of the individual account paradigm will continue in the years ahead without significant controversy or impediment. In contrast, there will be increasing contention about public employees' defined benefit coverage as governmental decision-makers emulate their private sector counterparts by embracing individual account plans to shift investment, funding, and longevity risks to public employees. Equally disputatious will be the debate about efforts to expand the use of HSAs, a debate which addresses the fundamental implications of the defined contribution paradigm: the merits of individual ownership and control, the benefits of risk-pooling, the costs of adverse selection, and the distributional consequences of individual accounts. There will be no resurrection of traditional defined benefit pension plans. Even if the advocates of such plans succeed in pruning the regulatory burdens on traditional pension plans, there will be no wholesale return to the classic defined benefit paradigm.

This chapter outlines the parameters of the “public sector labor problem.” When private sector unions grew powerful after World War II, public employees organized for similar rights. In many states they acquired the right to organize but not the right to strike. The chapter chronicles the early history of teacher unions—especially the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)—and their quest for meaningful collective bargaining. It uses Pennsylvania—the state that passed the furthest reaching attempt to ensure union rights for teachers—and teacher strikes in Pittsburgh (1968, 1971) and Philadelphia (1970) to highlight the failure of liberal labor policy to prevent teacher strikes.

How do people make sense of economic crises? This chapter uses ethnography with groups of people who meet of their own accord in settings in which they regularly gather to investigate. It focuses on the U.S. Midwestern state of Wisconsin, between May 2007 and February 2011. It reveals the split between public and private employees that erupted in protests in Madison, the state capital, and across the state, in February 2011. The results expose the logic of the perspectives through which public employees are to blame for the recession.

This chapter examines antiunionism in the context of the broader corporate agenda, asking why corporate lobbies seek to erase public employee unions as a political force. It begins with a discussion of the role of unions in politics as well as the origins of the so-called paycheck protection laws and their impact on workers' rights. It then considers the stand of business lobbies with respect to paycheck protection legislation, along with state legislation that created added reporting requirements and expanded the scope of prohibited activities aimed at curbing unions' involvement in political activity. The chapter argues that the most important advocates of paycheck protection, including the American Legislative Exchange Council, Americans for Prosperity, and allied corporate lobbies, are seeking to enact a sweeping economic agenda.

This chapter begins the second part of the book, which examines the government’s heightened power to regulate speech in “government preserves.” This chapter considers the Roberts Court’s treatment of the First Amendment rights of prisoners, public school students, and government workers. The Supreme Court has long taken a very narrow view of these institutional subjects’ First Amendment rights, and the Roberts Court has weakened their rights even further. This Court has deferred almost completely to the government’s managerial authority to restrict speech in prisons, public schools, and public workplaces however it sees fit, restricting the ability of government institutional subjects to contribute their distinctive insights to public discussion.

This chapter considers the idea of governmental “sovereignty,” as used by the right, to undermine the rationale for collective bargaining in the public sector. From the Boston Police Strike of 1919 forward, conservatives have considered the organization of government workers to be incompatible with the sovereign status of those entities sustained by taxes and elected by the populace. Public employee unions subverted the will of elected officeholders and undermined state power. That antiunion ideology faded in the two decades after 1958 when public employee unionism grew by leaps and bounds, but in recent years it has returned, albeit in a distinctively neoliberal, antistate guise. Conservatives today charge that instead of challenging the power of the state, public sector unionism is illegitimate because these institutions support those governmental functions that regulate commerce, sustain public education, and provide other public goods now under attack from the neoliberal right.

In Chapter 7, the focus shifts to public agents and the process of contracting financial services and local pension funds in the US states. The costs of governing and managing this sector are addressed and an idealized model of the institutional design, administration, and supervision of the investment management process is introduced, laying out the forms and functions of pensions in relation to their beneficial purpose. In a brief overview of the US state and local PERS sector, its economic significance and distinctive institutional ecology are noted. The authors’ research demonstrates the extent to which the market for financial services in the US public pension-fund sector is Balkanized, implying significant transaction costs for both the buy and sell sides of the market, more often found at the city or metropolitan level than among funds within states or between funds of adjacent states.

In this chapter, the author offers his personal account of the 2011 Wisconsin uprising that was sparked by Governor Scott Walker's issuing of Act 10, a “budget repair bill” that would effectively end collective bargaining for the state's public employees. The Walker administration also launched an assault against the University of Wisconsin with a drastic change in its mission statement. In response to Act 10, thousands of people converged on the state capitol in Madison, where they occupied and slept in “the people's house” for eighteen days. Although the protests and the electoral recall campaign they waged were unable either to stop Act 10 or to remove Walker from office during his first term, they produced a powerful new movement that has managed to score some victories. The author, a labor historian, considers the actions of the protesters in the context of a tradition of activism in Wisconsin. He also highlights the many other consequences of the Walker counterrevolution against the Wisconsin Idea's progressive political and social values.

This chapter covers another group of Roberts Court campaign finance decisions that, contrary to this Court’s signature decision in Citizens United, restrict the flow of money into politics. These decisions strike down government efforts to increase the resources available for underfinanced candidates, and they stifle public employee unions’ efforts to collect and spend agency fees from non-members. In only one, very narrow decision does the Court actually uphold a government restriction on electoral money. Concluding the book’s discussion of speech disputes in the electoral process, this chapter explains that the Roberts Court lets wealthy, powerful institutions and individuals, who share a strong interest in maintaining existing political distributions of wealth and power, dominate electoral debates. The Court lets those powerful speakers crowd out lesser-funded speakers with a stronger inclination to challenge existing distributions.

This concluding chapter examines the political dynamics that pit growing populist sentiment against increasing corporate dominance, particularly at the state level. It explains what the corporate agenda is not, arguing that the same corporate lobbies that are leading the charge against public employee unions are also at the forefront of the campaign against issues such as minimum wage, entitlements to overtime or sick leave, and occupational safety. It discusses the pattern of business-backed legislation, highlighting the many contradictions in the corporate agenda. It also considers how the success of the corporate lobbies has contributed to economic decline and political turmoil. Finally, it assesses public opinion against the business elites' platform as well as corporate lobbies' efforts to protect their privilege by attempting to shrink the scope of democracy; for example, by supporting preemption statutes.

This chapter explores Article XXIII of the Oklahoma constitution. Section 1 promotes industrial welfare of the people by fixing a high standard for employees on public work. It states that “eight hours shall constitute a day’s work in all cases of employment by and on behalf of the State or any county or municipality.” Section 1A reflects the state’s concerns that no person be forced to participate in, or pay for, a labor union and its activities. Section 2 prohibits the contracting of convict labor, while Section 3 prohibits “the employment of children, under the age of fifteen years, in any occupation, injurious to health or morals or especially hazardous to life or limb.” Section 5 deals with the health and safety of employees in factories, in mines, and on railroads. Section 10 focuses on the salary and emoluments of public officials.