for coming out. i have been looking forward to having read daniel's book. he present some interesting arguments we will have a chance to get into. our format this evening is going to be fairly simple. it will be 10 minutes from daniel on the far side, and then michael on the near side. how many people are related to michael, by the way? he said he had relatives here. five minutes then from each to respond to one another, and then i will take the moderator's prerogative to ask questions of my own, and you will have a chance to come to the microphone to ask your own questions. this is being recorded for c-span and by kuow, and i anticipate they will be airing the entire discussion on kuow and the shorter version on the show i host, "the record." scott walker has recently been mentioned as a second-tier republican candidate for the presidency, and he is known for his animosity toward public employees. this is an issue that is not quite simmering at a high lane in the national level. i'm interested in whether this becomes more of a national debate. we might be talking about things you would hear a lot more about in the coming months and years. let's hear an opening statement from daniel. go right ahead, daniel. we have 10 minutes, and it is kind of dark up here. we have a timekeeper and that may have to come down closer. we will start the 10-minute clock right now. go ahead, daniel. professor disalvo: thank you very much for that introduction, and thank you for coming out tonight to listen to a debate about public sector unions, a subject that really until the scott walker's reform efforts in wisconsin has lied dormant. i want to thank michael for agreeing to come out, and it is an honor for me to be a peer with such a distinguished scholar. let me get right into my book. i will have to be more polemical tonight because this is more a debate format than in my book, but that will be more fun. i think public-sector unions have been really at the center of state and local governments and politics since the great recession. wisconsin brought the issue to national and international attention, but in many states from indiana to michigan to rhode island to california to new york to illinois, this is where the action has been in state and local government. i think going forward we are going to see public employee unions as being getting a lot more attention in the press and the media and the subject of a lot more scrutiny than they have been prior to 2008. so i think that prior to 2008, journalists did not cover public employee unions closely. scholars did not either. when it comes to labor historians, political scientists, there just is not much written looking at public employee unions. my book is the first to try to take on this big subject and synthesize what we know, and make some arguments and conclusions from that. i think it is interesting because the study of public employee unions is really fundamental to our political life because we are studying the state. we are really studying the political activity of government's own employees. what do i argue? i try to make a conceptual, very important distinction between unions in the public and the private sectors. a lot of us, myself included came into this project thinking about unions as being sort of more older style industrial or craft unions, guys in hard hats, steel-toed boots, who work difficult jobs, and that was the image, romantic image, many of us have, but that is not what the labor movement looks like today. about half of the movement in 2009, for little why, a majority of members, were public employees, many of whom are relatively affluent with master's degrees or college degrees. so this distinction, public and private, i argue it can be made in a number of different ways why they are different. first is history. public employee unions have a different historical trajectory. private unions are governed by a national law. public-sector unions are governed by state law and local ordinances passed in the 1960's and 1970's. as private-sector unions have declined, public unions have remained stable or constant. their histories are different. i argue the way they operate and the way they affect policy is different. public-sector unions get two bites of the apple. they can win things for their members through collective bargaining, and also through politics, through participating in the political process electioneering, and lobbying, in a way that the private-sector counterparts cannot. public employee unions are different in a sense that they can exercise influence on both sides of the bargaining table in a way that private-sector unions cannot hope to do, which is through that second bite of the apple, lobbying and electioneering, public employee can gain influence with those who are acting as management in a way that private-sector unions, whether that is machinists unions here in seattle, which has no say over who boeing's ceo or cfo is. that is not the same in the public sector. fourth, the big difference between the two is that there is a lack of market incentives. markets really structure the dynamic between private-sector unions and management, and there is a lack of market forces in the public sector where are the government is the monopoly provider of many services. so after i make this decision i try to document what is the power of public-sector unions. i tried to give as much empirical data. how much public employee unions spent on campaigns, how much they give to candidates, how much they spend on initiatives and referenda campaigns, what is their lobbying spending. i look at their overall political advantages compared to both private-sector unions and other interest group players that are trying to get their way in american politics. those differences include they have easier access to politicians, they have much more easy to mobilize their membership for election campaigns and protests, rallies, because they are public workers themselves. they have a much more steady and stable revenue stream through dues and legal provisions. we can explain what those are later. fourth, as i said, up until the great recession, they were operating in a low visibility policy environment without a lot of media or public scrutiny. not only do they have a lot of political power, and just to give you a couple of examples, the california teachers association outspent the next three largest interests in the state combined in the first decade of the 21st century in donations to candidates and parties. in new york state, the state democratic party is very honeycombed in with many of the public employee unions, and the state firefighters and teachers, it is shared the state federation of teachers in lower manhattan. that is what i mean when i get to the question of access. i look at some of the incentive structures in collective bargaining in the public sector and why i argue tends to favor the union position over time and this has to do with the political incentives or management incentives in the public sector, where politicians are operating at different time horizons than union adversaries, and there is a lot of information asymmetries. unions know very much what they want, politicians are not so clear what exactly is in the public interest. so what is the effect of this power? i tried to marshal a lot of evidence to show that basically the effect of allowing public employees to unionize and bargain collectively has increased the cost of government through increased pay, increased benefits, for example, cities where firefighters are unionized pay on average about 9% more in salaries and about 25% more in benefits than cities where firefighters are not unionized for no measurably increase in service quality or fire protection. second, i try to find some empirical evidence, to show that the union negotiations of work rules that often shield workers from management can stymie or squelch innovation in the public sector such that management that you are paying agency managers in different areas really does not have many management rights or management pulls, so you are paying management, but they are not able to really manage in that sense. productivity is reduced. managers cannot credibly threaten workers with dismissal, cannot transfer them. in some cases they cannot assign them duties that would be appropriate to their skills. third, i argue that the effect of backloading -- and this is an interaction between collective bargaining and the pension benefit systems -- is what i call crowding out, the rising cost of the pension and health care for public employees, that is pushing some of its of the compensation back into retirement, has led to a squeezing a public budgets such that activists governments cannot do things that it might otherwise want to. i think i will basically wrap up here, but i would say that it has been raised as questions whether agency shop provisions other provisions surrounding collective-bargaining in the public sector actually compromise workers' rights, and that has been the subject of supreme court litigations in two recent high-profile cases, and whether this is a violation of some workers' first amendment rights by organizing this way. i would finish with promoters of public sector unions have not, as far as i can tell, made a positive case for why organizing our public labor markets in this way benefits the broader public. that it benefits the public workers themselves is clear. but what benefit rebounds to taxpayers, to consumers of public services? i have not seen a strong principled case that it does do that. i have seen some negative cases, that it does not have certain negative effects, but i have not seen a powerful first-principled case. i will leave it there. professor mccann: thank you. i want to thank the organizers for inviting me here. i want to thank you, daniel, about talking about public-sector unions. we were chatting before we came out that the study of unions in general has received little attention from political scientist. this is a welcome opportunity. i am not a specialist in public-sector unions, and i am not a debater by trade. we were talking about that as well. we are going to try to play the role. i am here in the introduction, the primary reason why, is i am the director for the center for labor studies at the university of washington. we will start the debate. because you may want to sign it later, we please sign my book? [laughter] let me start with one point of agreement. one point, 100% agreement, daniel begins by saying he is very much in favor of private-sector unions. he comes from a private-sector family background, and that he appreciates the role of private-sector unions have played in terms of representing workers, providing workers a voice, counterbalancing the power of concentrated capital, promoting conditions for safe and healthy work, for raising wages, providing social security, lobbying for social security, health benefits, and for really contributing to the rise of the middle class over the 20th century in america. where we disagree is not so much whether public unions are different, but whether they are different in a negative way, in a less beneficial way. where i disagree with him is that public-sector unions are more selfish in their goals, less democratic in the means by which they advance those goals in which they impose costs on government and more broadly on the citizenry that squeezes out other kinds of agendas, and especially those that might and benefit the most disadvantaged. so i should point out, because i am not sure it is clear, for my reading, a large part of the argument is about the shortfalls of pensions, that a squeezing of the funding, and while we talked about a variety of public sector unions, teachers play an important role. we get to talk about teachers and teacher unions. we will start with the argument about pension shortfalls that i see driving what this book is all about. daniel is right that there was a well-demonstrated shortfall in funding for pensions that became apparent in the last seven or eight years. the degree eventually follows how much it is a crisis people disagree about. one thing that is important to emphasize is that the shortfalls are quite different in different states. back to what i have to say about causes. a lot of information is in the book. it covers lots of information about union stability over time, how much union workers get paid, but what i did not see was a clear causal argument, evidence that there is a lot assertion that unions impose these costs but i did not see evidence that made a clear causal connection between what unions are doing and the problems that we see in the costs they are imposing. i do see evidence of costs. certainly, the state had experience deficits, and in many states experienced shortfalls because of pensions. we see unions are very active in terms of bargaining at the table and also in electioneering, as you called it, in campaign contributions, lobbying and so forth, but i did not see the clear evidence that there was causal connection between those. to my reading, there is good data about this, good data that helps us test this basic thesis about the causal impacts of unions. i will invoke a number of labor economists, in particular, the director for the center of retirement research at boston college, and another who is at berkeley, the dean of economics at harvard, and a number of other scholars, to give you a picture about what they say, because they have been looking at this issue to try to test whether this argument about what public-sector unions has done really stands. a lot of things they have told us, which is that the public sector has been stable over a time, the overall number of workers has been stable, the amount of state budget, the percentage of workers love to the population, all that has been relatively stable. it was not from a rising trajectory that created some sort of crisis. we know from the data that public-sector workers make roughly an overall compensation with a private-sector counterparts do. they tend to make less wages and there has been a lot of study on that, showing that public-sector workers as a whole make 93% to 96% what private-sector workers do, when one controls for experience and skills and so forth. they tend to have more generous pensions, and that in some ways is relative for your argument. when you balance out lower wages, higher pensions, there is not much not different. the book begins with some examples of public sector workers who are retiring on lots of money and made lots of money, but that is misleading about the overall picture. the other thing we know from these kinds of studies is that there is no correlation between union density, collective-bargaining laws, and union density in states them either with deficits that we saw in the states in the last 10 years or the shortfalls. there is a small linkage between the density of public-sector unions and the shortfalls, but that is corrected in once you add in the control for housing costs, that correlation no longer becomes significant. with some scholars, they say our public sectors are responsible for the shortfall. her answer is no, but one offers an answer by offering variables. one found that the strongest explanation for what happened with the shortfall pensions was two related things. one was the overall fiscal crisis that first kicked in in 2005 and got much worse in 2007 through 2008, in the recession we are just coming out of. that created massive budget deficits. you put that together with the states that experienced the greatest shortfall, explanation is those states experienced very bad management by politicians and those that they appointed as managers accounts for where the shortfalls are. that data to my reading is quite consistent and quite compelling. the aggregate data suggest you put together the fiscal crisis but it exposes the fact of mismanagement. mismanagement is that workers and employers, public sector pay into long term pension plans. what politicians were doing was not putting all the money that was due to workers into those plans. they were diverting that money to other types of causes. it happens in the fiscal crisis, the deficits of 2005 to 2011 the states are in crisis and it exposes the fact, and you can look at specific case studies like kentucky, which is probably the worst. "kentucky fried pensions." an accountant became a whistleblower to the fcc about the mismanagement in kentucky, and what was shown was the politicians only paid about 28% of the money that was committed over time, and then when the crisis hit, they had this massive shortfall of unfunded liability into the pension plan. other states, not quite as bad. illinois had 38%. other states not quite so bad. pennsylvania, new jersey, your home state, california, a number of states. some states did not experience a shortfall. one of the states that did not was washington state. the money was paid in, it was adjusted over time, various adjustments negotiated with the unions, and in 2000 there was 100% coverage of the pensions. when the crisis hit all but two very old pension plans were funded at 100% and they were barely under 100%. the argument as to these other causes to talk about was political mismanagement, politicians who were siphoning off funds. that is the primary story. public-sector unions do not control that. the politicians have to make the decisions. ross reynolds: you are out of time. five minutes to respond. professor disalvo: i am glad michael responded, and i will take them in order. public employee unions, not that they are good, it is that they are not doing harm, which is to say they did not consider it to deficits during the recession, and i cite in the book a study arguing that, that they are not responsible for the pension underfunding. i cite another book. if i wanted to make michael's case stronger, that is, the no harm case, i would also add that they are not overpaid. those would be the three points of the negative case. no harm, not overpaid, they did not contribute to pension underfunding, it did not contribute to deficits. that does not take into account the vast amount of evidence that i show the downsides of the costs. i do not want to get into the war of the studies. but scholars are not the only ones out there, and there are others out there, excellent scholars like one at stanford who has a good paper coming out in one of the top-tiered journals that shows that public employee unions, using the same empirical techniques, were responsible for driving up both the size of pensions and their underfunding in some key states. i will leave aside whether public employee unions are as possible for the underfunding issue in some states. there is clearly some bad actors where there is a lot going on. new jersey is one of them. illinois is another, where the pensions are in fairly bad shape. leaving that aside, there is a good causal connection to show that the size of the pension even if they are well funded using the government's current accounting techniques, which are also a little bit questionable -- my home state of new york is 100% funded if you use the 8% government downgrade -- however, the size of pensions as public employee unions have grown, the size of pensions, that is, their overall liabilities, are enormous. they went from being roughly 25% of the state's budget annually to being in the liabilities being three times or even in some cases four times the size of the state's -- these are much larger funds that are much, much riskier, and to make those returns stay 100% funded, the pension funds are now getting into much riskier investments, in hedge funds, in equities. that is part of the story. i did not hear -- and to take michael's second point -- that there is not a causal connection. i find that interesting. if one lays out as much as i do the evidence for how much power state and local governments are exercising, the amount of money they are contributing in spending, there is a clear causal connection between that and certain pay raises, certain work rules that are negotiated and if one had reversed it and provided that same evidence and taken out wherever i put public-sector unions and put corporate business, everyone would have said, yes, there is a clear causal connection. i think partly that can be an ideological point, which is to say in social science a clear causal connection, i think we can make our best judgment, but the most sophisticated empirical techniques, it is still going to be are very delicate question whether you have an ironclad causal connection. but i think there you do see -- i think as far as political science goes, this is about as strong a causal connection that these costs are being driven and some of the effects i laid out are driven in part or in whole by public employee unions. i will leave it there. professor mccann: one is the politics of this and politics is important. i will try to make a positive case. there is a politics to this, and it is important -- we get 2010 2011, massive deficits again around the country, these shortfalls in a number of states, and politicians who are trying to deal with this crisis. the crisis creates the challenge, but also an opportunity. one thing it does is provide an opportunity for political leaders. what are they going to do? they have got to find someone to blame. they find the public-sector unions. they said the unions are the ones to -- that come and they go to the -- and that is why you see all this attention to public sector unions because they are the ones who caused the crisis although just that the data shows that there is not even a vague cause. second thing is some of the scapegoating is political. after all, the public-sector unions give more to democrats than republicans. what you find in some states take wisconsin, where scott walker, who makes the brush of his challenge or attack on the unions, but what does he do? he exempts the police and firefighters because they tend support republicans. so you go after the teachers and that is what happens in a number of states where there is an effort to scapegoat the public-sector workers, and it is not entirely republicans against democrats supporting, but it is mostly, and there are exceptions. rhode island, you mentioned -- is divisive in the democratic party, but there is a politics to this. the third thing is that important is not addressed in the book at all, is what is going on, that there is an opportunity for financial investors, in that in the 1970's and 1980's, private pensions were replaced with 401(k)s, and private investment schemes. the primary argument is you need to replace the pension funds in the public sector with those private investment schemes. that is largely the private investors who are pushing that the same ones who got us in the economic crisis to begin with, and they want to push governors and legislators to make the workers pay for the costs of the shortfall in terms of higher contributions, lower benefits, lower wages, and in washington state we have not had cost of living raises in the last six years, and then turned it plans to the hedge fund brokers who are going to invest that and make tons of money in fees, and they're the ones were tried to break up the unions. that is quite a deal. even by american standards, that is a shocking story, i think. there is a larger story here and there is none of it in the book. not in the book about the politics of this, and the fact that some of the people who have a direct interest in pressing for this financial reform that it is going to go to the private investors are board members of the manhattan institute, where you are a fellow. i understand there's a connection there. the positive case for unions. if you take what i just said our public-sector unions teachers and police and firefighters, are they less democratic than hedge fund managers who want to take over this money in funding? one of your points is that public-sector unions is not the counterbalance to concentrated capital or to owners or employers that they are in the private sector. they are pushing agendas which are about raising wages, increasing work in the public sector, but they are working to private sector unions together. you see alliances between public and private sector unions. one of the arguments is they are playing democracy at the bargaining table. people do that all the time. i contribute to partisan politics. i argue in public forums like this. unions, because they're pushing democratic thoughts, are increasing democracy and doing it with the alliance is a private sector for the great many other insecure workers. ross reynolds: this is getting good. daniel, i would like to hear you respond to some of what we just heard from michael, particularly to the last point. you say that public unions have two bites of the apple, and michael is saying, that is taking place in a lot of areas. professor mccann: i would not start there because it is not taking in the same way -- if you take the two bites of the apple part, public employee unions are the only one that gets to negotiate with government or with their employer directly for salary, benefits, and working conditions, but can also lobby that same employer to the political process of that now. many of us participate in civic life. all of you are here, i assume many of you are cynically engaged. you may contribute to the sierra club, the nra, but those groups have to get people who are interested in guns, in the environment, they have to organize to make their case. they do not get to collectively bargain with government, too. private sector unions, for example, they get to collectively bargain with their employers for pay, benefits, and working conditions, and they do certainly participate in politics, but private sector union participation in politics is more in a sense a broader sense, a broader agenda, not in areas that will immediately affect the likelihood of their members. they may improve society can improve things for their members, but is a much more long-term project and say lobbying the government for a pension sweeteners that will change the formula that is going to allow people to benefit. i would come back to michael on a couple of points. i think he is being unfair to say that i am not citing the most sophisticated empirical studies. i think they're in there. there are other studies than the ones he wants to look like. i tried to parse them as carefully as i could on a chapter on pay. if you look at paid premiums, a term that economists use when comparable workers in public and private sector, when there is a premium, if you look at the states with the premiums that are the largest, they are correlated strongly with the highest union percentage states. so i think there is an empirical causal connection there. i do also in the book, and there's a chapter on lobbying, look at some of the ways in which the employee unions have gotten into that with some of the big financial interest that michael decries in the sense that they are very much involved, and big hedge funds are interested in managing the money of these pension funds and have sometimes lobbied for pension sweeteners along with the public employee unions because that will be more money for them to manage. on the political side, i did not get to it in my initial remarks, but i would say i come back and say that one of the big problems that comes out of this on the political side is the rise of public employee unions and the ways that they after been up costs and created this problem contributed to the larger problem of crowding out, has created a huge political conundrum for democrats and divided the democratic party over this. you can see this, whether you look at rahm emanuel, and then mayor of my home city, bill de blasio, or other politicians the illinois state legislature on the other side. this is a real divide within the state populace and centrists wings of the democratic party about how to handle the problem, because if you are democrat and believe -- a liberal and believe the government can do a lot of good for people and for society, you are between a rock and hard place now with the rising pension and health liabilities which are very large, as i mentioned, because they are squeezing out what you can spend to do on other things. they're cutting into library hours. the person who decided to run for office in rhode island, she saw library hours had been cut in order to pay these back pension liabilities. ross reynolds: one quick question for you, daniel, and a response from michael, and then the microphones are open, and i hope you will bring your own questions. let's say you are right, that public unions have an unfair advantage that it is such an unfair advantage that outweighs the benefits they provide to the public. if that is so, what is to be done? professor disalvo: that is a hard question. one i usually try to duck. [laughter] i have tried to analyze this phenomenon, and it has not been that studied. as michael mentioned, and he is right, there's an enormous amount of variation. this book is about state and local governments, states and cities, and there's lots of variation across the country. some places have big pension problems. think of illinois, new jersey. other states have big pay premiums. my home state of new york, for public employees, that is the case, and that is on equitable vis a vis the private sector. there are different problems and those are going to report different solutions in different places. i think in states where public employee unions are very strong, there could be different things that could be done, and i think it will depend on the culture of those particular places. ross reynolds: michael, what are your concerns about what should be done, that this idea that public unions take unfair advantage of the public takes hold and moves forward? professor mccann: i do not agree. let me address a couple points. the two bites of the apple. one thing is that the two forms, electioneering and collective bargaining, tend to deal with other issues. this is been well documented. the pensions are set through legislation. those are different venues. they need to fight in different forums. right there, i do not understand what you are arguing. the second thing about that is when public-sector unions participate in electioneering to influence legislators, they are only one small piece of the overall picture. they have a limited number of voters. have a lot of money in some states for certain kinds of policies. there's a lot of other people and big business and financial interests are giving more money when there is something at stake for them to do that. that does not begin to get at the imbalance that he is because large corporations do not have to give a lot of money because of the dependence of states and cities on those large corporations to provide employment and sometimes provide taxes. in the state of washington, we know about boeing. they will say we will leave if we do not billions of dollars in subsidies. when public-sector unions get money, that is all they had. the only thing public-sector unions that have marginally like that, is to strike. but strikes are outlined in the public sector in most states and in states where they are allowed where public-sector unions are being stigmatized as having caused the crisis they're not likely to go on strike, because that is a very bad situation to do that. while this countervailing stuff, i do not think it is significantly addressing the issue of power. let's come back to the positive issue. that the thing about not present issues that are democratic and contribute to equity and contribute to proving working conditions for workers and for middle class is just wrong. public-sector unions are lined with private-sector unions in engaging with issues. sea-tac in seattle was pushed by public-sector unions working with community groups, faith groups, other unions. there was a public-private union project, but pushing that, and that has become one of the primary causes around the country, minimum wages for everybody. and present on a whole for right of social benefits that will benefit working people that have been taken away or whittled away. to make this case that they are undemocratic in either means or ends, the primary standard for your book is about markets and about the way markets work. in many ways, what does about is interesting to neoliberal projects of privatizing government, privatizing pension plans, privatizing prisons, and much of the contracting out of government, which is i would say not something i would necessarily equate with democracy. that is not a project contributes to equity, to the increasing inequality between concentrated wealth and corporate capital. ross reynolds: i would like to open it up to those of you who have questions. step up close to the microphone so they can pick you up well on c-span. say your name into the microphone and give us your question. >> my name is stephen miller and i am a teacher. [laughter] i will get to the question, but i want to participate in the debate. i appreciate the fact that the leading was able to hold the state of washington hostage for the largest tax cut in history. that was quite a big bite, $9 billion. it is equivalent to saying the titanic sunk because of the waiters and maids that were working on the titanic that day. so let's work with a simple concept, using economic principles. you want to know what unions due to create a positive impact. so would you agree -- and both michael of daniel, this is a question for you -- higher wages for the average worker divides provides higher wages and benefits for most workers? ross reynolds: ok. >> washington state is a great example. unions have played a very key role in raising wages in washington state. so let's work on that civil economic principle. ross reynolds: let's start with michael. professor mccann: it is mostly for him, because i agree with him. professor disalvo: i would start by correcting the record. i do not argue in the book that public employee unions are the cause of the great recession or are the single bullet cause of the pension crisis across the country or that they caused higher deficits to go up. i do not argue those things. i do argue that states -- and again i draw on richard freeman for the empirical data on this states with stronger public unions tend to have higher levels of public debt, but that is different than the deficit, different than the recession. i do not argue that in the book, and if anyone got that message here, take that away. to the gentleman's question there is a threat it effect in economics, so if one company firm is unionized him raises wages, surrounding firms will need to match in hopes of staving off a union drive. those effects with a private-sector unions could not only help the workers in one plant, but in surrounding workers, no economist has felt threatened effect in the public sector. the public sector can raise wages and benefits, but it tends not to have any effect on the surrounding labor market. this goes back to the point that michael is a little confused about, there is a deep connection between pay negotiating through collective bargaining and pensions. the connection, and there is often at least anecdotally, you discover this, that public managers will often say we cannot do anything for you unions on pay right now, because that is factored in the current budgets, but we can do something on the pensions longer term, and that will be pushed off later and you can get that compensation in return down the line. so the pay question is very much connected to the pension question because any pay raises is going to be factored into how the pensions are calculated and what people's final average salary is. ross reynolds: we can go to another question. professor mccann: that is precisely what you just explained, is that politicians say we cannot give you a wage raise now, but we can feed the pension down the road or vice versa. that is what is meant by mismanagement. politicians will give this to you down the road, but they siphon it out. they're not there because the ones that are losing benefits and security down the road and making concessions to pay for the politicians' responsibility. secondly, quickly, about the impact of raising wages in the public sector. that is completely wrong, what you said. this is where unions worked with local civic groups to organize women who were not unionized in the public sector to file lawsuits on their behalf and take those lawsuits to collective bargaining to raise wages, because women workers are systematically underpaid. white women, especially women of color. this is what martin luther king was fighting for when he was assassinated. unions led that battle. public-sector unions. what happened, and there are studies in the bay area, because there is a major pay equity to . when you raise the wages of secretaries and clerical and nurses in the public sector, that raises the wages of everybody else in the private sector as well. that is what we call markets. it has those ripple kinds of effects. it is not purely consequential that the wages of women in the 1960's on average were only 59 cents to every dollar that men made. there were a variety of zones, reasons, but that that had a significant part, but that gap closes from 59 cents to 77 cents per dollar. sometimes these effects are local, and if you do it in lots of places, you get lots of ripples. fighting the causes like minimum wage, it is something that is aimed at raising the wages at everybody. ross reynolds: a couple more questions. >> my name is john stafford. my question is for michael. my question might imply that i am unsympathetic to public unions, but in fact i am in support of them. my question deals with process. it is my understanding in washington that when unions negotiate wage and benefit packages, the general structure or model is that union representatives meet with the governor, reach an agreement and go to the legislature who can vote for it or against it, but cannot modify it. that has received attention to the respect of if it is the appropriate process and has the appropriate level of transparency. my question is twofold. is the washington state model replicated reasonably uniform across the country, or are we sort of the standout in that respect? second, do you support the basic process by which union contracts are negotiated at the state level? thank you. professor mccann: i am not an expert. i know that pension issues are legislative issue, that does not mean unions to not have a role in that. they meet with the governor and present the case, and the governor presents that to the legislature which decides how to do with that. that means there are ongoing negotiations after the budget, which means the governor rarely gets the budget that the governor wants. at least in washington state. i am sure there is a lot of room if there is a fully transparent process, but that is for than undercutting the protector unions the same as the problem. the politicians on the one who determine what the nature of the process is. i would turn it back to that is a political question, not something that is the fault of the liability of the public sector unions. ross reynolds: let's bring it back over the side. >> my name is karen strickland. i am a former community college teacher. there's a little context for you. [laughter] i'm a longtime activist in my union. my experience is different than what you were stating, daniel, in terms of the role of the unions and looking out for their own interests as opposed to the collective good or the public good. and while i make no apologies for unions looking out for the interests of their members as working people, it is also the case that my union -- and i think this is true of many public-sector unions -- have actually really led the charge to protect the people that we serve. in my case, community college students -- ross reynolds: what is your question? >> i'm getting to it -- k-12 workers, teachers. if you could elaborate on your thinking around the lack of a benefit for the public good in terms of union roles. professor disalvo: i'm glad you raise that question, a good one. it brings back a few things that michael has argued in tried to put forward the positive case, which is if you think about the activity of public employee unions, you think about it as a set in terms of issues and the things they are going to invest time, money, and energy on. they are a set of concentric circles. there is nothing wrong starting with their own interests in the union leadership's interest in winning the best deal for their membership. it would be surprising if that was not agenda item number one. it was not, leadership is often elected democratically. someone would run against him and say we could win a better pay, better benefits, or better working conditions. that will be agenda item number one. from there, public employee unions -- and this goes to connected to private sector use and in some ways supporting private sector unions, so michael is right about that alliance. there's a lot of fissures in that alignment. public-sector unions went with their opponents. there are fissures between public and private. beyond that, public employee unions, as i mentioned, are deeply embedded or braided into the larger democratic party. they adopt at least rhetorically a lot of the issues of the larger liberal coalition. they underwrite groups on the left of the political spectrum, such as teacher unions. they have bailed out the naacp substantially. and that instance, it becomes a partisan case, which is that i support liberal politics. they are the money and manpower behind the liberal coalition therefore i support them. that is in a sense the larger argument as it goes. >> i am sure both daniel and michael will be around for other questions. you sir, your name and your question. >> is there any analysis of the outcomes of scott walker's union legislation? the fiscal state of wisconsin or the county level or the education outcomes? in terms of class size and the impact of other services? >> there has been some analysis. the big effect of act 10 has been to reduce some union membership. wisconsin's job growth was not as good as walker promise. how much she deserves either credit or blame for that is a subject of debate. some counties were able to during the recession cities like ms.e no milwaukee i don't know of any journalistic reports, no reliable broad studies. it is a little early for some of those empirical questions to be answered. >> daniel is going to be doing a signing over here afterwards. i want to thank both of you, i have learned a lot. [applause]

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