Why Unions Will Fund Gov. Gray Davis’ Survival Campaign

By Mary Mostert

July 31, 2003

Over the weekend some friends of mine from California unexpectedly showed up on my doorstep in Utah to tell me they were in town on a mission to purchase a house with the intent of fleeing California, the Socialist State of the American West that is slowly sinking in a sea of financial mismanagement.

My friends planned to sleep in the house, at the owner’s suggestion, as they inspected it. Only, as luck would have it, they never made contact with anyone with a key to the house and ended up with no place to stay. So, the four of them, mother, 11 year old son and two college-age daughters, camped out in a tent under my walnut tree. It was fun to have them and plans are that they will shortly join the mass exodus from California that has been going on for in the past few years.

While my friends didn’t actually discuss the recently approved Recall Petition to oust Democrat Gray Davis from the Governor’s seat in California other than frown and wrinkle their noses at the mention of the Governor, their need to get out of California is connected with Gray Davis and the conditions that years of no-growth Democrat policies have created.

In fact, as a former California building contractor, I am also a refugee from the state, having discovered, along with hundreds of thousands of other people once involved in non-union home construction in California, that I could not make a living there. This happened in my forested county in the foothills of the Sierras when the logging industry was killed by the spotted owls who, we were told, required 1000 acres of unlogged forest per nesting couple in order to survive. Apparently, the spotted owls nesting in a K-Mart sign in Los Angeles did not read the papers. .

One by one every contractor, developer, logger, sawmill employee and most of the realtors I had worked with, like me, had relocated or changed occupations by 2000. The hardware stores and lumber companies closed and restaurants in the county that had survived on customers who had once worked in a thriving home-building industry, shut down.

This has caused me to view the hysteria over Governor Davis possibly losing HIS employment with some amusement. Where was everyone’s concern about unemployment when the Democrats and the no-growthers were so determined to run all of us builders out of business?

The effort to get names on petitions to recall Davis has centered around the charge that Davis covered up a huge budget deficit during the 2002 election campaign then after getting re-elected proposed in January 2003 a $8.3 billion tax increase to make up part of the difference, rather than cut any special interest program put forward by his contributors. Davis has the dubious honor of being the first California governor to face recall. The October 7th Recall election which required 897,158 valid signatures actually gathered 1, 300,000 signatures.

Gray Davis, a top money raiser in the Democratic party, has used traditional Democrat techniques, perfected among wealthy Democrat movie-moguls in Hollywood over the years which claimed to be helping the poor and the working-class while protecting their own money interests in the labor unions and entertainment industry.

Gray Davis uses tax funds to prop up the building trade and teachers unions, for example. In fact, in the last two years over $15 million in tax funds has gone to what can only be called a slush fund for the State Building and Trades Council of California, a Union group composed of approximately 15 of the State’s largest unions.

Even Democrat unionists were amazed at Davis’ blatant demands for funds in exchange for his interest in their issues. As the far left Nation magazine put it in its August 1, 2002 issue: “Incumbent Democratic Governor Gray Davis was meeting in his Capitol office with Wayne Johnson, the militant leader of the California Teachers Association, which had forked over $1.3 million for Davis's 1998 election campaign. Since relations between the Governor and the union--as is the case with much of the state's liberal Democratic base--had curdled, Johnson was hoping to sway Davis back toward the teachers' camp on a series of educational issues, but the Governor's mind was elsewhere. ‘We were just sitting there and talking,’ Johnson later told the press, ‘and he, just out of the blue, said, 'You know, I really need a million dollars from you guys.'"

The Education Union receives 44% of California’s $100 billion annual budget, still manages to produce one of the worst education records in the country and demanded NO budget cuts for the education union’s bloated figures.

This week the California Building Trades Council, is holding “Recall Training Workshops (WAR) to defend their Davis against the wrath of angry taxpayers, apparently using part of a $15 million grant supposedly designed to tell Californians about the wonders of union apprenticeship. Those apprenticeship programs (according to their website http://www.sbctc.org/default.asp?id=1437&pagetype=about) offer the apprentices “40% of the prevailing wage in their area. This translates to about $12-$15 per hour, plus benefits while they begin the program. That rate goes up each year until they turn out as journeymen. The average craft journeyman makes about $28 per hour in this state plus health and pension benefits. Many trades pay in excess of $75 per hour with overtime.”

So, what exactly is the logic behind giving Unions millions of dollars to show people how to lay pipe or hammer a nail? That’s what we contractors routinely do, at our own expense. And, just how much of that tax money is and has been used to get Gray Davis elected or to fight Recall?

Does this, perchance, give you a clue as to why average people like me and my friends cannot afford to live in California, why the cost of housing is so high in California, why so many jobs have moved OUT of California to other countries, why education reform is blocked and kids can’t read in California, why union membership has dropped by 50%, as jobs are moved offshore by companies that can’t or won’t pay $75 an hour for something that the average person can learn in 6-8 months and why unionists making ridiculous amounts of money per hour plus benefits are going to defend Gray Davis with their last breath and dollar?

I thought it might.

To comment: mmostert@bannerofliberty.com