The Chris Christie Revolution

Chris Christie is a big guy, but he's also a big deal. I'll cut right to the meat: The Governor of the great state of New Jersey has made it acceptable to take on the public sector unions, whereas it was taboo prior to his arrival on the scene. While many of us knew that what was bankrupting us was out of control spending directly related to obscene union contracts for civil servants, it was socially unacceptable to say so publicly. Thanks to Christie, it is socially unacceptable no longer. This is major progress towards the fiscal rectitude that the nation needs at every level. I'm seeing it first hand. Last year, my little town had a budget brouhaha over its school budget. We were over a million dollars in the hole and the school board was looking at cancelling field trips, which cost $14,000 apiece. The merits aside, it was appalling to see our school board, comprised of putatively intelligent and accomplished individuals, adressing a dollar bill problem by looking for pennies and nickels in the sofa cushions. Meanwhile, there were renegotiations going on with three unions that represent school employees, and yet the Board avoided any mention of these negotiations as the central focus of our budget problems like the plague. No one wanted to even talk about the unions and the teachers' compensation. Let me break here to mention that my town is no struggling hamlet, it's a rich town and we take the school damn seriously, parents are very involved, and our community has stewarded over decades a school that is a dream employer for its employees. If you have chosen public education as your career, working conditions don't get much better than in my town's school - great facilities, great kids (almost zero truancy), involved parents, and a commitment to the school's excellence. Thus it is not by accident that educators are clamoring to work at our school, we get hundreds of top applicants for each job opening. Yet the local teachers' union takes its orders from the state level union and continues to make outrageous compensation demands because they know no other way. The state level union does not allow local teachers to moderate their stance based on the working conditions of the individual school, 'who cares if conditions are great, push hard' is the union's stance; and, everyone has been cowed for years into not criticizing the union for fear of looking "anti-education." Furthermore, the state union arms the local union with the data and the fortitude to make their demands because we are a rich town. In the end, the unions hypothesize, we'll pay. For years they've been right, pushing the limits so aggressively that budgets have exploded and things have gotten obscenely unaffordable even in our rich town. Last year it looked like they'd be right again, but in less than a year though, I've noticed a sea change in attitudes. People are engaged, looking at the issue clearly, and are no longer afraid to examine unionism in the schools critically and discuss it openly. People are starting to understand again that our schools are not the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and that in our society employees don't bark demands in a "take it or leave it" manner to preferred employers, preferred employers ought to be treated with the respect they have earned. I attribute this to Chris Christie. The change could not have been this pronounced if it weren't for the spark he lit, and now everyone from Michael Bloomberg to Andrew Cuomo is targeting public sector unions as the correct source of budgetary problems. The taboo has been broken and there just may be hope for us to regain fiscal sanity, thanks to a little Trenton Thunder.