California Labor Federation - Our Issues - Municipal Bankruptcy: "AB 155 (Mendoza) will provide state oversight and guidance to cities and counties considering filing for municipal bankruptcy. AB 155 will create a three-person Commission, comprised of the Controller, the Treasurer, and the Director of Finance, who will have oversight over municipal bankruptcies. This bill will NOT ban municipal bankruptcies or make them impossible. Instead, it will simply create an oversight structure to ensure that bankruptcies are only entered into when necessary."
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California's public employee unions, having driven the state and many local governments into insolvency, are now pushing a bill that would make it harder for cities to declare bankruptcy, as Vallejo did and others are considering. They would need permission from three presumably Democratic and union-beholden state officials. In bankruptcy, the unions lose their power because their contract gets broken. All the stuff on the union's web page about the impact of bankruptcy on communities is window dressing. This is all about union contracts.

Unions were one of the main reasons the privatization revolution took hold in this country back in the early 1980s. Some cities couldn't afford to have unionized public employees collecting the trash and so forth, and the only way to get around the public employee unions was to abolish the department and contract out the function. Trash collection was one of the first experiments with privatization and it seemed to work. Then it was on to other things, and now we have private communities with private governments, private parking meters on public streets, and private police on Chicago's streets.

So, this entire slide toward privatizing away what are now the most basic, traditional, functions of local government was in a sense fueled by the intransigence of public employee unions. Look at school district funding problems today and you can see the same thing in many big city systems: lousy performance, high cost, and no way to fix either. That's why the drive for privatization through charter schools and school choice and vouchers is so strong. It's the only way around the unions.

Oh, and Assemblyman Mendoza is a former LA school teacher and teacher's union stalwart. Here is what passes for a sentence on his official web page: "First as a fourth grade teacher at Brooklyn Avenue Elementary School in East Los Angeles, then as an active member in United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) and as a representative to the California Teachers Association (CTA) and the National Education Association."

That's a sentence fragment. I wonder if he was an English teacher.