Ripping off the teachers, too?

Washington Examiner:

In the past, Kaukauna’s [Kaukauna School District, Wisconsin] agreement with the teachers union required the school district to purchase health insurance coverage from something called WEA Trust -- a company created by the Wisconsin teachers union.  "It was in the collective bargaining agreement that we could only negotiate with them,” says [school board President Todd] Arnoldussen.  "Well, you know what happens when you can only negotiate with one vendor.”  This year, WEA Trust told Kaukauna that it would face a significant increase in premiums.

Now, the collective bargaining agreement is gone, and the school district is free to shop around for coverage.  And all of a sudden, WEA Trust has changed its position.  "With these changes, the schools could go out for bids, and lo and behold, WEA Trust said, ‘We can match the lowest bid,’” says Republican state Rep. Jim Steineke, who represents the area and supports the Walker changes.  At least for the moment, Kaukauna is staying with WEA Trust, but saving substantial amounts of money.

Most commenters, both on the Examiner story and over at Althouse, are concentrating on the ripping-off-the-taxpayers aspect of this story.  But the taxpayers weren’t the only ones getting a haircut: I’m confident that the WEA Trust’s higher-than-market prices didn’t trickle down as improved health benefits for the union’s teacher-members, and I’d lay better than even money that a lot of the Trust’s excess costs wound up as "compensation” paid to union officers and their cronies.  While Ace wonders about a hidden agenda:

Why, this is such a bizarre state of affairs, you’d almost think... the teachers’ unions’ mission was not to improve education, but rather to keep it in crisis forever so they could make ever-escalating demands upon the taxpayers.

...I believe I’ll opt for old-fashioned graft-n-corruption as a  first explanation.

Union-operated benefit funds have a long history of thievery, the poster children being the gangster-plundered funds run by (mostly) east and west coast trades’ locals and, closer to home, the Teamsters Union’s Central States Pension Fund.^[1]  Even absent outside criminal influence, union operations historically have not been paragons of efficiency.  At Kaukauna, the "excess” money the district was forced to spend on "health benefits” wasn’t there to spend on other things... like teacher pay.  And in view of these revelations, were I a member of the union, I’d be very interested in discovering who wrote the single-vendor provision into the contract, and finding out where the excess money went.

Ace, again:

There is corruption going on here that we didn't even imagine.   Corrupt people can think up too many corrupt schemes for the honest man to keep up with.

Yep.

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Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 16:14:12 GMT | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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