Public employee unions are handing over vast amounts of money to the
incumbent governor's re-election campaign, while the governor is
simultaneously sitting at the bargaining table negotiating contracts
with these very unions.

If it seems inappropriate for the governor, Christine Gregoire, who
is locked in a very tight re-election, to benefit personally from the
parties that her office is negotiating with, that's just your
conscience, not the law.

As of Aug. 28, a number of unions — the Washington Federation of
State Employees, AFSCME, National Education Association and Washington
Education Association, Service Employees International Union, and the
AFL-CIO — had already contributed more than $1.5 million to the
Evergreen Progress PAC.

The current negotiations are covering everything from general
government employees, home health care workers, home child care
workers, and nurses in state institutions to staff in the public
universities. According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the PAC's
ads have unleashed "a drubbing" of her Republican gubernatorial
opponent, Dino Rossi.

Amazingly, neither union members nor the taxpaying public knows the
details of these negotiations until after the legislature approves the
budget funding the resulting contracts. Even the members of the
legislature do not know the details of the contract negotiations before
they vote.

That wasn't the way it was supposed to be. A joint committee from
the state House and Senate was originally supposed to consult the
governor during the negotiations, but that committee never met. The
Democratic-controlled legislature has simply chosen to ignore the costs
of the collective bargaining agreements that burdened taxpayers with
more than one-half billion dollars in the last budget. By law, the
contracts themselves are not public records until after the legislature
approves the budget.

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