"selecting the elected officials with whom they (ultimately) bargain."
That's like saying McDonalds employees can select with whom they bargain by buying shares. Unless you're in a government town with no other real industry, those votes are drastically outnumbered by everybody else.
The real reason why public sector unions have gotten as powerful as they are is because for years (decades) politicians were simply unwilling to take them on in any serious way. We even have a recent example in Toronto with the garbage strike. There was a union asking for too much. The Mayor and City Council had something politicians don't usually have in these cases: overwhelming and rock-solid voter support to let them stay on strike and refuse the wage hikes being demanded. So what did the Mayor do? He folded like Superman on laundry day. He was then promptly removed from office and the new Mayor is moving to privatize the whole system, which will solve the problem anyway.
The difficulty is that while there's cases where the unions just get greedy and abusive (see Toronto garbage), there's other cases where the problem is with the politicians. Where I am, the public servants are currently all on a wage freeze that was brought in a couple years ago to help try and get spending under control. What did the elected officials do after getting that?
Why, they voted themselves a massive pay raise and a *doubling* of their pension benefits. They also jacked up spending everywhere because an election was coming up.
So now the fiscal situation is even worse. What's their solution? Why, now they want to impose a 5% wage cut on public servants (excluding themselves, of course). The union is pretty likely to fight that, and they should. It's not a real solution to the problem, and all it's going to accomplish is to drive out everybody skilled who can get better paying jobs in the private sector. If the goal is to have a less functional government, it'll work. If the goal is anything resembling sound fiscal policy, it's nonsense. (Since they'll just throw the savings into the black hole that is the health care budget, and then in 2 years go "oh no we're out of money, we need to cut again!")
Without the union, they'd probably get away with it because the government being in control of the legislature can just force through whatever it wants. Workers have every right to band together to fight against that kind of nonsense no matter what industry they work in.
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Date: 17/2/11 16:11 (UTC)"selecting the elected officials with whom they (ultimately) bargain."
That's like saying McDonalds employees can select with whom they bargain by buying shares. Unless you're in a government town with no other real industry, those votes are drastically outnumbered by everybody else.
The real reason why public sector unions have gotten as powerful as they are is because for years (decades) politicians were simply unwilling to take them on in any serious way. We even have a recent example in Toronto with the garbage strike. There was a union asking for too much. The Mayor and City Council had something politicians don't usually have in these cases: overwhelming and rock-solid voter support to let them stay on strike and refuse the wage hikes being demanded. So what did the Mayor do? He folded like Superman on laundry day. He was then promptly removed from office and the new Mayor is moving to privatize the whole system, which will solve the problem anyway.
The difficulty is that while there's cases where the unions just get greedy and abusive (see Toronto garbage), there's other cases where the problem is with the politicians. Where I am, the public servants are currently all on a wage freeze that was brought in a couple years ago to help try and get spending under control. What did the elected officials do after getting that?
Why, they voted themselves a massive pay raise and a *doubling* of their pension benefits. They also jacked up spending everywhere because an election was coming up.
So now the fiscal situation is even worse. What's their solution? Why, now they want to impose a 5% wage cut on public servants (excluding themselves, of course). The union is pretty likely to fight that, and they should. It's not a real solution to the problem, and all it's going to accomplish is to drive out everybody skilled who can get better paying jobs in the private sector. If the goal is to have a less functional government, it'll work. If the goal is anything resembling sound fiscal policy, it's nonsense. (Since they'll just throw the savings into the black hole that is the health care budget, and then in 2 years go "oh no we're out of money, we need to cut again!")
Without the union, they'd probably get away with it because the government being in control of the legislature can just force through whatever it wants. Workers have every right to band together to fight against that kind of nonsense no matter what industry they work in.