Are Public Unions Necessary?

[a-new-machine.livejournal.com]

Wisconsin is raising hell in its attempts to balance a budget that's heavily weighed down by union-bargained benefits for public employees. Of course, they're taking the "nuke it from orbit" approach and removing collective bargaining rights from public employees.

My question is this: Why do we have collective bargaining for public employees at all? After all, unions grew out of the need for a power capable of balancing that of capital. But there's no real need for that in the public sector, right? Public sector workers are extremely powerful in the political process, "selecting the elected officials with whom they (ultimately) bargain." There's the argument that government, sheltered as it is from immediate consequences and business incentives, is unresponsive to economic realities to begin with - and needing to kowtow to powerful unions only makes that worse. For most jobs, from what I can tell, skills that are valuable in the public sector are equally valuable, or more valuable, in the private sector. Someone who knows, and can enforce regulations is very useful for a company seeking to comply with them. Administrative work is largely similar between corporate and public jobs. So for many public employees there is no real need for unionization - the government's need to compete with the private sector should keep pay and benefits roughly commensurate, but there is some disparity in public employees' favor. FDR, famous backer of unions though he was, opposed public unions as "intolerable."

The counter-argument I've heard is that many fields only offer employment in the public sector (teachers spring to mind). This means that the same dynamic exists as existed between the Company Town bosses and the laborers. There, I can see an argument. But for government construction workers, plumbers, lawyers, and administrative personnel, skills are essentially fungible, and competition with the private sector for those skills should keep compensation competitive.

So what are your thoughts? I'll grant that teachers, social workers, and other gov't-exclusive jobs may need unions. But what about the rest? Why does the DMV clerk have a union membership?

ETA: My state's recent experience with unions in the public sector has been a case study in why they suck. In New Hampshire, our budget was seriously unbalanced (most of our tax base comes from property taxes, and as property values fell, so did gov't revenues), and we needed to cut public services. The unions refused to take job cuts, preferring instead to foist the additional costs off on local government (cities/towns). So we had more employees doing less work. Public services were worse-impacted because the Governor was forced to institute furlough days, rather than simply leaving everything open but with fewer staff members. In the meantime, our court system was forced to cut so deep they had to suspend trials for a month, and they're not even open normal business hours anymore. As a result, the courts are facing constitutional challenges for failure to provide speedy trials.

Comments

[rasilio.livejournal.com]

Education Spending at the national level has increased at about twice the rate of inflation for more than 30 years.

Nationwide school enrollment has fallen steadily for the last 20 years as the Boomer and Gen X Generations left school and the Much smaller Gen Y and Millenial generations came along.

More Money + Fewer Students and yet educational performance has at best stagnated and more likely fallen back significantly.

Further it is now cheaper to send a child to private school in most cities than it is to send them to the public schools. A mere 10 years ago that was not the case and yet private schools still continually outperform public schools.


No, the issue is not that we do not spend enough money.

Clearly the issue is we spend TOO MUCH money in all the wrong places.

[nevermind6794.livejournal.com]

Health care spending has increased at more than twice the rate of inflation for more than 30 years, and that's a substantial part of "education" spending. Salaries for college graduates have also outpaced inflation, as have most service-based industries (as opposed to manufacturing).

In Houston, private schools are certainly not cheaper. From what I know of other cities, almost no private schools are cheaper.

While the educational system could certainly be better in lots of ways, poverty explains nearly the entire problem:

To justify their campaign, ed reformers repeat, mantra-like, that U.S. students are trailing far behind their peers in other nations, that U.S. public schools are failing. The claims are specious. Two of the three major international tests—the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study and the Trends in International Math and Science Study—break down student scores according to the poverty rate in each school. The tests are given every five years. The most recent results (2006) showed the following: students in U.S. schools where the poverty rate was less than 10 percent ranked first in reading, first in science, and third in math. When the poverty rate was 10 percent to 25 percent, U.S. students still ranked first in reading and science. But as the poverty rate rose still higher, students ranked lower and lower. Twenty percent of all U.S. schools have poverty rates over 75 percent. The average ranking of American students reflects this. The problem is not public schools; it is poverty. And as dozens of studies have shown, the gap in cognitive, physical, and social development between children in poverty and middle-class children is set by age three." (http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=3781)