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

[a-new-machine.livejournal.com]

Also, do admin personnel at private sector jobs need unions for this purpose? They seem to manage pretty well without them, after all.

[kitlizzy.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I guess I don't really understand myself why public sector jobs get protections the private sector doesn't - you would think that the jobs and pay would be pretty much the same in either. People in the private sector get fired for no good reason all the time, I'm not sure why the public sector needs oversight against that, unless the idea is to ensure a consistent and competent workforce to be available for these essential services. But then again we've all run into that tenured high school teacher who utterly failed to teach, or the utterly incompetent gov employee no one can fire, so....

[tridus.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine works in the video game industry, which is notorious for poor working conditions. He'll occasionally get told "it's now 12 hour days, 7 days a week for the next two months because our delivery schedule was completely unrealistic."

Just because he goes through it doesn't mean I should welcome the same nonsense.

[allhatnocattle.livejournal.com]

Government jobs have governments behind them with little/no constraints. See trillion dollar debt. No private sector has that kind of bargaining leeway behind them.