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]

I don't know about Canada but you might want to rethink that stance after you look at this list...

http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php

12 of the top 20 organizations for political donations for the last 21 years are labor unions, 4 of those 12 are largely or entirely comprised of public sector employees. Also these numbers for the Unions by and large only cover donations made by the Unions themselves, not by their members individually and they also only include donations made at the Federal level.

From a quick crunch of the numbers for the 2010 election found here...

http://www.followthemoney.org/index.phtml

It looks like non military public sector employees accounted for around 8 - 10% of all political donations that came from groups and individuals (individual candidate and party contributions as well as public subsidies and contributions whose source could not be determined were excluded) and these accounted for about 4% of all political spending, over 156 Million dollars

Comparing the numbers between the sites shows that about 1.53 Billion was spend on Federal Elections and 2.97 Billion was spent overall.

Of the 1.53 Billion spent at the Federal Level Public sector Unions accounted for a mere 20 Million meaning they focused about 88% of their spending (or over $135 Million dollars) at the state and Local Level and again they account for close to 9% of all political spending at the State and Local Level, which if we assume that the breakdown by organization above (subtracting out money from candidates, parties, public subsidies, and the categorized contributions) means that public sector employee unions represent somewhere between 15% and 20% of all identifiable interest money spent in State and Local Elections.

The exact elected officials who they will be negotiating their pay and benefits packages with.

No this is not equivalent to a McDonalds employee thinking he can fire his Boss because he bought a single share of Stock in the Company, it is more like that employee buying 5% of the company and getting elected to a seat on the Board of Directors and then wanting to fire his boss.

[tridus.livejournal.com]

Canada has a donation cap of $1000 per person, and bans corporate and union donations entirely.

I'd say this is just one of numerous problems with the US donation system rather then a union problem.

[rasilio.livejournal.com]

There are donation caps here as well but they are largely meaningless, as are yours, because there are so many ways around them.

Also the numbers at that second site (and at the first site as well) do include individual contributions grouped under parent organizations (for example all of the employees of Goldman Sachs donations were considered to be Goldman Sachs, however for whatever reason donations from Unions at the first site only had about 15% come from individuals and 85% came from the Unions PAC's Political Action Committee's).

The fact is you cannot limit political donations unless you are willing to limit free speech.

Otherwise what is to stop a Union from funding a pro union anti candidate made for tv movie, and paying to air it on all major networks 1 week before the election with their $20 million in lobbying money if they can't donate it any other way?

[tridus.livejournal.com]

You mean other then how such a thing would look so ridiculous that nobody would take it seriously? The US system of having huge sums of money slushing around in donations isn't sacred, or even particularly good. Other places have found better ways of handling it.

I also find it interesting that you're worried about free speech in the form of money to politicians, but not concerned about the freedom to form unions.

[rasilio.livejournal.com]

Not at all.

I am a huge supporter of the right to freedom of association (aka the right to form a union), thing is I am also a huge fan of an employers right to tell the union members that they have no interest in collective bargaining and refusing to pay any attention to the union then firing anyone who fails to show up for their scheduled shifts (aka goes on strike).

If Public employees want to form a union, then good for them. That doesn't mean the government is in any way shape or form bound to pay attention to it or agree to collectively bargain with it.

[tridus.livejournal.com]

While you could do that for something like garbage collection, it would go badly with technical staff. If all your engineers, DBAs, network OPS guys and programmers walk out at the same time, replacing them doesn't get you anything for years.

...

which come to think of it probably explains why those groups are almost entirely non-unionized.

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

Also because professions like IT and engineers, programmers, etc. have strong negotiating powers individually so unions are less appealing.

[rasilio.livejournal.com]

Yes, I did not say the company would not suffer any consequences for ignoring workers demands to collectively bargain, just that there should be no legal barrier to doing so.

Even with workers whose skillsets are much more fungible there is a cost to just firing everyone if for no other reason than the public ill will that will be generated towards the employer and IMO more often than not if a corporations workers decide to unionize the company would be willing to listen to them as long as their demands are reasonable but that does not mean they should be legally compelled to do so.

[a-new-machine.livejournal.com]

I've always wondered about whether public-only campaigns were the way to go. The issue would be deciding who gets public money, and what third parties can say about the campaign.

[tridus.livejournal.com]

Publically funded campaigns have a lot of upsides, and some downsides. The difficulty with it is always figuring out how much money people should get, and what you should have to do to qualify. Those are hard questions when its taxpayer dollars.

But it also eliminates a lot of undesirable situations, like politicians getting huge donations from corporate/union donors and then being asked to write regulations/contracts with those same groups. It lets you avoid problems like the Senator for Disney (http://aldoblog.com/2002/03/the-senator-from-disney/).

[allhatnocattle.livejournal.com]

Corporate and union donation ban is not meaningless. Yes, there are ways around them, but those ways are illegal.

[nevermind6794.livejournal.com]

There's a lot of money in that "contributions whose source could not be determined" category.