One of the hottish topics about which I haven’t written is Janus v. AFSCME, presently before the Supreme Court. In the case the plaintiff challenges the union’s right to charge him agency fees on grounds of free speech and association. In his Washington Post column, George Will, who has an insider’s view of the case, writes:
In private-sector collective bargaining, management and labor negotiate how to distribute companies’ profits. No comparably adversarial process exists in the public sector. There government, which acquires its “profits†(revenue) from a third party — taxpayers — “negotiates†with unions that have an interest in government doing what it wants to do anyway: expand. Because government is both employer and policymaker, collectÂive bargaining by the union is inherently political advocacy and indistinguishable from lobbying. Hence in 2012 the court acknowledged that compulsory fees are “compelled speech and association†implicating on First Amendment rights. President Franklin Roosevelt was right: “The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.â€
I have no opinion of the legalities and I don’t know which side should prevail. I do know that I think the present situation with public employees’ unions is inherently corrupt. Dues and fees are being directed into political contributions which are recycled into higher wages.
My predisposition is to ban public employees’ unions from making political contributions, full stop. There are other ways of correcting the present situation without muzzling the public employees’ unions but I’m afraid that some of those measures would have serious adverse secondary effects while others would require a complete transformation in our form of government.
No, it’s inherently political. And that’s as it should be.
It’s a positive feedback loop.
Unions representing workers (or the threat of unionization) at private firms are a necessary evil to check the potential excesses of private enterprise. Unions representing public workers are protecting those workers from…what exactly?
Public sector unions make no sense except as a very good method to extract rents from taxpayers and exert oversized influence in public policy. The effects are apparent if one on looks at the balance sheet for just about every state and local government.
“The effects are apparent if one on looks at the balance sheet for just about every state and local government.”
You may have seen the article over the weekend about the sorry state of California’s public pensions. The solution? Maintain an artificially high assumed return rate and risk up, of course.
Who are these government employees, what are their job duties? Are government managers all benevolent, kind, caring individuals? Are you painting all government employees with the same brush? Looking at the overall picture of government, it seems to function pretty well. Millions for federal, state and local government workers provide a pretty good service. Perhaps a harder examination of the administration side would shed some light on why public employees need to have unionized protections.
And then there is Citizens United…how political is that?
I’m not alleging anything malign. All parties merely pursue the perfectly understandable incentives they have but are parts of a corrupt system. Everyone wants to be paid more. Union leaders want to promote the interests of their members (and their own). Politicians want to be re-elected. Bureaucrats want to expand and promote the interests of the bureaucracy. Put it all together and it creates a system without restraints.
@Larry Colbert, the unionization rate in Illinois state government is somewhere around 95%, which means that one’s boss is usually a union member, and so is their boss.