Posted by Anon at 9:10pm Oct 14 '09I saw a piece earlier about something that I had never considered. We've all heard people bitch about teacher unions or these unions or those....
But why do we even allow government employees to unionize? It seems kind of against logic doesn't it? Unions collect power through numbers then negiate contracts with their politician leaders who they eventually re-elect. Then the cost of such services is dispersed on the general public at large. It's not even a functional market situation. I can see the logic behind private unions. In that scenario there's a boss who takes in all the profit and begrugingly (or sometimes not) shares it with workers in the form of compensations.
But as we stand today, in huge recession where everyone is making concessions, many public unions are not. Taxes are being raised to provide them with even higher living standards. Now I know that some have made concessions with their governments on the verge of bankruptcy, but on the whole, public union employee compensations are and have been pulling away from private sector workers at rather significant rate.
So why do we allow it? Conventional wisdom has always been that the benefit to working for the government is that you have a bulletproof pension and benefit plan, with very great job security and a liveable wage. Yet these days they're outperforming anyone else in the economy. And this is due to the problem I outlined at the beginning of this post, that public unions have little to answer to. Consider this excerpt..
Some of that is just my regurgitation source, but there is a very strong underlying point here. Isn't this system unnatural and rigged against the everyman/woman taxpayer?
Link to source below
But why do we even allow government employees to unionize? It seems kind of against logic doesn't it? Unions collect power through numbers then negiate contracts with their politician leaders who they eventually re-elect. Then the cost of such services is dispersed on the general public at large. It's not even a functional market situation. I can see the logic behind private unions. In that scenario there's a boss who takes in all the profit and begrugingly (or sometimes not) shares it with workers in the form of compensations.
But as we stand today, in huge recession where everyone is making concessions, many public unions are not. Taxes are being raised to provide them with even higher living standards. Now I know that some have made concessions with their governments on the verge of bankruptcy, but on the whole, public union employee compensations are and have been pulling away from private sector workers at rather significant rate.
So why do we allow it? Conventional wisdom has always been that the benefit to working for the government is that you have a bulletproof pension and benefit plan, with very great job security and a liveable wage. Yet these days they're outperforming anyone else in the economy. And this is due to the problem I outlined at the beginning of this post, that public unions have little to answer to. Consider this excerpt..
Katz not only represents thousands of state employees, she is also the richly rewarded former girlfriend of New Jersey governor Jon Corzine. Katz's influence on Corzine became clear in 2006 when the impassioned governor spoke to a Trenton rally of roughly 10,000 public workers and shouted out: "We will fight for a fair contract." Corzine was of course management in that situation, not labor. But with the power of the public sector unions to drive election outcomes, they now sit on both sides of the bargaining table. Unlike private sector unions, the sheer number of workers represented is not the linchpin of their influence. Private sector unions have a natural adversary in the owners of the companies with whom they negotiate. But public sector unions have no such natural counterweight. They are a classic case of "client politics," where an interest group's concentrated efforts to secure rewards impose diffused costs on the mass of unorganized taxpayers. Also unlike private sector unions, those in the public sector can achieve influence on both sides of the bargaining table by making campaign contributions and organizing get-out-the-vote drives to elect politicians who then control the negotiations over their pay, benefits, and work rules. The result is a nefarious cycle: Politicians agree to generous government worker contracts; those workers then pay higher union dues a portion of which are funneled back into those same politicians' campaign war chests. It is a cycle that has driven California and New York to the edge of bankruptcy.
Some of that is just my regurgitation source, but there is a very strong underlying point here. Isn't this system unnatural and rigged against the everyman/woman taxpayer?
Link to source below
added on 10:07pm Oct 14 '09:
p.s. I now accept tips for my good workLink: Click Here
This is a good debate here - Anon