Public Employee Unions: An American Scourge

Philip K. Howard has written many books including The Death of Common Sense. He has a new book out called Not Accountable, Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions. It's an argument for why public sector unions, the kind that represent government workers and teachers, have become the biggest obstacle, Mr. Howard says, "To effective democratic, self-government."

According to author Howard, there was an 18-year study in Illinois that showed an average of 2 out of 95,000 teachers were dismissed for performance annually. That's twice the rate that there is in California, where it's two or three per year out of 300,000 teachers. A Washington Post study of 37 large cities showed a termination rate of police of 0.02%. 99% of all federal employees get a fully successful rating.  All incontrovertible examples of the hypothesis… "Accountability is non-existent in American government. Performance doesn't matter."

This week in Chicago, Brandon Johnson was elected mayor to replace Beetlejuice (Lori who just got the foot Lightfoot).  According to my friends who have lived in Chicago area for decades this represents a giant step backward!  How in God’s name can anyone go backward from Lori Lightfoot.  Ponder that.  More importantly, how is that relevant?  Well, Mr. Johnson’s job prior to becoming a commissioner and now mayor was organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union.  In the past, he has endorsed the likes of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.  Progressive, you bet.  Progress, I think not.

Election after election, we elect a president, governors and mayors, and those are supposed to be public executives. Unlike legislators who pass laws, they're supposed to actually manage the government. But decade after decade, really since the 1970s, they have failed to do that.  Inner city schools get worse. Police forces develop toxic work cultures. The inefficiency of government is really breathtaking. And we elect people who keep saying they'll bring change we can believe in, or drain the swamp, or whatever.  Nothing changes. Well, there's a reason nothing changes. They're actually figureheads. They don't have the authority to manage government.

According to Mr. Howard… “In the late '60s there's a throwaway in the rights revolution. Public union leaders got the power of collective bargaining, which allowed them to go to politicians, who've been elected as executives, and say, ‘Now, you have a legal obligation to negotiate with this group as a unit, and you must make a deal with us. We have that power.’ And since that time, they have put in more and more rigid controls in the management of government. They eliminated accountability completely, as just noted. They put in multi 100-page collective bargaining agreements so if you want to move the desk in an office, that has to be negotiated. If we have a pandemic, there's nothing about having to teach during a pandemic so the teachers don't go back to work. And they refuse to do distance teaching, because that's not in the contract, until it's been negotiated. So literally,

 In 1958, a politician by the name of Gaylord Nelson in Wisconsin introduced collective bargaining for public unions.  Then JFK, in 1962, introduced it into the federal government. What’s fascinating is that Franklin Delano Roosevelt (greatest liberal of them all) and even the famous AFL CIO leader, George Meany, opposed collective bargaining for public employee unions, citing the inherent difference between trade and public sector industries.

In a trade union context, basically, labor and management divide the profit pie. So, both are at risk in the negotiation because if the unions demand too much, the company will go out of business or move out of town. Thus, the unions have a vested interest in the viability of the enterprise. Public unions are completely different. The government can't move out of town. They can demand as much as they can get away with. And by so doing, have bankrupted effectively entire states.

Private sector unions are subject to marketplace competition. Not just the ability to move out of town, but in demand for the products, which determine the ultimate success or failure of the company. That's not true of the public sector. No matter what, we must have teachers and police and governments.  So, what you end up is that public sector unions, in a significant sense, are on both sides of the bargaining table.

The reason FDR was so opposed to public unions is that the public unions are putting themselves first in line, ahead of all interests in society, to get things out of government. Whereas FDR said, "No." The duty is to represent... He kept saying this, "The whole people." People who are elected must represent the whole people. And public employees have a fiduciary duty to serve the people, not to serve themselves.

Author Howard asserts: It's really fundamentally corrupt. It's not corrupt yet in an illegal sense, but it is corrupt in that people are in fact simply using money to get an advantage. And it's different than all other interest groups who try to give contributions, because of two things... They have the power of collective bargaining, so they're first in line. They're also bigger. They're collecting about $5 billion a year in dues, most of which is spent for political influence. An astonishing amount of money. And of course then, there's the ethical difference. Public employees swear a duty of loyalty to the public.

And then these unions get in place and they negotiate contracts, and this really can't be emphasized too much, that are designed for inefficiency. That's how they're designed. They're designed to waste money. Trash collection in big cities costs twice what private carters pay. The MTA pays two to three times as much to run the subway system in New York as it would if it contracted it out. So we're talking about a system of government that, at all levels in this country, spends about over $2 trillion a year in personnel costs. A significant portion of that is basically burned.

Unfortunately, there is not much we the public can do about the hammer lock that public sector unions have.  They have enormous power to influence election outcomes and the behavior of those they elect.  Just try saying no at the bargaining table and you’ll be looking for work.  It is not realistic to imagine that someone running for office is going to eschew the contributions of any union.  As a result, we get an election outcome like yesterday in Chicago.  We get teachers unions deciding what our kids will learn and, since Covid, where they’ll learn it.

Until we elect leaders with the cojones to drastically mitigate the power of public sector unions, our elections will forever be affected.  And, not in a good way.  Meritocracy, as in most walks of life these days, is dying in the classroom.  Standardized tests are being abandoned, history is being bastardized, even human biology is being thrown out the window.  In order for any politician to meaningfully confront America’s most critical issue, the continued disintegration of education, he or she must throw off the shackles of public sector unions.

Listen for those words from the next politician you back.