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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (601011)	2/22/2011 9:56:58 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1571400

Bainbridge on Public Sector Unions Jonathan H. Adler • February 18, 2011 3:06 pm Professor Bainbridge makes the case against public sector unions. Of note, unlike many conservatives, the good Professor supports private sector unions on principle. As he points out, the arguments justifying private sector unions don’t translate very well to the public sector context: public sector unionism lacks the economic justifications for private sector unionism. It results in significant distortions of the political process, which have real adverse consequences for the taxpayers. Charles Lane, a liberal distraught over events in Wisconsin, makes some similar points here and here. From the latter: All Americans have a constitutional right to free association. But public-sector employees do not have a “fundamental right,” either moral or legal, to bargain collectively . . . — for the very good reason that they work, ostensibly at least, for the people, not for profit-making private corporations. Federal labor law specifically excludes public employees and leaves it up to the states to expand or contract collective bargaining for their workforces as they see fit. The man who signed that measure into law, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, disapproved of public-employee unionism. Just for the record, I am probably a bit less sympathetic to unions than Professor B. My mother was a management negotiator when I was growing up, and what I experienced was not pretty. There were menacing and harassing phone calls (“We know where your son goes to school”), industrial sabotage, and direct acts of intimidation (another negotiator’s house was paint-bombed). We had to have security parked outside our house every night for months on end and there were days I had to be driven to school by an off-duty cop. This all just makes me a bit less willing to give unions the benefit of the doubt. UPDATE: Calvin Massey says “Public Sector Unions Should Not Exist.” UPDATE: It seems the American people aren’t big fans of public sector unions either. volokh.com Public Sector Unions Should Not Exist In response to a commentator who chastises me for not speaking to the merits of public sector unions, I shall do so. Public sector unions ought not exist. Here’s why. In the private sector a union bargains for a greater share of the entity’s revenue and profits. What it can provide in return is greater productivity, accomplished perhaps by work force stability, higher morale, and the belief that the common fate of employer and employee will be enhanced by productivity gains. If this happy event ensues, at the next round of collective bargaining, union workers can and should receive their fair share of the resulting gains. In the public sector, by contrast, a union is not bargaining for a greater share of the revenue produced by economic activity; it is bargaining for a greater share of revenue that is obtained by force of law – taxation – or, if not a greater share, at least for a constant share of those revenues extracted from the citizens. What a public sector union can and does provide in return is political support for the faction that chooses to increase taxes or the union’s share of existing taxes. If public sector unions deliver on their support, they will be rewarded by ever more generous payments. There is no market that acts as an external monitor of worker compensation; there is only a steady repetition of a corrosive bargain – tax the public ever more in order to maintain political power. That is inimical to responsible government. thefacultylounge.org