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Should state employees have collective bargaining rights?
Results so far:
| Yes | 52% | 1411 votes | Total: 2702 votes | |
| No | 48% | 1291 votes |
Yes
by James Boyd
Created on: March 15, 2011
Should state employees have collective bargaining rights? The real question is not whether state employees should have the right to collective bargaining. The real question is whether any employees, no matter whether the employer is public or private, should have the right to bargain collectively. Many people in this country have an unfavorable opinion of labor unions. They think of unionized employees as lazy and overpaid.
Members of unions of public employees get a special dose of antipathy, largely due to pension benefits they have bargained for. This is a curious issue. The employees who negotiated for and obtained the pension provisions are vilified, while the public entity that agreed to provide the benefits is somehow exempted from the anger. States and cities agreed to provide some very good pension benefits for public employees, and then did not do what they knew they had to do to fund them. It is like blaming the seller of a luxury car because the buyer agreed to pay more than he could afford for the car.
Unions had terrible battles in their early years. Not just battles with words and in court; there were many violent confrontations. A lot of union supporters were jailed and many were killed. Companies and factory owners vigorously resisted attempts to organize employees. The successes of organized labor changed the workplace for all of us. Child labor was banned. We got an eight-hour workday, with time-and-a-half paid for overtime. Safety rules were put in place to protect workers from some of the hazards they had previously had to live (or die) with.
The current attack on public unions, which is being pursued in several states, is not really about what some have called “lavish” benefits. In Wisconsin, the governor declared that concessions on health benefits and pensions were necessary in order to manage the budget. The public unions agreed to all the concessions he asked for, but he still insists unions must give up their right to bargain collectively over anything other than wages. This is actually a thinly-veiled assault on all labor unions, public and private. Hard-line conservatives hate labor unions, for reasons most of them probably do not understand. It is part of their creed, and that is all they feel a need to know.
What this really amounts to is the first step in an all-out assault on the middle class. People who actually work for a living are despised by those who worship wealth and those who have it. Anyone with a job should be grateful to have the job, and should be instantly fired if they complain about the pay or the benefits or the working conditions. Public employees, as a general rule, make less than private sector employees in similar jobs. In return, they get a measure of job security that most people in the private sector do not have. The health insurance benefits and pensions are things they have negotiated for, and the public entities that have agreed to provide these benefits now seem to believe they have agreed to obligations they cannot meet. If that is so, then renegotiation is the proper method to make adjustments.
The issue in the debate about unions of public employees is not really about the problems with budgets for public entities. Some unions have been short-sighted and managed to obtain agreements that include unsustainable expenditures for benefits. But contracts can be renegotiated when conditions change. The real issue is collective bargaining itself. Republicans claim unions are evil incarnate because they provide campaign funds and political advertising money, usually in support of Democrats. The Republicans say the unions are subverting the political process because they use their funds for political purposes without first obtaining the consent of their members for every dollar they spend. In the same breath they strongly support the right of corporations to support Republican candidates, even though the corporations do this without consulting shareholders or employees.
The main issue here is not philosophical or political. It is economic. The battle is over a continuing effort to drive down wages for American workers. A prosperous middle class, with everybody who is willing and able to work having a steady job that pays a living wage, makes the whole country stronger and more stable financially. Full employment results in high tax revenues, fewer budget problems for public entities (and can even generate surpluses), increased spending on goods and services, and higher rates of debt repayment. Everybody benefits. Corporations and wealthy individuals, some of them anyway, seem to be opposed to widespread prosperity. They want a workforce that is timid and always on the verge of financial disaster.
The Republicans won the battle in Wisconsin, even though they had to use subterfuge and deception to do it. They have not won the war on working people, at least not yet. The assault on public unions is the first step in a battle to smash all unions. The ultimate object is lower wages, fewer benefits, more uncertainty in the jobs market, and a lower standard of living for all but the very wealthiest Americans.
Learn more about this author, James Boyd.
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No
by Gregory Cochran
Created on: February 28, 2011
Imagine awakening in the middle of the night to an odd, crackling sound mingled with the faint smell of smoke, the kind of smoke that arrives at your nose with almost a toasted-marshmallow sweetness, yet with the unmistakable bitterness of burning sulfur. You know that what you smell is fire. So, in a panic, you jump from your bed, grab what you can, shout for your kids to get out of the house, and, while you are running from your burning home, call 911 to report the house fire.
Imagine, again, that as you are waiting on the firemen, you realize that your pet dog, Fluffy, is still in her crate in the back room of the burning home. As the firemen arrive, you greet them with screams of horror on behalf of Fluffy the dog. They motion with their hands for you to calm down, assuring you that Fluffy will be all right—as soon as you contribute $100 to their pension fund. You would, undoubtedly, be dismayed, then distraught, then resigned to do whatever you had to do to save your dog, Fluffy.
Though hyperbolic (and unfairly biased against firemen who surely wouldn’t act so crassly), this illustration highlights a critical reason that government employees should not have collective bargaining rights. If government employees who provide critical services could collectively bargain for their own affluence, they would do so at great cost to the taxpayers who, in turn, would be held hostage by a collective determination on the part of public employees to withhold services.
Some would object to this framing of the collective bargaining dynamic, saying that collective bargaining could be arranged so that strikes are not allowed, thus eliminating all possibilities of our supposed fireman debacle. In fact, this is the argument that Lanny Davis makes at the Daily Caller. But saying that government employees can collectively bargain as long as they do not strike still misses the critical point as to why collective bargaining is a bad idea for public employees.
The Daily Caller article by Lanny Davis makes the case that the problem only arises when there is a strike of public employees. Davis recalls the words of President Franklin Roosevelt to make his case. Many writers have invoked the words of Roosevelt since the showdown in Wisconsin. In writing to the National Federation of Federal Employees in 1937, Roosevelt said, “"A strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government." In other words, a strike would result in wielding critical services (such as fire protection) as a club over the heads of the public, thereby strong-arming the public into succumbing to an ever-increasing tax burden in exchange for government services.
Davis agrees with the point that “militant actions” such as striking or withholding services ought to be beyond the pale of public sector bargaining. Yet, he still hopes to afford public workers the right to bargain collectively without striking. Such a position does not take into account the full effects of collective bargaining clout in the public sector. Roosevelt, I believe, went further in his forbidding bargaining practices.
Roosevelt said that “collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.” Notice that the transplantation of the collective bargaining concept into the public sector is what Roosevelt could not allow—not just the strikes or militant actions which followed collective bargaining. The reason that collective bargaining itself is a problem in the public sector is because the public sector is inherently linked to the general public. That statement may sound redundant or circular so let me explain.
First, public sector jobs are paid for out of public funds. Thus, any increase in a single public employee’s pay is an increase in the tax burden for everyone. This increase is a taxpayer burden which is not tied to the profitability of the persons making the payments. In the private market, for instance, workers can bargain against the profitability of the corporation. So long as the company is making money, the workers can bargain for increases. If they bargain for more pay and benefits than the company can pay, the company will eventually go out of business. So, there is a natural balance in effect. But this balance does not exist with the public sector. Every increase of pay in the public sector increases the burden on each taxpayer, regardless of whether that individual taxpayer has had a profitable year or not.
Second, because public sector jobs are under the control of elected public officials, public sector employees can band together to elect the very officials who will be negotiating with them, thus making certain they will get the increases they desire from the public treasury. This dynamic easily leads to an unholy alliance of labor and elected officials, who will inherently profit at the expense of every taxpayer.
Finally, collective bargaining by public employees puts the public employees in an adversarial relationship with the very public by which they are employed. Again, in the private market, employees who bargain are doing so against a separate party who has the same aim: making money. In the public sector, however, employees who bargain together are doing so against people who are supporting them as a burden. Public employees are expected to treat their work as servants because they are serving the general public. They are not employed in an arena of capitalistic enterprise in which profitability sustains both sides. They are, instead, performing a service at great cost and sacrifice to the people by whom they are employed. Public employees should understand and respect their privilege, not exploit it by holding the public hostage.
Ironically, Wisconsin stands now as a monument to the devastating effects of public collective bargaining. It was in Wisconsin in 1959 that public employees were first awarded collective bargaining rights. And now, it is in Wisconsin that government officials are hoping to turn back the clock to fiscal sanity in public service.
Learn more about this author, Gregory Cochran.
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