Government workers don’t need unions
7th March 2011
The Economist, as usual, makes perfect sense.
Without public-sector unions, government workers would lobby their way to padded paychecks, unobtanium-plated pensions, and hermetic job security anyway. Which is just to say, government workers don’t really need unions at all.
The thing is, public-sector unions don’t work like this. They aren’t bargaining against capitalists for a fair cut of the cooperative surplus. They’re bargaining against everybody who pays taxes and/or benefits from government spending. The question of distribution in democratic politics isn’t about splitting up jointly-produced profits. It’s about interest groups fighting to grab a bigger share of government revenue while sticking competing groups with the tax bill. Because of the sheer size and relatively uniform interests of the group, public employees constitute a politically powerful bloc with or without unions. As the percentage of the labour force employed by the government rises, the heft of this group only increases. Public-employee unions simply consolidate an already impressive concentration of political bargaining power. Moreover, as the Democratic Party comes increasingly to rely on patronage from the public-sector unions, the determination of Democratic politicians to bargain against the unions on behalf of taxpayers and the beneficiaries of competing government programmes necessarily weakens. For Democratic office-seekers, generous union contracts are “willingly given”, as the Times put it, in roughly the same sense that unaffiliated private-sector workers “willingly” accept low wages and poor working conditions.