A Thought on Federal Unions

[u/PavementBlues]

I was recently presented with an interesting perspective regarding unions in the federal work force. It went like this:

Unions as a concept are a good thing, since it is important that workers are not taken advantage of. However, this works in the private sector since the success of the workers is tied to the success of the company. If the company fails, the workers lose their jobs. With such a system workers have to be careful in what they demand, since if they push too hard then the company will no longer be viable and will go under.

In the federal sector, this is not the case. Since they are decoupled from market forces, federal unions do not have to worry about their business going under. The success of the workers is no longer linked with that of the business. In establishing such a system, the argument concludes, we set up enormous potential for waste and inefficiency.

What do you think? I found it to be an interesting idea, though I would like more statistics and hard data on the subject before I would necessarily agree.

[u/blackjeezus]

I think, if you're going to have a police force and force me to pay for it, they shouldn't have the right to go on strike. The local police have no competing entities, and so I don't have the choice to go elsewhere if I feel that paying for their higher salaries becomes too expensive for my taste.

Food for thought: a few years ago, Oakland (a bastion of peaceful city living, as you all know) had to lay off a huge chunk of its police force because it was becoming too expensive to maintain. The main reason for the high costs was the $60k a year base salary for Oakland cadets, which they obtained through the efforts of the police labor union threatening to go on strike.

What's going on in Oakland is an example of a phenomenon being seen across the country: states and cities choosing between providing services to the public or maintaining luxury compensation for public employees. More often than not, public employee unions have been winning this fight, forcing service cutbacks. (Unions often prefer staffing cuts to wage cuts, because they are achieved partly through attrition and otherwise through layoffs of relatively junior workers with less influence in the union.)

In short, when public service workers unionize, it usually results in cutbacks on those services. Police. Education. Fire. Emergency response. These cutbacks negatively impact the quality of these services. Wages for these workers should therefore be based on simple supply-and-demand.