4 ms·

The public sector is one of the few places that needs a union. There is no competition, no free market to determine wages and benefits, and often no private se

The public sector is one of the few places that needs a union. There is no competition, no free market to determine wages and benefits, and often no private sector equivalent of the positions involved. There is one monolithic, powerful entity that doesn't move quickly or respond well to changing labour market conditions, and many small, powerless employees whose skills are not always transferable to the private sector. Without unions, it's a setup that would almost guarantee abuse. Unions are certainly not ideal, but they are necessary for that kind of industry.

jerf 11y ago
The problem with public unions is that they are not negotiating with an entity that has the motivation to save every penny, which does in fact remove one of the major needs to unionize. Governments care less about giving away money, especially if they're building a voter base in the process. And history rather strongly suggests that governments downright love promising the world tomorrow if you'll just smile for the cameras today. It ends up being both the unions and the government against the tax payer too easily.
- monknomo 11y ago
  Governments enjoy giving money away to donors, other smaller governments and large private employers, not government employees. Ask any government employee how easy it is to get cash or a raise
  - jerf 11y ago
    There seems to me to be a lot of equivocation in all these replies between "unions" and "employees", substituting whichever one makes the best argument at the time. That's not valid. When discussing "governments negotiating with unions", you can't just suddenly substitute "government negotiating with employees individually"; the incentives are not the same. The governments have little incentive to pay a given individual; they have a lot of incentive to pay blocks of voters, and the especially have a lot of incentive to do so with money from the future, a point I note none of the replies cared to engage with, which I find is a big tell. Since a huge element of the problem with public unions was the enormous pension giveaways, which are now coming due and crushing the ability of the "blue model" to keep the rest of its promises. While everyone here is fiddling, the cities are burning. You can't write about these issues as if we're debating creating public unions for the first time and seeing what happened. We created them. They are, present tense, in the process of crushing city finances, in the most concretely real, dollar-based, actually happening way possible. This is a present fact that must be accounted for, not a hypothetical bad thing that may happen in the future. Unfortunately, yelling "Oh, those wacky libertarians! Well, that concludes that debate." doesn't add a single dollar to the tax base.
    - spopejoy 11y ago
      "pension giveaways" "crushing city finances" Oh my goodness, look up from your Economist occasionally and read some history. New York didn't go broke in the 70s because of lazy union members, but because Wall Street hung it out to dry. California didn't bankrupt it's schools and parks in the 70s because of unions but because of prop 13. Unions didn't kill Detroit. In general, cities bend over to grant ludicrous tax breaks to corporations that then soak up city services and resources, and then bitch and moan when teachers or MTA workers want more than a 3% raise. Union-hostile city managers are everywhere, bringing Flint Michigan-water scandals your way. By your line of argument, having public transportation, or a decent homeless shelter system, or funding public schools "crushes finances" "in a concretely real, dollar-based" way -- i.e. the same zero-sum, deficit-baiting neoliberalist ideology.
- Symbiote 11y ago
  > an entity that has the motivation to save every penny That sounds like what's happened/happening in many European governments with austerity policies.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  > The problem with public unions is that they are not negotiating with an entity that has the motivation to save every penny The current UK Government is trying to "save every penny". This isn't unique to the UK. Surely some US states face financial hardship or have ideological motivations to cut spending.
- redthrowaway 11y ago
  Your caricature of government may be pleasing, but it bears very little resemblance to reality. Government is inefficient, and often wasteful, but not because they don't care about wasting taxpayers' money. They're just (often) bad at spending it responsibly. And public sector employees are often the first target of any politician elected on a promise of "getting rid of waste".
  - crdoconnor 11y ago
    >Government is inefficient So are Fortune 500s. It's in the nature of large bureaucracies, not governments specifically.
    - redthrowaway 11y ago
      Exactly, and government is the largest bureaucracy out there. My point is that people, particularly libertarians, like to ascribe to malfeasance government behaviours that are better explained by poorly designed systems and misaligned incentives. There are very few government employees and elected officials actively looking to screw over taxpayers. Almost every single public employee I've spoken to has expressed how much they care about the job they do and how constrained they are by bureaucracy and lack of resources. And elected officials are overwhelmingly concerned citizens who want to do everything they can to help their constituents. The fact that they often fail to do so has much more to do with maladaptive systems and perverse incentives than it does with the motivations of the people involved. It's tragically comic that the people on this site, who should be hyper aware of the effects of bad architecture on an system's output, are so quick to write it off as a cause and instead resort to facile ad hominems about the people in question. You don't blame the silicon when your app becomes unresponsive. It's weird that we do so for countries.
      - jerf 11y ago
        No, I'm an equal opportunity "big system" hater. Hating Wal-Mart but thinking the US Government is the bee's knees makes no sense to me.
- crdoconnor 11y ago
  >The problem with public unions is that they are not negotiating with an entity that has the motivation to save every penny, which does in fact remove one of the major needs to unionize That explains why the public sector pays better than the private sector. Oh wait...

jerf 11y ago

The problem with public unions is that they are not negotiating with an entity that has the motivation to save every penny, which does in fact remove one of the major needs to unionize. Governments care less about giving away money, especially if they're building a voter base in the process. And history rather strongly suggests that governments downright love promising the world tomorrow if you'll just smile for the cameras today. It ends up being both the unions and the government against the tax payer too easily.

monknomo 11y ago
Governments enjoy giving money away to donors, other smaller governments and large private employers, not government employees. Ask any government employee how easy it is to get cash or a raise
- jerf 11y ago
  There seems to me to be a lot of equivocation in all these replies between "unions" and "employees", substituting whichever one makes the best argument at the time. That's not valid. When discussing "governments negotiating with unions", you can't just suddenly substitute "government negotiating with employees individually"; the incentives are not the same. The governments have little incentive to pay a given individual; they have a lot of incentive to pay blocks of voters, and the especially have a lot of incentive to do so with money from the future, a point I note none of the replies cared to engage with, which I find is a big tell. Since a huge element of the problem with public unions was the enormous pension giveaways, which are now coming due and crushing the ability of the "blue model" to keep the rest of its promises. While everyone here is fiddling, the cities are burning. You can't write about these issues as if we're debating creating public unions for the first time and seeing what happened. We created them. They are, present tense, in the process of crushing city finances, in the most concretely real, dollar-based, actually happening way possible. This is a present fact that must be accounted for, not a hypothetical bad thing that may happen in the future. Unfortunately, yelling "Oh, those wacky libertarians! Well, that concludes that debate." doesn't add a single dollar to the tax base.
  - spopejoy 11y ago
    "pension giveaways" "crushing city finances" Oh my goodness, look up from your Economist occasionally and read some history. New York didn't go broke in the 70s because of lazy union members, but because Wall Street hung it out to dry. California didn't bankrupt it's schools and parks in the 70s because of unions but because of prop 13. Unions didn't kill Detroit. In general, cities bend over to grant ludicrous tax breaks to corporations that then soak up city services and resources, and then bitch and moan when teachers or MTA workers want more than a 3% raise. Union-hostile city managers are everywhere, bringing Flint Michigan-water scandals your way. By your line of argument, having public transportation, or a decent homeless shelter system, or funding public schools "crushes finances" "in a concretely real, dollar-based" way -- i.e. the same zero-sum, deficit-baiting neoliberalist ideology.
Symbiote 11y ago
> an entity that has the motivation to save every penny That sounds like what's happened/happening in many European governments with austerity policies.
TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
> The problem with public unions is that they are not negotiating with an entity that has the motivation to save every penny The current UK Government is trying to "save every penny". This isn't unique to the UK. Surely some US states face financial hardship or have ideological motivations to cut spending.
redthrowaway 11y ago
Your caricature of government may be pleasing, but it bears very little resemblance to reality. Government is inefficient, and often wasteful, but not because they don't care about wasting taxpayers' money. They're just (often) bad at spending it responsibly. And public sector employees are often the first target of any politician elected on a promise of "getting rid of waste".
- crdoconnor 11y ago
  >Government is inefficient So are Fortune 500s. It's in the nature of large bureaucracies, not governments specifically.
  - redthrowaway 11y ago
    Exactly, and government is the largest bureaucracy out there. My point is that people, particularly libertarians, like to ascribe to malfeasance government behaviours that are better explained by poorly designed systems and misaligned incentives. There are very few government employees and elected officials actively looking to screw over taxpayers. Almost every single public employee I've spoken to has expressed how much they care about the job they do and how constrained they are by bureaucracy and lack of resources. And elected officials are overwhelmingly concerned citizens who want to do everything they can to help their constituents. The fact that they often fail to do so has much more to do with maladaptive systems and perverse incentives than it does with the motivations of the people involved. It's tragically comic that the people on this site, who should be hyper aware of the effects of bad architecture on an system's output, are so quick to write it off as a cause and instead resort to facile ad hominems about the people in question. You don't blame the silicon when your app becomes unresponsive. It's weird that we do so for countries.
    - jerf 11y ago
      No, I'm an equal opportunity "big system" hater. Hating Wal-Mart but thinking the US Government is the bee's knees makes no sense to me.
crdoconnor 11y ago
>The problem with public unions is that they are not negotiating with an entity that has the motivation to save every penny, which does in fact remove one of the major needs to unionize That explains why the public sector pays better than the private sector. Oh wait...