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Comment by WalterSear | Hacker News Reader

Here's why:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odious_debt

Private sector unions are essential and should get more protection from the government, but public sector unions don't make any sense to me.

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Why is there any category of worker that you feel doesn't deserve the right to collective bargaining? Why should any group of workers be prevented from organizing for rights and benefits as a group?

These workers are not required to work for the public. But public workers do have a duty to work in the most efficient method possible for the public. If that means no pension or less pension, that is the deal. I don't support pulling pensions that have already been promised, though. That's nothing but breaking a contract.

Edit: To clarify first sentence, I mean that they do not have to take or hold these jobs.

This is a really tough question. And I don't think people really want to argue that workers shouldn't have the ability to form groups and collectively bargain.

To me, the current status isn't as simple as that. The current status that I see is that public pensions have outsized control over government spending, which means you can't just think of these unions in these simple happy terms.

It also seems perverse to many private sector workers that public workers, who are unionized, pay dues to the unions, which lobby the government for more benefits. Essentially the government is paying people to lobby against itself. Private unions don't have this conflict of interest, their funding is based entirely on profits based on the market.

The suggestion is not that workers don't deserve the right to collective bargaining. The suggestion is that management typically has insufficient incentive to negotiate aggressively for efficient, sustainable labor contracts. It can yield results such as BART's overtime rules [1].

[1]:http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/11/02/bart-janitors-whopping...

Perhaps a solution to this is to allow public sector unions, but to require the general population ratify it.

I'm sympathetic to the parent comment. All workers should [be allowed to unionize]. But public sector unions are dramatically more effective. I don't know enough economics to convincingly argue it but this is what worries me:

1. Privatization has a terrible track record, but it gains steam when the government is hamstrung by the labor-cost differential.

2. Governments are paying social democrat labor costs, while taking in neoliberal revenues. This makes nice things look inordinately expensive.

3. Jealousy in the private sector fosters conservatism / lazy govt worker stereotypes.

...

Basically long term the private sector unions undermine their own cause.

Once again, if you have a bunch of short-sited actors (c.f. financialization of business) you better be damn well they reach some equilibrium.

I can tell you why I think so. When private sector unions negotiate an impossible deal with their employer, the employer goes bankrupt. When public sector unions negotiate an impossible deal, we all end up paying more taxes to make it possible.

In the US, the federal and state governments are functionally and legally unable to undergo bankruptcy. Although municipal governments can technically go bankrupt, only five cities have done it since the Great Recession, and none of those bankruptcies actually resulted in significant debt shedding. In that same timeframe, hundreds of thousands of businesses went through bankruptcy.

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