It's confusing for me that so many people will complain about how the police unions prevent reform and allow for bad behavior -- but then support unions for all other public sector workers.
Policing is a unique role with incredibly perverse incentives, and it has special powers and protections granted to officers by the state that no other workers are granted. When an officer abuses their power, not only do their coworkers protect them, but the system that is supposed to provide checks and balances turns a blind eye to the abuse, and fights against justice every step of the way.
It is clear that this role, and the special status it incurs, is vastly different than other roles for government workers.
I'm not sure what is confusing about having a slightly nuanced view on unionization, especially when I gave my reasoning in both the post you're replying to and this post itself.
Wouldn't that be great if violent cops were assigned to create Public Safety materials all day that went straight into the bin? They can't be fired so their job is to do something completely worthless until they quit.
Do you have to leave them in front of kids teaching students until they're convicted?
What if that takes months? Or never actually happens? But the teacher has crossed the line inappropriately enough times that no parent wants their kid in the same room with him?
In the most positive light, a union might protect a genuinely good teacher being unfairly accused or targeted for political reasons from being put out of work. But sometimes following the processes for ensuring that can be so unreasonable to work through on a practical level that it's easier to just keep them employed but away from students until it gets resolved or they quit.
There's a famous PDF that gets shared when this comes up (although it's geared toward an incompetent teacher):
https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/assets/db/126393089187...
It’s also entirely possible that even without the unions, the school boards don’t want to get rid of bad teachers simply because they’re already, and chronically, understaffed.
Yes, it's not tech-level pay. But it's not exactly "abysmal" either.
Given the amount of education, time and their own resources they're expected to put in to do their jobs, I wouldn't categorize them as "good", and would say generalizing their compensation as poor would be accurate given those points.
I'm not saying having, say, a teachers' union is a bad thing. I just feel like it should be redundant.
Of course, the police are a special case even within the realm of public sector unions, because they're the ones enforcing the law anyway. It's one step removed from having a union of congresspeople, which really WOULD be completely redundant. What are they going to do? Petition themselves?
This is a joke statement right? There is no state in the history of the world that attempts to do this.
The thing is, the courts often grant Due Process protections to government employees on the theory that a government employer taking actions against an employee isn't too far removed from the government taking actions against any random citizen. At a minimum, the government almost always must follow some sort of reviewable investigatory procedure. Compared to at-will employment, the burden (however de minimis in an absolute sense) is much greater. The need for checks against malicious government managers is significantly reduced.
The upshot is that unions aren't as necessary in the case of government employees. The downshot is that even if you prevented unionization, the government would still have problems firing problematic employees. The issue is never that they can't be fired (union or not), but whether it's worth the hassle, which has a cost in terms of time & money.
Unionized workers make more than their non-union peers, and have significantly better benefits.
You can see a huge difference in pay and benefits with union and non-union construction workers and welders. One group is paid a living wage with benefits, and has options for retirement, and the other group makes barely more than minimum wage, has poor benefits if they're even classified as employees and not contractors, and they're on their own when it comes to retirement.
Similarly, white collar unionized workers make more than their non-union counterparts, too. They have higher pay, better benefits, and more paid time off.
There are other ways to handle public sector unions. For example, in Canada the military is not part of a union but their pay is tied to other public sector employees who are unionized. This makes sense since you don't want the military going on strike. When the union employees go on strike to get better pay and benefits the military also gets the same increases. You could do something similar in the US by tying police salaries and benefits to another public sector group like teachers or nurses. I have the feeling that this would be extremely unpopular with the police.
The reason it's strange is because if the government is a democracy (representative or direct), there should already be a mechanism for collective bargaining.
The fact that this is often insufficient strikes me as a pretty strong indictment of our systems of government.
Let's consider teachers as an example. The top search result in Google tells me that 2% of the population of the US are teachers. With collective bargaining they can do work to rule, go on strike, and other job actions to pressure the government to improve working conditions. With voting they don't have a large enough voting block to push through candidates that will improve their working conditions. They would somehow need to convince over 48% of the population, assuming no gerrymandering, to also vote for the candidate that they want. That seems like a big thing to ask just to ensure an annual cost of living increase.
And given the limited number of candidates and the frequency with which our elections come down to a few percent, they certainly wouldn't have to sway 48% of the population to influence how elected representatives treat them.
You're not considering wedge issues? What if the candidate that would improve your working conditions also has a stance on an issue that you are strongly opposed to? For example, do you vote for the candidate who will give you a small raise but also disagrees with you on abortion? What if all of the candidates feel like siding with you would alienate more people than your voting bloc would bring?
> You're not considering wedge issues?
Maybe our systems of government shouldn't have this weakness. This is what I was talking about when I mentioned the "strong indictment".
Examples of things other than direct voting include campaign contributions, talking to the media, going door to door. In the case of teachers, you could talk directly to parents during meetings.
There are all kinds of ways to influence elections that go well beyond simply casting your vote.
Based on your last comment I think our disagreement is less about what makes a democracy and more about what constitutes collective bargaining. I don't see a difference between the examples you cited and a worker at a private company telling their neighbours to boycott the company until working conditions improve. Both of these are individual actions and unless they're organized at a larger scale the word "collective" doesn't really apply to either of them.
And yet, nobody considers that to be sufficient to deny workers their right to organize.
Board positions can be lifetime appointments.
With a corporation, you need to buy a controlling interest of shares. With the "voting as collective bargaining" approach for public sector employees, you have a chance once in a while (depends where you live, but 4-5 years in most places) to try and convince a plurality of the overall population that the concerns of your profession outweigh the many, many other considerations people have in choosing who they vote for.
Either way, both options are not realistically achievable by nearly any union (ironically, I could see police as one exception - "tough on crime" policies, which are usually favourable to police unions, tend to be popular among voters, at least up until June 2020).
What’s unique here? Isn’t the whole point of all strikes that the employer doesn’t want the employees to go on strike?
Edit: just to be clear, I don't mean to imply that teachers aren't important, just that the immediate consequences of them all missing work is less severe than some other occupations.
It's also important to consider that when you're talking about the military who dies matters more than how many people die. How many civilian drone strike casualties would it take to get the same attention that Benghazi got?
What mechanism does the US military have to force people to work in the event that the whole military is on strike? Are they going to charge the entire military if they go on strike? Everybody walks down into the brig and the last man in locks the door behind them?
A group of young adults gets drafted into the Army. They're told to show up at base Foo on some date for boot camp. They go to base Foo and cross the picket line to enter the base. All of the instructors are on strike so there is no one to teach them. They can't get uniforms and equipment because the quartermaster is also on strike. They head to the mess hall to get some food but the cooks are on strike. It's getting late and they want to sleep. The barracks for trainees is locked up and no one is around with the key because they're on strike.
Now you've got a group of tired, hungry people, who didn't want to be there in the first place, who have no training or equipment. How does this help?
National Guard are mobilized all the time during crisis such as Katrina or the ongoing covinavirus pandemic.
US military was the single largest contributor to the response effort to the 2010 Haiti earthquake [0]
They were also heavily involved in the relief operation in response to the 2015 Nepal earthquake [1]
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unified_Response [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sahayogi_Haat
You're not alone. George Meany, the first president of the AFL-CIO was opposed to the very idea of public sector unions. As was FDR. And virtually all union leaders through the mid-1950s.
I don't understand why anyone would think that the rank and file public employees are the same entity/interests as the elected officials or upper level management. You might as well say the employees who own a little company stock or get options at any random company don't need a union because they can vote their shares. Working conditions, due process, etc. always matter, in the face of management having an incentive to find shortcuts and such.
Public sector unions are really not the government negotiating with itself any more than a private company. Any time you have management answering to different interests than the workers, a conflict of interest exists so a union has an obvious purpose. If actual unions are bad or corrupt, that's not the same as an issue in the abstract.
Like all things in life, nothing is cut and dry. It's not wrong to both support unions, and call for the reduction in power of police unions.
Public sector unions "bosses" are the people and politicians, so even though these are "private" unions, their alignment is to protect the political class first, cops (members) second, people third. By focusing on politic over people (bad looking cops = lost mayor, DA political race) their primary interested is not public transparency (where the money comes from, leading to lack of consumer alignment on service rendered b/c cops are serving political interests more than they should).
In a private union, the first people they are protecting are their membership (lot could be said here about how that works in practice), but their transparency problem isn't regarding factory deaths or issues at the work place because that is precisely what they are created to bring awareness to. If Ford's cars are killing people, the union actually wants to bring that up since it can hurt employment opportunities for future members.
> Collective bargaining evens out the power imbalances between workers and their employers. It doesn't really matter if the employer is the government or a private company. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make about collective bargaining and democracy since the two are unrelated. There are other ways to handle public sector unions. For example, in Canada the military is not part of a union but their pay is tied to other public sector employees who are unionized. This makes sense since you don't want the military going on strike. When the union employees go on strike to get better pay and benefits the military also gets the same increases. You could do something similar in the US by tying police salaries and benefits to another public sector group like teachers or nurses. I have the feeling that this would be extremely unpopular with the police
The two are kind of distinct.
https://credo.stanford.edu/studies/charter-school-studies
Be sure to read it carefully, and disaggregate the online charter schools from the brick and mortar.
I also took a look at the 2019 Washington (my state) press release with the following bullet point:
o School level findings identified several charter schools with significantly positive impacts, as much as 165 and 189 more days of learning in reading and math, respectively, compared to the learning they would have realized in traditional public schools. Conversely, some charters significantly underperformed their local school options by as much as 106 and 83 fewer days of learning in reading and math, respectively
I'm not saying that charter schools aren't useful, what I am willing to say is that charter schools provide a good solution to a particular problem that has more to do school quality being tied to local tax revenue than unions.
https://credo.stanford.edu/studies/charter-school-studies
You do want to read carefully, because Charter schools are often mixed by 'online' and 'brick and mortar'. When you aggregate these two, Charter schools as a group tend to match or underperform traditional public schools. But this is primarily because online charter schools do substantially worse. When you disaggregate the brick-and-mortar charters, they usually overperform traditional public schools, though not totally uniformly. And these studies do try to do matched control of students, to account for that selection effect.
I checked out the first case study and it looks like you are correct that the brick and mortar charter schools significantly outperform the online ones. However, at least in that study, the brick and mortar charters slightly outperformed public schools in reading but underperformed in math. However, I don't believe these differences were statistically significant. While there probably are some states where charter schools outperform they seem to only perform the same as public schools in South Carolina. To me this doesn't add much weight to the argument that unions lead to worse teaching outcomes. I will also say that I'm not an expert, my cursory reading of one report doesn't change that fact, and I'm definitely open to changing my opinion on this in the future but I don't have the time or interest to read all of the reports in the link.
On the surface it's not obvious that this is attributable to the union. But if you dig in a little bit to what actually differentiates charter schools, the main thing is the absence of the teacher's union. At least, to my understanding, from operating in the space a little bit, and from people I know that operate more deeply in it than I did.
That's not the public position of charter schools. Charter schools are based on the idea that more flexibility will give better results, that has nothing to do with unions. The flexibility comes largely from not being pushed around by the school board and subject to testing and limits. Unions are willing to be flexible with education structure
The fact that most charter schools insist on no unions is what drives much of the opposition which sees them as a bad faith stalking horses for people who want to destroy union power. If charter schools were universally unionized there would be much less opposition!
Compare with magnet schools which are unionized. (But still have to deal with school board oversight)
> Over time, as people figure out what works and what doesn't, I would expect to see them continue to widen the gap between themselves and traditional public schools.
I don't see the evidence for this. Studies show Charter schools perform no better then regular public schools. Some places that have really crappy public schools may try to turn to more charter schools on the chance that on average they might be better but I'd say reforming the regular school system would work better (even though it might be harder)
I agree that it's not the message they transmit. And i'm basically relying on my own personal experience and relationships for guidance here, so I don't necessarily expect you to be convinced. I'm just telling you what i've heard, and what my understanding is.
> I don't see the evidence for this. Studies show Charter schools perform no better then regular public schools. Some places that have really crappy public schools may try to turn to more charter schools on the chance that on average they might be better but I'd say reforming the regular school system would work better (even though it might be harder)
Read the studies I linked earlier in the thread. They do not perform the same.
People very much care about accountability when it comes to law enforcement, because compared to regular employees in most fields they have very direct and outsized power over society. And police aren't exactly underpaid either.
To drive this point home, the median salary before overtime and bonuses is $105,106/year for cops[1], and with overtime, cops can earn over $250,000/year[2].
The median salary for software engineers in the same state is 10% lower than the $105k police salary before overtime and bonuses.
[1] https://www.nj.com/news/2017/05/how_much_is_the_median_cop_s...
[2] https://www.nj.com/somerset/2019/11/4-cops-in-this-nj-town-e...
The entire point of unions is to empower the oppressed. But the police have over and over demonstrated that they are not the oppressed, they are the oppressors.
Both would fall under the aegis of "collective bargaining", but the social aims of the two couldn't be more different: the maintenance of a stratified class system vs the dismantling of same.