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Comment by falcrist | Hacker News Reader

Public sector unions seem a little odd to me. The whole point of unions is to have collective bargaining power to deal with the bargaining power of corporations. That makes perfect sense... but isn't collective bargaining the point of having a democratic government?

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?

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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.

> Collective bargaining evens out the power imbalances between workers and their employers.

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.

I believe your argument is that in a democracy, public sector employees can vote for politicians who will represent their interests and this is equivalent to collective bargaining. Please let me know if I've misunderstood you because I don't want to argue against a straw man.

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.

It's not just direct voting. There are plenty of other ways to influence culture to sway other voters.

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.

Can you give me an example, other than voting, of how democracy is collective bargaining?

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?

Can you give me some examples, other than voting, of what constitutes democracy?

> 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".

You're the one that wrote, "It's not just direct voting." I'm just asking for an example other than direct voting. I'm legitimately trying to understand your point but so far I still don't see the link between democracy and collective bargaining.

Well I need to know what your definition of "democracy" encompasses.

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.

It appears like we've hit the max comment depth. This is really meant as a reply to your last comment in this thread.

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.

In a private company, there is also a mechanism for collective bargaining, without a union. The workers could just buy up all the outstanding stock, and replace the board.

And yet, nobody considers that to be sufficient to deny workers their right to organize.

That's generally only possible in a public company ("public" meaning "publicly traded"). Even then, I don't think the stockholders are under any obligation to sell to you, so you still may not be able to purchase a controlling interest in the company. So if the board holds a controlling interest, you're out of luck.

The politicians you elect, likewise, have no obligation to actually follow through on their campaign promises.

In the case of politicians, you can simply vote them out next election.

Board positions can be lifetime appointments.

This feels like quibbling. In both cases, the mechanism proposed as an alternative to collective bargaining is wildly unrealistic.

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).

With voting, you don't actually have to convince a plurality. You only have to convince a small percentage of the population (often <5%) to sway an election.

> This makes sense since you don't want the military going on strike.

What’s unique here? Isn’t the whole point of all strikes that the employer doesn’t want the employees to go on strike?

Some services are more important than others. If teachers go on strike kids miss some school; if nurses go on strike people die. The military fits into the "people die" category in terms of likely consequences from a 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.

Do you really think that more people would die if the US military went on strike? Besides, the US military already has a mechanism to force people to work for the military.

My original comment was about the Canadian military and was an example of how groups like the police don't necessarily need unions so you're the one bringing the US military into this. I can't speak for the US military but the Canadian military is active domestically doing search and rescue, responding to natural disasters, counter terrorism, etc. People will die if those activities need to take place and the military is on strike. They doesn't account for other important work like embassy staff. I know the US military provides embassy security. How many people would die if no US embassies had armed people with guns protecting them?

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?

The US military has an active conscription program at their disposal.

Draftees won't be much help if the military is on strike. Let's take a quick look at how that would go.

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?

Not really hard to find examples of this, isn't it?

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

Public sector unions exist because you have two groups of people with opposing needs/desires. The state wants to minimize budget while still providing services, and public workers want to make an appropriate wage for the work they do. The government is organized, so (IMO) there should be an organization on the other side of the table bargaining for the workers.

"The state wants to minimize budget"

This is a joke statement right? There is no state in the history of the world that attempts to do this.

Maybe not in the states you’ve lived in, but this was very much the hypothesis behind Sam Brownback’s experiment in Kansas. Beliefs in a strong version of the crowding out effect result in states trying to cut their budgets.

What nonsense, firstly OP clearly is specifically referring to the budget outlay for education, and even if taken more broadly I can assure you throughout the world there are plenty of governments whose spending is constrained by current income and who very much do aim to minimise expenditure for a given outcome (predictably often with the effect of greatly worsening outcomes).

Maybe you'd prefer it reframed as: elected officials want to minimize spending on line-items they don't care about in order to spend on things they do care about.

What are you talking about? Education budgets are almost comically prone to budget cuts, it's one of the most contentious facets of government spending (at least in the U.S.)

Wages are only part of the function of a union. An arguably more important part is preventing arbitrary and capricious management decisions, including retribution against employees for expressing grievances. A big part of what unions do day-in, day-out, is dispute resolution. A unionized meat factory isn't going to pay much better wages, if at all, than a non-unionized factory; but it would be significantly safer.

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.

> A unionized meat factory isn't going to pay much better wages, if at all, than a non-unionized factory; but it would be significantly safer.

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.

>Public sector unions seem a little odd to me

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.

The elected leaders represent distinctly different interests than public employees. For instance, in March, in NY state government, public employee union contracts didn't permit working from home in general. That was tightly restricted based on past negotiation. In order to respond to the pandemic crisis, they really dragged out giving permission to work remotely where possible.

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.

The point of unions is to attempt to counter the immense imbalance of power between employers and employees that often exists. That can certainly exist with public jobs just like it can with private jobs.

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