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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

How about any public sector union? They do services that have no competition, allowing them to extract taxpayer money with no substitute providers.

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I agree. I cannot think of a justification for public sector unions.

The typical pro-union argument for companies is that they protect workers against abuses by the company.

In the public sector, the union is supposed to protect workers from the citizens? I haven't ever heard of a good theoretical argument for them. Would be interested if someone knew of one.

I guess (?) that they protect low level civil servants from the whims of politicians and political administrative changes.

Perhaps public entities should not enter into collective bargaining agreements with public sector unions, but freedom of association is guaranteed in the constitution, it's not going to be possible to ban unions in the US.

There is no bigger abuser of workers than we the citizens. We don't intend to, but we do generally expect extraordinary results for a pittance investment of resources with all sorts of strings attached.

Public sector unions are fine.

US government spending was $6.5 Trillion last year. I think it's OK to expect extraordinary results for that amount of money.

Sure. Let's start with the police, and then we'll go after whichever next union is killing people across the country.

Edit: Your downvotes only make it more obvious that you don't really have a counterpoint to the police's homicidal tendencies nor their unions' participation in crafting legal protections for their actions.

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