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Comment by unethical_ban | Hacker News Reader

>“the vast majority of our employees are hardworking, ethical, diligent corrections professionals, who act with integrity daily and want those engaging in misconduct to be held accountable.”

In the career of prison guard, the ideal would be 100% integrity.

I believe unions have their issues, but that in a "market" career, such as the trades or retail or service workers, the good outweighs the bad.

Unions for police and prison guards are 100% a mafia and they should not be tolerated. It needs to be much easier to fire cops.

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How about banning unions for any government employees? These employees should be held accountable only to the public and its elected representatives.

While other public sectors can definitely have an impact on public safety, I don't believe there is the threat of violence or endangerment to the public that is so prevalent in policing.

Therefore I'm /less/ concerned about teachers, fire, post office, air traffic, etc. even though they have their issues.

There are many aspects of a union. Employees deserve a unified voice. What they don't deserve is to hold the system hostage with threats after they agree to work.

That's literally the only leverage a union has. If a union can't strike, then it means nothing for them to have a voice.

I dislike unions in general. I think they're a terrible compromise in response to a monopolized labor market. You should deal with the monopoly, not create your own monopoly of labor.

Anyways, in cases where the employer has an unnatural monopoly and you can't otherwise address it, unions make perfect sense. The employees otherwise have no secure mechanism to legitimately and successfully negotiate their contracts.

Your only other way out is to privatize the police force to a large extent and allow competition between different agencies for different city contracts. Then you would have true market forces benefiting the city and the labor.

Unions are a right, not a privilege, and if the police and prison guards are racist, a good union representing them would also be racist.

We need to stop catering to them, however, and we need to make it those jobs fit for someone other than racists of fascists to do. But you can't create and uphold a racist system, and put all the responsibility on the hands needed to carry out the goals of that system. These horrible police abuses and prison abuses are usually being carried out under the oversight of hundreds of Democratic (often black) mayors and governors who love a docile and quiet minority population, but not the blame for the violent pacification that it takes to create and preserve one.

> It needs to be much easier to fire cops.

Unions don't make the rules, politicians doing what their donors say do. Giving the police unions what they want is a choice. Other unions don't get what they want.

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