Public Sector Unions

The whole point of a union is to benefit its members contra the interests of their employer. The problem with public sector unions is that they benefit government employees contra the interests of the public.

This is talking about the public sector. Public sector unions are a disaster, with the police unions being the the star example. Unlike the private sector, you can't capture profits from the owners because there is no profit to begin with. Instead, the money comes from the more junior employees and in the form of taxpayer debt. Thanks to unions, 40% of Chicago's education budget goes towards paying pensions. Meanwhile, younger teachers are stuck in dead-end part time roles because that

The problem with public unions is that they are not negotiating with an entity that has the motivation to save every penny, which does in fact remove one of the major needs to unionize. Governments care less about giving away money, especially if they're building a voter base in the process. And history rather strongly suggests that governments downright love promising the world tomorrow if you'll just smile for the cameras today. It ends up being both the unions and the governm

What don't you understand? The point of a union is to extract more money and reduce productivity (yes, it is). A company will resist this since it's the company's money that's getting extracted and their productivity that's getting hurt. Politicians will not resist it since it's public money and public services--not specifically their own.

does this argument not apply to all or most public sector employees? what if a teachers' union demanded high salaries and protection against being fired for poor performance (or worse)?

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 un

Yes because the vast majority of the public is not in a union. If they were then their union would be fighting for their interest and prevent the public sector unions capturing all the benefits at their expense.

Unions provide important balance to the relationship between labor and capital but public sector unions negotiate not against capital but against the public.Moreover, the balancing force to union demands is that too many demands will kill the company and thus the union, so the union ultimately has a shared interest in the health of the company. Public sector unions have no such incentive.Public sector unions benefit their members at the expense of everyone else, and should be considered a

For private sector unions this is true, because employers have a vested interest in the success (or at least survival) of their employer. In the public sector, prison guards don't have a vested interest in reducing the prison population (quite the opposite), police officers don't have a vested interest in keeping themselves accountable for use of force (quite the opposite), and so forth.

I think any discussion of the good and bad side of unions needs to distinguish between public and private sector ones.In the private sector, union negotiations are naturally constrained by the knowledge that if the company isn't profitable, everybody loses. I think there are cases in the private sector where unions make a lot of sense (e.g. mining towns where there's one dominant employer).In the public sector that doesn't apply. The union's incentive is to demand all