How did it come to pass that public employee unions, which scarcely existed 60 years ago, have come to run public schools and myriad state and local government agencies?
Answers to this question, which few people think about these days, come from Philip K. Howard’s latest book, “Not Accountable,” accompanied as in his earlier books (“The Rule of Nobody,” “Try Common Sense”) by outspoken outrage and generous dollops of common sense.
The rise of public employee unions in the 1960s was not inevitable. President Franklin Roosevelt, who wanted his New Deal programs to deliver results, explained that “the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.” That was in 1937, when New Deal legislation sparked the drives that vastly increased private-sector unionization. In 1955, when private-sector unionization percentages peaked, AFL-CIO President George Meany opined confidently that it was “impossible to bargain collectively with the government.”
That didn’t stop New York City Mayor Robert Wagner, eager to develop a political base independent of patronage-hungry Democratic machines, from authorizing the unionization of city employees in 1958. Nor did it prevent Wisconsin Gov. Gaylord Nelson from doing so for a state government known for pioneering nonpartisan civil service, nor President John F. Kennedy from doing so in 1962 for federal employees.
What were they thinking? Evidently, they saw unionization as the default system for employee relations. They thought public employees should be treated the same as auto workers or carpenters.
But as Roosevelt and Meany saw, the two situations were not the same. Private-sector unionism is adversarial but with both sides understanding the need for profitability. Public-sector unionism, in contrast, is collusive. As longtime New York public union head Victor Gotbaum explained, “We have the ability, in a sense, to elect our own boss.”
As long as the employees that are members of these unions continue to ignore the current facts that the unions no longer represent them and spend their union monies to further union causes instead of employees causes, we will continue to have them.
Unions from a big-picture perspective were initially good in the private sector as they caused the rules that we now have for all employees. They have only benefitted the unions and protected the lower-performing members in the public sector!