Excellent point, Dollared. And true. You hear countless stories from the 70s around here of selectmen receiving favorable treatment for their kids in school (or making hell for the teacher who dared give their daughter a C). Unions protect against corrupt politicians.

“Public sector employees generally do not need a lot of “protecting”, since their employers, i.e. the taxpayers, are not seeking to profit from their labor,”

@mfw, that is reversed. Most taxpayers don’t have a horse in the race at all. Their ONLY motivation is to get the job done cheaply. At least in the private sector, there is a profit motive. If you cut support and increase workload beyond what is manageable, then your better employees will leave and your business will fail. Because the taxpaying public has no interest in the quality of the product, there is nothing to halt the downward slide.

Unfortunately many public unions have focused more on compensation than on working conditions. They accept an impossible workload in impossible conditions, as long as they get paid well for it. This is again a place where the adversarial approach has broken down.

There are definitely differences between public-sector and private-sector unions, especially in the perception of such by the public. But it is hard to imagine a quality result in education when the ONLY organized group at the table is the board of selectmen.

“One of the biggest secular forces in the decline of labor has surely been the glut of skilled and unskilled workers coming onto the US labor market from abroad via immigration. As a result, I suspect that any truly important next-generation social movement will be profoundly national in nature, and will have to make big strides in reducing immigration before it has any real effect. Laborers in US factories aren’t just competing with US workers for jobs: they’re also competing with immigrants.”

FIFY

Salmon’s version is a) paradoxical and b) so roundabout as to invite the suspicion that he’s trying to avoid the simple truth.

Fact: 120,000 legal immigrants per month
69,000 jobs created last month

“The fact is that one of the biggest secular forces in the decline of labor has surely been the glut of skilled and unskilled workers coming onto the international labor force in recent decades, particularly in China. As a result, I suspect that any truly important next-generation social movement will be profoundly international in nature, and will have to make big strides in China before it has any real effect in the US. Laborers in Chinese factories aren’t just competing with US workers for jobs: they’re also, in a weird way, the best hope those US workers have for real improvements in how they’re treated and paid.

The original purpose of unions was to protect workers from rapacious capitalists, who imposed horrible and dangerous work conditions and kept wages to a minimum. And I think that most people would agree that private sector unions are still needed to protect workers from abuses, since there are few other checks and balances in the private sector.

However, public sector unions are quite a different story. Public sector employees generally do not need a lot of “protecting”, since their employers, i.e. the taxpayers, are not seeking to profit from their labor, and plenty of checks and balances already exist (i.e. elections) to protect them should politicians try to impose unfair working conditions. Pretty much the only thing that public sector employees need protecting from is political pressure, and that indeed was one of the reasons civil service laws were put in place.

However, nowadays, when the public hears about public sector unions, what they hear about is bloated pensions, hugely costly overtime rules, ridiculously early retirement ages, and work rules that make it impossible to discipline employees. All from workers who do not actually need much protecting. So is it any wonder that people are starting to question the need for public sector unions?

I grew up in San Francisco, probably one of the most liberal cities in America, and I can tell you that pretty much every public sector union in the city has a negative reputation. The police and firefighters are best known for their ridiculous overtime, and the bus drivers union has made MUNI probably the least popular public institution in the city due to work rules which make it impossible to discpline or fire poorly performing drivers. Only the teachers union has anything vaguely resembling even a neutral reputation.

It may be more accurate to say that the Wisconsin result illustrates the weakness of the public sector unions–which have barely lifted a finger over the past 25 years in solidarity with their drowning private sector union brothers–and of the Democratic Party, which is, to borrow a phrase, a confederacy of dunces.

In part because of a vicious propaganda campaign by the right, and in part because of bitter experience, Middle America sees a difference between public and (the late, lamented) private sector unions.

Second: Inequality is abstract? Only because people like you, Mr. Salmon, do not do enough to make it clear. Allow me (and Prof. Richard Freeman) to help: If we bring the top tenth of the top one percent of the wealthy down to the level they were in 1937, and you can give a 10 percent raise to everyone else. Everyone. Else.

http://www2.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/video AndAudio/channels/publicLecturesAndEvent s/player.aspx?id=1457

Or do this: Google + “The L Curve.”

Campaign for a maximum wage–defined as max annual income. Make it $6 or $8 million.

Unions can only be collaborative when the government laws give them the upper hand. When employees have their union rights protected, then they can sit down at the table.

Finally, the business about “public sector unions are different” is just ALEC/right wing talking points. Public sector unions are an incredibly valuable extension of the civil service ideal, where employees can enforce laws and regulations against powerful private interests without fear of being fired for doing their jobs. They are key to preventing corruption. They do not have to be wildly out of control – they can be subject to binding arbitration, for example. But pure at will employment in the public sector is exactly what produces corruption.

It’s been a neoliberal fantasy that unregulated markets could give us a shiny new kind of prosperity. Really we have unleashed a form of gangsterism and that monster will be extremely hard to cage. It is telling that drug gangs have erupted in Mexico in the same period that financial and corporate elites have undermined American democracy. It is the same impulse: grab what you can and the devil take the hindmost.

It is sad that the best and brightest of your generation are so alienated from the union cause. It began with the youth rebellions in the 60′s and 70′s, the rise of identity politics, and the like. The result has been successes for gay rights and feminism and AfAm professionals, but the impoverishment of a whole class of Americans, regardless of race. Civil rights won’t feed and house a family.

What your alienation from the union cause is symptomatic of, in the larger sense, is how far we will have to fall, before we rediscover the necessity of economic justice.

But even as a youth, I railed against the thought that I was the equal in skills and abilities to hundreds of thousands of others, and that my pay and opportunities should be the same. If I excelled, I should be recognized as an individual. If not, I shouldn’t be protected by the group. My power in the market was derived from my own abilities and motivations, from what I brought to the table of life, not from an artificial membership in a group in which I had little in common.

My experiences with union members is that this is a very foreign way of thinking. I appreciate the sacrifices by the early union organizers, and by the benefits that unions in the 1940s and 1950s brought to those that worked with their hands and their bodies. But I think unions lost their way when they thought that an adversarial relationship in the workplace was the natural way of things.

An article in Foreign Affairs on labor unions, and not once do the authors mention “illegal immigration”!

Oh, excuse me……”undocumented guest workers”!

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505123_162-4 8740199/the-uaw-and-the-foreign-auto-tra nsplants-its-do-or-die-time/?tag=bnetdom ain