Why America’s unions are not working any more
By Christopher Caldwell
Published: February 25 2011 22:34 | Last updated: February 25 2011 22:34
During the holiday break this winter, a woman in my neighbourhood was at the supermarket with her son when they ran into the son’s teacher. “See you Monday,” the mother said. The teacher gaily informed her she would not be back until mid-month, as she had planned a vacation in Central America. Teachers used to content themselves with the months off they enjoy in summers and at holidays, but they have got used to more. One can understand why American public employees ardently defend their unions, and the benefits they win. But one can also understand why, in a time of straitened budgets, union-negotiated contracts might be among the first places to make savings.
A fierce budget battle has been running for more than a week in Madison, Wisconsin. It goes far beyond salaries and benefits, to touch on the deeper question of whether collective bargaining has any place in government employment. Governor Scott Walker, a Republican elected last autumn with support from the Tea Party movement, believes it does not. His “budget repair” bill not only requires state employees to contribute to their pension and health plans. It would also end collective bargaining for benefits. Democratic senators, lacking the votes to defeat the bill, fled the state, denying the quorum necessary to bring it to a vote.
EDITOR’S CHOICE
Mr Walker is not making a mountain out of a molehill. Wisconsin has a $137m budget gap to fill this year and a $3.6bn deficit over the next two. The big year-on-year leap reflects, in part, the expiration of federal stimulus spending, much of which was used to avoid laying off government workers. Citizens of other advanced countries sometimes make the mistake of assuming that the US has a skeletal bureaucracy. That is wrong. Once you include state, county and city employees, it is a formidable workforce and an expensive one. State employees account for up to $6,000bn in coming pension costs. Wisconsin’s difficulties are milder than those elsewhere, which means that similar clashes are arising in other states, especially where Republicans rule.
Critics claim Republicans are using the excuse of deficits to advance a programme that has more to do with power politics than with economics. The critics are right, in a sense. But the existing system is as much a construction of power as the one Republicans want to replace it with. Public sector unions are either the “backbone” (as the historian Nelson Lichtenstein puts it) or the “taxpayer-subsidised armies” (as the columnist Patrick Buchanan puts it) of the Democratic party. Every election cycle, their leadership contributes hundreds of millions of dollars to (almost exclusively Democratic) candidates. As the author William Voegeli has shown, this activism often takes the form of pouring vast sums into low-turnout elections – $287,000 to one candidate for the Los Angeles school board, for example – where the victor helps to set public salaries and benefits. Union favourites then wind up judging the merits of union demands.
The arrangement is tawdry. It resembles a fee-for-service contract between government and a political party. Public-sector unions have long posed a problem of what the economist Mancur Olson called the “logic of collective action”. Democracy tends to offer benefits to small, well-organised groups (who defend them vigilantly) while spreading the costs among the broader public (in doses that are too small to rally resistance around). The result is a hardening of privilege. What is new in Wisconsin is that those who do not belong to public-employee unions see this logic as clearly as those who do.
In Wisconsin, unions have agreed to many of Mr Walker’s suggested wage and benefit cuts, but have drawn the line at reforms in collective bargaining rules. Noting that presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan both supported collective bargaining, Mr Walker’s critics accuse him of union-busting. Whatever Mr Walker is doing (and “union-busting” is a fair description), he cannot do it without voter assent. There has been a hardening of Republican views about organised labour, but there has also been a drop in union prestige. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center showed that Americans have a slightly less favourable attitude towards unions than they do towards business. While the Democratic National Committee has fanned the demonstrations, the White House has minimised its own involvement – a sign that it fears opinion is running against it.
The mobilisation of tens of thousands of union members in Wisconsin is impressive, but it has drawn more solidarity from media pundits than from the working class. Perhaps private-sector workers have been goaded into turning against the public sector, out of resentment at their benefits. More likely they resent paying for others’ pre-recession-level benefits with their own post-recession incomes.
If trade unions did not exist now, would we feel a need to invent them? Styles of labour organisation change and end. Guilds, indenture, phalansteries, kibbutzes, apprenticeships – all of them, in their day, had success in either enriching proprietors or ennobling workers. None is particularly fit for contemporary purpose, even if they survive here and there. Since governments do not go broke the way businesses do, public-sector collective bargaining does not produce equilibrium the way private-sector negotiations do. The only equilibrium is a political equilibrium. The only brake on escalating demands is an emergency brake. It appears Americans are about to pull it.
The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard
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