Public-Sector Unions Are Different

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
1

Unions give employees more power to negotiate the terms of their employment, and that’s true of public-sector unions as well. However, public-sector unions differ from private-sector unions in at least two ways that may support treating them differently e.g. exempting them from some or all protections we otherwise provide to unions.

First, in a democracy, public-sector employees already have some direct influence over their employers, in the form of the democratic process of influencing policy through voting etc. In that sense, they function like co-owners. Private-sector unions typically don’t have this influence without unions.

This can have the effect of giving public-sector union employees multiple opportunities to effect their preferred policy outcomes: they can lobby, run candidates, and vote to influence the policies that will affect their jobs; and if they don’t like the outcome, they can organize a strike or otherwise leverage their union power to force those policies into place.

Second, private-sector unions serve as a check on the power of private ownership of companies, and limit the share of company profits that owners can capture. They serve to redistribute earnings between two groups of private actors.

Public-sector unions, by contrast, serve as a check on the government-as-employer. In a democracy, where the government works on behalf of the public, Public-sector unions serve to redistribute from the public coffers to private employees. So where they succeed, they do not necessarily have the same pro-social effect that private-sector unions have.

These differences undercut much of the rationale for union support, but may not eliminate it completely. Unions also allow groups to act in a coordinated way, and that may lead to better policies. For example, unions may help with price discovery: negotiating for wages individually will tend to under-estimate the value of the labor by favoring the lowest-paid workers, where collective bargaining may better identify the average value of the labor. That effect would apply equally to public-sector and private-sector unions.

So it may be useful to partially limit public-sector union activity rather than to eliminate them completely. That could mean protecting e.g. collective bargaining and union lobbying, while limiting the right to strike. Or it could mean prohibiting requiring union membership as a condition of public-sector (but not private-sector) employment.

Public-sector unions are relevantly different from private-sector unions. We should think about them differently, and we should probably treat them differently under the law.

2

I don’t get this general subject but private sector unions make me think of mafia and bullying. If an employer is mean, then leave the company, am l missing something?

Public sector unions are a must. Private sector ones seem like a trojan horse.

3

I understand the sentiment, and I agree that many times the public-sector unions exaggerate with the strikes and the demands. However, I see also a slippery slope in such proposition.

I do not know what happens in your country, but I can give you some examples from mine, where public-sector employees need to have active unions:

  1. Doctors and nurses at public hospitals. Due to lack of sufficient funding, public hospitals are usually understaffed, however they have heavy load of patients, since everyone can visit them. As a consequence, the staff most of the times make extreme overtimes, to the point of physical exhaustion (we are talking about frequent 24 hours duties). The union in that case can push for hirings and better working conditions.
  2. Teachers at public schools. Usually underpaid, being in classes with too many students. The recent years there is an increase in pupils’ aggression, while simultaneously there is general guidance to avoid punishing them (not only due to government instructions, but to also avoid the complaints of angry parents). The teachers’ unions can push for better working conditions.
4

It’s true that each individual employee can leave, but employers can also choose not to hire anyone who want put up with bad working conditions. And employers are a smaller group than workers, and that makes it easier for them to coordinate (explicitly or implicitly) to advance their own interest. Moreover, there are often more people looking for employment in a given industry then there are positions to be filled. That dynamic leads to worse and worse conditions for workers, who are forced by desperation to accept any work they can get.

Unions allow workers to coordinate against employers. In terms of game theory, a worker who accepts worse conditions for employment is ‘defecting’, and it leads to a worse outcome for all workers. Unions make it easier for workers to ‘cooperate’.

What makes you say this?

This is a weird case because it seems likely that society is behaving irrationally. Better funding would likely improve things both for workers at the hospital and society as a whole (as treating illness efficiently often saves money on net).

Unions in this case may force the issue by preventing the hospitals from passing off irrational policy costs onto hospital workers, but it could also increase the expense of system dysfunction without actually solving the underlying problem.

If anyone should be unionized in this case, it seems like it should be the patients.

I’m not sure that teacher’s unions actually address these problems. The US has all the problems you describe and more, but teachers unions here are pretty strong, so these problems exist in a world with teachers unions. Maybe the problems would be worse in a world without unions, but that isn’t a given.

Like hospitals, schools seem irrationally underfunded, likely because many of the costs of failing schools are deferred for decades. Again it seems like its students who need better representation in the policy debates.

5

It’s amazing how for several decades public sector or government unions were elevated over private ones. Workers in the private work force have been suffering decades as a direct result.

Not that it really matters anymore because the United States federal government is currently trying to eliminate all unions everywhere.

There’s really not a lot of union jobs left inside of the United States beyond public sector and government unions.

It never has made sense to me why police officers or nurses should have an easier time unionizing at a federal level over warehouse workers yet that is exactly what has happened in this nation overtime.

:clown_face: