Why Public Sector Employee Unions Should Not be Allowed

Unions once had their place in protecting workers but in the modern age workers have access to information in the form of what other employers than their own are paying in wages and benefits and are free to take a better offer. Employers know they have to compete with each other for the best employees. Unions have become largely irrelevant. In the public sector, unions are actually destructive because they can influence elections and support candidates who, though elected to represent the interests of voters, are actually then beholden to the public sector unions and will act to increase government employee wages and benefits to the detriment of the voter/taxpayer. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Public sector employees now make more on average than their private sector counterparts, who must pay taxes to support them and they have the protection of civil service laws to boot. In other words, the employees get to elct their own bosses, who must then keep the employees happy.

Over the last few days, teachers in Wisconsin have been staging a sickout in protest of Governor Scott Walker's plan to rein in the power of the unions by removing their collective bargaining rights with respect to benefits, not wages, just benefits. Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel columnist Patirck McIlhern sums it all up here but I thought this part of his column on the issue best sums up the difference between private and public sector unions:

"Unions in the private sector are a way of organizing private interests, those of employees, against other private interests, those of a company's owners, for economic gain and for protection against unfairness. In government, workers are already protected against unfairness by civil service laws, and Walker has supported expanding those. Economically, government unions pit a private interest, that of employees, against the public's interest, that of taxpayers and voters."

Read the whole thing.