"THE FREE MARKET HAS FAILED"

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Prohibition made a formerly legal product (alcohol, in all its forms) illegal via the 18th Amendment in 1919. If anything, whatever taxes collected that were imposed upon alcohol ceased with its passing and didn't begin until the 18th Amendment was repealed. Anyone who manufactured, distributed or sold alcohol (but, curiously, not consumed it) inside the US was automatically a criminal, not a tax cheat.

I suppose such action by a government is a price control of a sort, but it is not one imposed via taxation, excessive or otherwise. I'm afraid you simply have your facts wrong.

Well, first, how much of a "right" is this? If the state tried to abolish unions for public sector workers, you'd have an easy position to take because they are guaranteed the right of free assembly.

However, there is no "right" to "collective bargaining." If you are a public sector worker, your pay, benefits, rules and regulations of your job, etc. are all spelled out in policy and procedure. In general, it is not individually negotiable unless you can make a case that you qualify for a higher pay grade than you are currently assigned. It is up to the legislature to decide what your pay and benefits will be. By and large, the head of your organization/department will decide job-specific rules and regulations and the state's personnel division decides what the overall personnel policies will be.

If you and your fellow workers form a union, that union would be able to present issues, concerns, complaints, etc. to the proper people on behalf of the union membership. That they would be representing several people ensures it will be taken more seriously than if one or two workers had a grievance and wanted something done about it. HOWEVER, as the politicos and the bureaucrats who are your "bosses" serve at the pleasure of the electorate and must act in the best interest of the electorate, to negotiate a labor contract with them is problematic because they might think there is no issue in giving you what you demand, but the taxpaying public might be up in arms. I've heard police officers complain about their "low pay" as compared to a national average...or what other cops make in another city (which is much larger than where they serve). No sympathy. The complaining cops are paid much better than I am and get better benefits than I get, and my taxes are high enough as it is. The area is economically repressed and we are wondering how to increase the number of officers on the force with limited resources.

In a private sector job, the management agreeing to a labor contract knows how much money is in the purse and what can be afforded. In a public sector job, the management might agree to a labor contract and if they can't afford it, go to the real "boss" and demand more in taxes to cover the difference. The real "boss" (the taxpayers), get no space at the table when the bargaining is done.

I hope that helps paint the duality of the situation. Private sector = true owner at the table in person or via proxy. Money comes from HIS pocket and HIS pocket only. Public sector = true owner gets no effective representation and if more money is needed, it is taken by force under color of law by non-negotiable new or higher taxes.

Simply put, public sector jobs and private sector jobs are sufficiently different that they should not be entitled to identical rights. What works well for one may not (and often does not) work well for the other.

Well, I can't speak to American law, but in Canada, collective bargaining is recognized as falling within the right of freedom of association, so from my perspective, it's a real right. The United States has historically been a laggard on workers' rights, so it's not really a surprise that our legal circumstances are different.

You need to distinguish between the legislature and Ministers. While Ministers are Members of Parliament, in carrying out their minsiterial functions they are not acting as legislators, they are acting within the executive branch, which is answerable to Parliament, to be sure, but is not an extension of it.

The only the the legislature sets pay and benefits occurs when the legislature imposes a contract by statute. My collective agreement is between The Professional Institute of the Public Service and the Treasury Board of Canada. While the Treasury Board is a committee of cabinet composed of Ministers, not one of those ministers has negotiated or signed the agreement--all of the Treasury Board's negotiators and signatories were public servants who are management-exempt employees of the Treasury Board.

Treasury Board sets the working conditions, issues tenders and makes contracts for benefit providers, and travel service providers, and sets out most of the regulations governing the public service (with the exception of the Canadian Forces and the RCMP).

None of these actions are taken or initiated by politicians. Ministers exercise prudential oversight, and serve as the ratification body for management in contracting (in the same fashion that a membership vote serves as a ratification body for the bargaining unit). But their functional role crystalizes only in two ways--they set the limits within which their negotiators can negotiate, and they approve the final product.



One correction--politicians serve at the pleasure of the electorate, bureaucrats do not--they serve at the pleasure of the government of the day. (Unless the government has limited its right to dismiss them by signing a collective agreement to that effect). My director general can be fired at will--she is management except and appointed by Order-in-Council. I, on the other hand, cannot. My collective agreement and relevant employment law protect me from arbitrary dismissal.

Government is about making choices, and one of those choices is how much you will spend for the services that government is obliged to provide. Government has to compete with other governments--police officers can transfer their pensions, and join a neighboring police force. Teachers can teach in another province. The choice for government is how low can you push the price tage before your best and your brightest desert you.

Government is not well served by mediocrity in the public service. I would earn double--possibly triple my salary in the private sector. But I choose not to, because my working conditions, benefits and job security more than compensate for the pay cut I took to be here.



Your analogy is flawed because you wrongly suppose that management is the real boss in the private sector. Shareholders are the true owners, and they have no seat at the negotiating table.

The proper cognates are:

electorate <--> shareholders
directors <--> elected politicians
officers <--> public servants



At the end of the day, I don't buy your argument. My job is not sufficiently different to subject me to arbitrary wages and working conditions. My union stands between me and my management when and if that becomes an issue.

Thank you for that, I probably did get my facts wrong. Especially towards the end of the paper, I didn't do my research properly, just from things I had in my head.

I am also worried that there might be some incorrect factual information regarding the part about capital goods, the plowing of fields etc. While I am sure the argument is essentially correct, my sources for that part of the paper were sketchy. It was not an academic paper it was a personal letter of sorts to my professor. I did my best but given the length of the paper and the time in which I wrote it, I really couldn't avoid making some mistakes.

Prohibition was an attempt to modify behavior on a large scale. I am happy to say, that it failed completely.

ruveyn

I must disagree with your analysis. You are oversimplifying your comparison without an appreciation for the differences you find in the details.

Shareholders buy ownership interest in a company. Their only concern is that the company turns a profit and pays dividends (or if you're a short-term trader, you want your stock value to go WAY UP before you sell it).

Shareholders DO NOT finance the company. A company is funded largely by making a product for sale or rendering a service it charges for. The "shareholders" are only funding the company if they are buying new stock. Otherwise, it is a shifting of ownership interests. More so, shareholders may enter and leave at any time, and while a shareholder does bear risk of loss in that their owned stock might become worthless. That is the limit of their liability. Shareholders cannot be attached for the indebtedness of a corporation. If a corporation goes bankrupt, their loss ends at the value of their stock holdings.

In municipal, state and federal government matters, the electorate are unrepresented owners who are 100% liable for all indebtedness of the government entity. Governments do not produce a product or render a service for fee that generates a profit. In the end, they always operate at a net loss that the residents must pay for via taxation. If a state goes bankrupt, they will try and pay for the debts by going after the residents or whomever transacts business in the state through fees, taxes, etc. So, costs and liabilities are eventually passed onto the resident of a government entity. Arguably, you can move to another jurisdiction (city, county, state) or even leave the country, but unless you live in a rented home and can easily find work elsewhere, the option to move outside the taxing authority of the fiscally-strapped government entity isn't really that practical a solution.

So, no, they are not the same. Hence why a private sector job and a public sector job should not be entitled to identical rights. They have different dynamics with different needs.

This statement troubles me.

Do you think absent a union public sector employees would be handcuffed to their stations and beaten by a taskmaster regularly?

Until recently, getting a "public employee" to do an honest day's work was like asking a nun to flash you her boobies. Now that there is no way to let them get away with "no work AND pay," they're realizing what people in the private sector have to live with and even then, some places still practice "business as usual."

The salaries for public sector workers are not cheap here in the USA. They have enjoyed above average wages even in places where there is no union in place. At least in state and federal job, the pay scales are set by policy, and they are rather generous compared to private sector jobs of similar duty requirements.

If wages were to be frozen, the state/county/city would have a published reason for why the wages are being frozen. It's not negotiable because the government can't pay more than what it has to pay with. It would be up to the taxpayers to come up with more money to pay more salaries, and if you think you'd get a sympathetic ear from the electorate when it's a bad economy with high unemployment, guess again.

Proof please.

Compare to the salaries paid to civil servants with the salaries paid to bank presidents, corporate CEOs and the like.

ruveyn

No analogy is perfect, and limited liability is a key protection of shareholders--you are quite correct in that. But it is, nonetheless, shareholders who are left holding the bag if directors and officers have mismanaged the company's working capital. Perhaps not to the unlimited extent that taxpayer might be exposed in a public sector environment--but it is ultimately their loss to shoulder, nonetheless. Just ask the former shareholders of Lehman Bros.

Corporate finance does not come from its net earnings--net earnings of a corporation are what finances the company's return on investment to its shareholders (since its bondholders will have been paid out their investment return as an expense). Corporate finance comes from one of only two places: debt and equity. 100% of a company's equity is owned by the shareholders--directors and officers might be shareholders, but there is no general obligation to be so unless the company's bylaws provide for it.

While that might be the most egregious offence of a private sector employer, it is not the sum total of exploitation that can and does occur.

I have been the subject of discrimination during my employment in the public sector--my bargaining unit represented me in my grievance against my employer and successfully obtained not only compensation, but a change in policy.

Managers in the public service have been found to engage in unfair hiring practices--the unions stand in place to ensure that staffing exercises are fair and transparent. Managers in the public service have been found to rely on underfilling to require public servants to perform duties at classification levels above their own. Managers have been found to deprive employees of contractual entitlements to overtime payments or compensatory time off.

Unions don't exist merely to keep the locks off the fire escapes.



I find this an appalling sentiment. I have worked for three different departments, at headquarters, abroad and in regional offices. At every place where I have worked in the public service I have worked with professionals who take pride in their work.

Are there slackers? Very likely. But that is not a phenomenon unique to government. There are slackers everywhere, and unions cannot protect slackers against management who are prepared to do their jobs properly. I have fired a couple in my time, and the union's interest was limited to seeing that I had handled the performance reviews, remediation attempts and termination processes properly.

Management has as many slackers as it is prepared to tolerate, and if a union stands in the way of that, it is, in my view, a testament to management's failure to manage, rather than the union's failure to allow them to manage. I am not blind to the potential for abuse, but I have successfully seen management's and union's interests satisfied in a termination process to know that it can be done.



Not being in the US job market, I cannot comment. Here in Canada, I don't know anyone in my department (including the clerical and support staff) who could not get a 25% to 50% raise immediately with a private sector employer. There would be some compromise on working conditions, pensions and benefits, perhaps--but generally speaking if you have the talent, intelligence and skills to get through a public service hiring competition, you have the talent, intelligence and skills to get bigger money in the private sector.



Put the shoe on the other foot, and imagine that you are a public servant, supporting yourself and your family on the salary that you have been promised for the work that you will do. And suddenly the legislature turns around and passes an act that says that you will, henceforth, earn 10% less for the same work. Or you will only be employed 4 days per week.

I have no objection to government offering incentives for people to retire or resign, or laying people off involuntarily, if the cost of the workforce must be reduced. That is an ordinary hazard that every employee in every sector faces. If your employer can't afford to keep up its operations, it will make cuts. We face a strategic review in the Government of Canada, and job losses are, I think, inevitable.

But I have a strong objection to government unilaterally cutting salaries and pretending that it can continue to expect the same level of service.

Now you are being silly. I don't agree with how excessive salaries are for such people, but you are comparing apples to watermelons from Pluto.

Any public sector worker, for some time now, actually tends to make MORE in pay and benefits than their private sector counterpart, and not necessarily because a union got it for them (most government workers ARE NOT unionized...believe it or not). If the pay and benefits were not better overall, you'd not see people scrambling to try to get a government job over working private sector.

Private sector offers better hope for massive income, but that means being relevant, having needed skill, being able to travel and relocate on demand, etc. It can be feast and famine depending on how the marketplace for your skill set changes. More so, if you are in a rather ordinary job, you are able to be dismissed if the boss feels you just aren't productive enough anymore.

Public sector offers competitive income and benefits, but stability which limits how high you might reach in salary. Short of earning promotions to higher pay grades or transferring to a different job that pays more, you're stuck on the scale assigned for your position. The up shot is that you don't have to worry about being cut lose when market realities change, and unless you are doing some bad things, you won't lose your job for poor performance without a lengthy process to try and remedy the problem before you are terminated for cause. Indeed, part of the problem we have now in the USA is that things are so bad that the public sector workers are having to face the same realities that the private sector has always had to deal with....all because they don't have the means to tax more money from the people to continue operating as if nothing is wrong with the economy.

I would like to see some evidence to support this assertion, with a normalization for complexity and tenure. Government work tends to have a fairly consistent level of complexity making mean salaries more meaningful. Private sector work in similar occupations covers a much broader range of complexity (with extremes that are both simpler and more complex than government work at comparable levels of responsibility), with the result that there is a much larger standard deviation in the population sample used to find the mean salary. Further, the relatively larger number of public servants with long tenure will distort the mean, resulting in a much larger standard deviation in private sector samples.

Benefits and job security are important aspects of the pay, benefits and working conditions package in the public service--absolutely. But I still don't see any argument that supports the assertion that public sector workers neither need nor deserve collective bargaining rights.

Public sector workers are not immune from discrimination, from harassment, from unfair hiring practices and from improper management activity.



Shouldn't your boss have to prove that you aren't productive enough anymore? Is it fair that your boss can fire you because he can hire a twenty-two year old at half your salary on the basis of a "feeling?"



I have never once suggested that public servants should be immune from cuts--but these need to be managed well. In the early 90s, under Program Review II, the federal government in Canada shed a large number of public servants through a combination of retirement incentives and work-force adjustment. The practical upshot, though, was virtually no hiring for a period of about 5 years. Well, those chickens are coming home to roost now--because there is a significant demographic hole in the profile of the public service, and we have too few people ready to step into management and director level positions that are going to become vacant in the next few years. This is going to present a significant training and development challenge, and is the number one issue of concern for the most senior levels of management in the public service.

It is all to easy to look at a snapshot in time and proclaim: "cuts must be made!" It is a much different thing to look to the continuity of expertise within the public sector, to ensure that politicians continue to receive the best possible, non-partisan advice from their departments.

Not a "feeling" Rather substantial saving in wages paid. By the way, most employees are hired on an "at will" basis. They are not guaranteed their employment long term.

ruveyn

I would suggest that most jurisdictions in the US and Canada have employment standards legislation that prohibit employers from dismissing them without cause (or for unreasonable cause). Certainly in Canada if an employer purported to lay an employee off on the basis of economic necessity and turned around to hire an employee to perform the same work for a lower salary, that employer would find itself on the wrong end of a wrongful dismissal action. I suspect the same would be true in any state in the United States.

I wish that you were right in the us there are several states mostly in the west and south were employment is
"at will" meaning the boss does not need a reason to fire a person although racial/sex discrimination is still illegal.
strangely this states correspond quite strongly with the "right to work" anti-union states.