The Emperor’s Clothes

The headache of managing government under union strictures is not exactly a secret. But the managerial disempowerment of governors, mayors, and other elected executives seems to have caught people by surprise.
 
There may be ten million management books, but we can’t find one that talks about what happens when managers no longer have authority to manage—for example, to hold employees accountable, or to redeploy resources to meet new circumstances. No such books exist because the organization can’t move forward in any coherent way—as if the spokes were disconnected from the hub. That’s why endemic public failures don’t get fixed. Elected leaders come and go, but public unions just say no.
 
George Will this week in The Washington Post discusses the incalculable harm that public unions have caused to society. Mary Williams Walsh, formerly of The New York Times, writes a thoughtful review of Not Accountable for John Ellis’s News Items.*
 
The harm to society from union controls is matched only by the political difficulty of trying to shed these controls. The political power of government unions is preemptive, because it is proportional to the size of government itself. For five decades, since statutes authorized public unions to collectively bargain against government, public unions have been emboldened to seek more and more power. The concept of overreach is unfamiliar to them.
 
Illinois recently adopted a constitutional amendment providing that collective bargaining agreements trump all statutes, past and future. It is hard to imagine that ceding sovereign powers in this way will be upheld in the United States Supreme Court. Here’s Philip Howard's column this week in the Chicago Tribune. As Mary Williams Walsh ended her column, “All you need is one case.”
 
*News Items is an aggregator that compiles science, business, and international articles as well as domestic politics. We find it an invaluable resource amid so many news sources.