While We’re Looking the Other Way
There’s a lot going on in the world, with Ukraine, Canadian truckers, and more. So it was easy to miss the report of the White House Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment, released on February 7. The Task Force, chaired by Vice President Kamala Harris, calls for expanding collective bargaining throughout society, including in government. The Biden administration should “remove unnecessary barriers...that impede unions’ ability to organize federal workers” and should “expand…collective bargaining rights for state and local government employees.”
Last we looked, public unions have America in a hammerlock: No accountability for bad cops, bad teachers, and even federal civil servants who spend the day surfing porn sites. Union work rules bar daily management choices, such as a school principal dropping in to see how a class is going, or a crew chief asking a worker to help out on another worker’s project. Overtime and pension rules gouge taxpayers. Collective bargaining agreements can run several hundred pages and read like catalogs against any supervisory choice. Try reading one.
Public unions are the main cause of dysfunctional government, not the solution. Democracy can’t work, as James Madison put it, without an unbroken “chain of dependence…[from] the lowest officers, the middle grade, and the highest.”
Who are the public unions negotiating against? Against the common good—you, parents, the elderly, taxpayers, every citizen. Nor, unlike the private sector, is there any market reality that limits what public unions demand. This is why FDR said that “the process of collective bargaining…cannot be transplanted into the public service.”
The White House report reveals, unintentionally, a cancer that has infected our Democracy. Public unions have become so powerful politically—one of the largest campaign contributors, and blocs of campaign workers, while holding daily public choices in their hands—that political leaders will accede to whatever they want. Without any evidence, the Biden administration is happy to conclude that America needs more of what is killing our schools, destroying trust in police, and squandering public funds.
Nor, with one or two exceptions, have Republicans been willing to take on the dragon guarding the cave of public administration. It's just too big, with all its power focused on keeping public employees impregnable. Better just to gripe about it from a distance.
The solution does not lie, realistically, in electing new leaders. But public unions have overplayed their hand: They’ve preempted democratic governance. Democracy has become a facade with doors locked against changing how government works. Voters elect new leaders who, because of collective bargaining agreements, have been disempowered from fixing broken schools and getting rid of bad cops.
Common Good, with help from prominent experts, is preparing a white paper on how public unions have undermined democracy and should be declared unconstitutional. Our analysis will be released this spring. Philip Howard discussed some of the arguments on this recent podcast with Harvard professor Paul E. Peterson. See also this essay in American Purpose. Please let us know if you have any ideas or suggestions.
In a recent Commentary essay on the bureaucratic bungling of Covid, James B. Meigs cites Philip's April 2020 City Journal piece “Fighting Covid-19 in the Red-Tape Nation.”
Philip was on Colorado Public Television to discuss how collective bargaining makes government unmanageable.
Philip was interviewed on the Washington Times’ “Bold and Blunt” podcast about his recent Newsweek op-ed “The Disease Killing Democracy is Distrust”—listen here.