Unions and Government Workers

It's no wonder that Obama snuggles up to unions. Ira Stoll on the role played by unions in the public sector:

If there’s a day of the year to notice the paradox of organized labor, Labor Day is it. The paradox is this: even as private sector unionism has declined, public sector unionism is in some ways more influential than ever.

The numbers tell the story. Among private sector employees — the ones who work for for-profit companies or non-profit organizations that are not part of the government — the percentage who belong to labor unions plummeted to a mere 7.5% last year, from 23.3% in 1977, according to UnionStats.com. By the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics’ more restrictive accounting, a mere 6.7% of private sector workers were in unions in 2013.

Among government workers, it’s a whole different story: 40.8% of local government workers — teachers, police, firefighters, librarians — belong to unions, according to the BLS numbers. The public sector rate drops to 35.3% (38.7% by the UnionStats.com numbers) if you include state and federal employees — postal workers, corrections officers. That’s so much higher than the private sector that it’s almost a tale of two labor movements — one, in the private sector, that is diminishing to irrelevance, and another, in the public sector, that retains substantial clout.

Public sector unions are so important that it’s impossible to tell the story of the big city and state governments without accounting for their influence. It’d be impossible to understand public education in America, for example, without knowing about the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association and the roles they play in electing local government officials and in negotiating contracts with detailed work rules and protections for teachers. Likewise, one can’t understand the California state budget without understanding the enormous power of the union that represents that state’s prison guards. The power of public sector unions also explains why retired city bus drivers and teachers have generous, guaranteed, taxpayer-funded defined-benefit pensions, while private sector workers and entrepreneurs must save for their own retirements.

Read the rest here.