Dr. Martin Hash Podcast

“All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations.” - August 16, 1937, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the strongest union supporting president of all time.

Obviously, intense & incessant lobbying overcame President Roosevelt's sage observations, and the nation is now in the seemingly inextricable grasp of public employee unions. If there is oligarchy in the U.S., the public employee unions would certainly be counted among them. They surely rank ahead of even large corporations in the public extortion racket. There's a huge difference between private sector & public employee unions, mostly to do with the lack of negotiating ability: there are no opposing party, there's no feedback mechanism, and there is no adversarial relationship because a Third Party, the taxpayer, bears the burden of the cost.

Negotiation is not possible because Government is us, so who is the opposing party? The People? Elected officials? Appointed government employees? What is the feedback mechanism? Elections? Reneging on public debt? Bad press? And the contracts amount to little more than collusion against unrepresented taxpayers. What Public Employee unions call negotiation is little more than public employees debating other public employees about how much interest their retirement accounts should grow every year.

Public Employee Unions have been able to exploit the special government bookkeeping to hide their true cost in outrageous unfunded future obligations, for which ultimately taxpayers will suffer the consequences. The perks are substantial: guaranteed hefty government pensions, job security, no one paying attention to what they do, and who's going to fire a public employee that is under-performing? What's the upside for the person doing the firing? No private business could participate in such a one-sided relationship because if they did, they wouldn't remain in business for long.

But getting rid of Public Employee unions isn't to save money, it's to pull down the wall they've put up around education, parks, transportation projects, and every other thing they control with an iron grip.