Making US Citizens the Adversary

By Aydin @Adobe Stock

Shouldn’t Employees Show Up for Work

Remind us again why government workers need to be unionized, pleads James Freeman in the WSJ:

People say American politics is too polarized, too bitterly divided. Yet suddenly we appear to have achieved a bipartisan consensus between the executive and legislative branches on a significant issue. Joe Biden’s Treasury secretary and congressional Republicans now agree that unionized federal employees have been extended too much privilege.

Reporting from the Washington Times:

The IRS is struggling to get its employees back to work in person at least 50% of the time, and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the agency’s labor union is the chief hurdle.

In striking testimony to Congress, Ms. Yellen suggested that the department may have to renegotiate contracts to get those employees back to their desks more often. “Some of the employees are covered by collective bargaining agreements. They are members of a union, and to enforce those rules requires an agreement with the union,” she told the Senate Appropriations Committee last week. 

What‘s not to understand, inquires Mr. Freeman, about workers in private firms being free to join unions if they believe it’s the best way to manage their sometimes adversarial relationships with business owners?

But why should federal workers be empowered to make an adversary of U.S. citizens in general?

In Mene Ukueberuwa ‘s Interview with Philip Howard, Mr. Howard noted that the bizarre creatures known as federal employee unions didn’t exist for most of the nation’s history.

Mr. Howard, a lawyer and writer, notes the results of bad governance: dreary schools, dangerous streets, and poor, costly services.

But politicians bent on reform tend to hit the same wall: government unions. Philip Howard has spent three decades studying this problem, and he’s convinced it can never be solved through ordinary politics. Only the courts can uproot public unions and restore accountable government.

Mr. Ukueberuwa, a member of the WSJ’s editorial board, also noted Mr. Howard’s argument that the expansive power currently enjoyed by government employee unions is not legal. Public unions are looking to exercise control over the entire operating machinery of government, argues Mr. Howard:

It’s not a favor. It’s not a sliver from the public fisc. It’s the entire way the system works.” And they donate enough to get what they want.

In his book, “Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions,” Mr. Howard reminds readers that teachers unions often spend more on state elections than all business groups combined. Those funds go to Democrats by a factor of about 19 to 1.