As the Bay Area braced for the BART strike expected to tie up hundreds of thousands of commuters Monday and San Benito County’s Service Employees Union International (SEIU) local talks of “labor actions”, we return to the key question – should public employee unions be permitted to strike?
While it’s a basic freedom for people to organize and withhold their labor, public employee unions are in a unique situation. They are not acting as individuals, but as organizations and their employers – government agencies – are usually taxpayer subsidized not-for-profit monopolies. Because they work for public monopolies, I believe that public unions should be prohibited from striking or taking strike-type actions.
In most private enterprise, the market forces that determine the value of labor are established by a combination of laws such as minimum wage and, recently, the Affordable Healthcare Act, return on investment, and economic realities like competition and price elasticity. Competition provides the major balance for similar products or services. Price elasticity means that if you really like Mounds Bars you may pay $2 for one, but you are unlikely to pay $50.
In the competitive world, if you do not like the cost of a product or service – which includes direct and indirect labor – just go for something else; perhaps a different brand, a more basic model, a smaller home, cheaper seats, etc. Those types of choices generally do not apply to public services. Additionally, the cost of public labor is often in direct competition with the program’s basic intent. An example is the cost to employ an eligibility worker – a classification whose functions exist under some title in every county in California.
An eligibility worker establishes and documents the many administrative and eligibility requirements of clients for complex state and federal public assistance programs. Obviously, the more it costs to employ the worker, the less is available for the assistance they provide. Having no worker or a poorly trained worker is self-defeating and inefficient; therefore, a staffing balance is mandatory, but so is cost control.
While private enterprise has scrambled to rid itself of long-term obligations to workers over several decades, the public sector has often taken on inadvisable lifetime financial commitments with their enormous cost and shouldered most of the risk. Risk elimination has value; just ask your financial advisor. These long-term obligations make it difficult, if not impossible, to do an apples-to-apples comparison of compensation between the public and private sectors.
Then there is the “who-pays” and “how-pays” factor. Considering their responsibility and the amount work required, top-level full-time elected officials are among the worst paid public employees. A California State Senator makes only $90,526 annually plus per diem, a U.S. Senator about $175,000, and the old joke – “plus all you can steal” – does not apply any more. Since salary levels for elected officials are often political hot potatoes, they learned to hide much of their compensation from the public eye. In imitation, the majority of other public employees, who do much better on a relative scale, learned to hide theirs too.
Will strike restrictions for public employee unions ever come to be? Not in California. The realities are that public unions have large political war chests and voting power, and plenty of their employment is as much about jobs as about necessity. This results in a toxic soup like the molecular acid blood of the alien in the film of the same name. Oh, you might kill it, but it’s likely to be a suicide mission.
