Unions: One of these is not like the other

Public-employee unions and private-sector unions: One of these is not like the other. Unless you're Ezra Klein, that is, who sees no distinction at all.

... The difference, as Joe Klein puts it, is that "Industrial unions are organized against the might and greed of ownership. Public employees unions are organized against the might and greed ... of the public?"

I don't think this really holds up. Labor unions organize to get the best possible deal -- or what they think of as the best possible deal -- for their workers. This usually pits them against managers who want to get the best possible deal -- or what they see as the best possible deal -- for their institution. Unions are not just about challenging the "might and greed" of private-sector CEOs, but about recognizing the different incentives faced by managers and workers, and about correcting the tremendous power imbalance between those who can be fired for asking too many questions or demanding a different bargain and those who get to do the firing and would prefer a more submissive workforce and a status quo that they've created and defined.

This is wrong on so many levels that one hardly knows where to begin. So I'll let George Will offer the instruction:

[Public-sector] unions are government organized as an interest group to lobby itself to do what it always wants to do anyway: grow. These unions use dues extracted from members to elect their members' employers. And governments, not disciplined by the need to make a profit, extract government employees' salaries from taxpayers. Government sits on both sides of the table in cozy "negotiations" with unions.

Ezra, of course, missed the key, indeed central, distinction between private and public sector unions: cash flow. If a private business (the ones that remain, anyway) agrees to union-demanded
compensation of its employees that the company's revenue stream can't support, the problem is self correcting. It must:

A. raise prices to cover the shortfall, but as a consumer I don't have to buy, or

B. Convince the union to renegotiate, or,

C. Go out of business.

But none of these are possible for private citizens in Wisconsin, who are the consumers of what the teachers' union there is providing, the education of the states' children. So, if the state's tax revenue can't support its obligations (including but certainly not limited to paying teachers' health insurance and pension plans), it can:

A. Raise the tax rates of the state's residents, which the residents cannot prevent - except at the ballot box and then only prospectively. This, though, is what last November's election was about in Wisconsin, something that Ezra Klein refuses to see, but so do the legislature's Democrats.

B. Convince the union to renegotiate, which is what is happening now, or

C. Go out of business. This will not happen because the state will always raise taxes first - raise them, that is, until it winds up like California, facing insolvency.

What else does Ezra not understand? Well, this:

State taxes amount to 20 percent of the average income of Wisconsin residents. A big chunk of that money sustains a highly unionized public employee force that is well paid by comparison with the private sector.

"You can't get blood out of a turnip." The turnips who went to Wisconsin's polls last November have made it plain that they've been squeezed as dry as they're willing to get.

The voter-consumers can't take their business elsewhere when it comes to educating their children, but what they can do is in the next election make sure that the Republicans have a self-sufficient quorum. And if they do, there will not be the slightest spirit of compromise there, especially after considering what the union has been doing this time. I'd say then that actual disestablishment of the teachers' union could be possible.

Maybe something the union leadership should consider.

Update: Wisconsin Gov. Walker also wants to end the practice of the state auto-withholding union dues - up to $1,000 per year - from teachers' paycheck and passing the money to the union treasurers. The unions overwhelmingly support Democrat candidates with enormous monetary donations; Michael Barone explains the implications:

The money in this case comes from taxpayers, present and future, who are the source of every penny of dues paid to public employee unions, who in turn spend much of that money on politics, almost all of it for Democrats. In effect, public employee unions are a mechanism by which every taxpayer is forced to fund the Democratic Party.

And Professor Bainbridge explains, "The case against public sector unionism."