With their prodigious tendency to waste taxpayer dollars, public sector unions are better off in the junk heap of history. Would that they'd hasten thither.
Strong unions are necessary to keep the stratifying effects of capitalism in check. And since private sector unions have already historically expired, if public sector unions followed then that would be the end of it altogether.
The reactionism of public sector unions also wastes money on useless stuff that benefits the union members & hurts everyone else. When the prison guards in California don't want to let people take money out of the prisons, it seems to me that their interests are juxtaposed to those of everyone else, who would rather the state not liquidate.
Yes, that is correct. Unions are inherently selfish; they go after what benefits their own members at the expense of everyone else. Just as corporations do. Your conclusions would be correct if the prison guards' union were the only union in existence. However, when you have many unions acting in concert to raise the prevailing wage level and exert political pressure on behalf of workers', then the net effect of all these self-interested activities, up to a point, is greater worker security, benefits and influence across certain sectors of the economy. I do not think this applies in the case of industries in the infant or early growth stage, but it applies in the late growth and mature stages (of which prisons, which have been around since probably the time of Hammurabi, almost certainly are one). Think of it like Adam Smith's invisible hand.
It's not like Adam Smith's invisible hand, because there is not a free market in labor but rather a centrally-planned one. (And that's just referring to private-sector unions - public-sector unions are about as far removed from the free market as one gets).
