Public employee union membership in Wisconsin has crashed in the last year

[Beet]

Ah, yes. Further weakening of workers' rights and increased dependence of politics on corporate money is just what we need. The slump to parliamentarian plutocracy accelerates.

[Beet]

Ah, yes. Further weakening of workers' rights and increased dependence of politics on corporate money is just what we need. The slump to parliamentarian plutocracy accelerates.

Workers still have the right to unionize.

lol. A right that exists only on paper and is eviscerated by reality. Not that the pre-Walker status quo provided unions with enough to even sustain themselves in most instances.

Ah, yes. Further weakening of workers' rights and increased dependence of politics on corporate money is just what we need. The slump to parliamentarian plutocracy accelerates.

Weakening workers rights?  How so when the workers were given a new right to vote?

"it appears that a majority of the members (or close to it) said no, we don't want our paychecks docked for dues"

What right to vote? Vote for what?

Unionism depends on collective action. Of course no individual will choose to make the sacrifices necessary to bargain collectively by themselves. It doesn't make sense. That is the whole premise behind unionism.

But ah, they still have the 'right to unionize', without the right to effectively act collectively, without the money to defend their power. That is like saying you have the right to vote freedom of speech, on the condition that your larynx is surgically removed.

[Beet]

     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.

[Beet]

While I agree in general with Beet here (shocking everyone) in that strong unions are an excellent check against sh**tty working conditions, strong unions are their own worst enemy.  They don't care about the repercusions of their actions, they don't care about corruption inside their own organizations and the people in charge don't even care about their own members.  I certainly don't want unions to die, I think they have their place in a free market system, but they need to be restrained less they kill the golden goose and make toilets out of the eggs.

No, corporations are the unions' worst enemy. You say you think strong unions are a check and have a place, but a 55% fall in membership in one year isn't restraint; it's disembowelment. Actually, I was pretty complacent about Walkerism until seeing this article Torie posted. I haven't always been the friendliest to unionism myself in the past. But this is shocking.

And all this is considering, as I said, unionism is already dead in the private sector. It's already dead in the south. Pretty much the only place it's still alive is in states like Wisconsin and in the public sector. And now, Walker will most likely win the recall leaving the unions totally eviscerated. The Democrats in the future will turn to the Koch Brothers to fund their campaigns.

[Beet]

No, corporations are the unions' worst enemy. You say you think strong unions are a check and have a place, but a 55% fall in membership in one year isn't restraint; it's disembowelment. Actually, I was pretty complacent about Walkerism until seeing this article Torie posted. I haven't always been the friendliest to unionism myself in the past. But this is shocking.

And all this is considering, as I said, unionism is already dead in the private sector. It's already dead in the south. Pretty much the only place it's still alive is in states like Wisconsin and in the public sector. And now, Walker will most likely win the recall leaving the unions totally eviscerated. The Democrats in the future will turn to the Koch Brothers to fund their campaigns.

Unions are still strong (for now) in the North East no?  Still kind of strong in the rust belt (what's left of it).  The teachers unions are still strongish nationally.  If the people still felt the unions were serving them this sh**t wouldn't pass, but the unions have burned any and all the good will they had by constantly doing things the people find heinous.  The jokes about lazy union members didn't come out of a board room of a Fortune 500 company, they came from people observing lazy unions members.  The jokes about corruption and ties to organized crime didn't come from a guy in a suit, they came because unions have historically been corrupt and had ties to organized crime.

Public opinion on the workers in question in Wisconsin however are largely positive. The problem isn't 'lazy' union members, the problem is the pension funds. Secondly, if there's corruption and organized crime then by all means, go after that. This has nothing to do with that. However it should be noted that there is inevitably going to be some corruption within unions just as there are in Fortune 500 companies. Large human organizations, especially those with a political side, always have some corruption from time to time. But it's better than the alternative of not having them, or having them only pro forma with no real power.

[Beet]

The only successful large developed country right now is Germany. Guess what, Germany has strong unions, deeply embedded within the structure of the economy. Historical experience with the US has shown that the middle class benefits well going with a large public and private sector union base that is strong across the major economically significant areas of the country. Weakening union membership since the 1970's has been associated with stalling of wage-growth, stall in the decline of the poverty rate, income inequality, political polarization, corporate money in politics (a.k.a. corruption at a higher level), and recently, jobless (or job-loss) recoveries and economic instability. This is because of the breakdown of the social contract that unions implicitly represented.

[Beet]

Wow, the heat in here is amazing. I'm trying to fight a desperate rearguard action in favor of a deeply unfortunate status quo, to prevent an even more unfortunate future. Lined up against me are a battery of right-wing posters, including the most formidable debater on the forum, and I'm trying to put my days of deep debate behind me. What shall I say?

Couldn't I refute your last point by pointing out other places with strong unions that aren't doing as well as Germany?  I know I'll probably get called a racist or something, but perhaps Germany is doing well because it's full of Germans?

But what places were you going to bring up? Many countries are dealing with problems stemming with being in a currency union with Germany, that have nothing to do with unions per se [ unions preventing structural reforms yes, but the only reason why those 'reforms' are so critical is because of the currency union ].

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Are you suggesting that Germany has no workplace safety laws, except for unionized workers? Union density is actually not astronomical [although nearly double that of the US] but their political power is much stronger. If what you said were true, most German workers would not be covered by workplace safety laws, which is hard to believe. The Germans are the ones that invented government-provided unemployment insurance. Until Hartz IV, it had one of the most generous unemployment insurance programs in the world. Germany also has a limited work week of about 37 hours, although in practice most Germans work around 40 hours a week. These are set by governmental policy, although unions have a strong hand in the negotiations. The role of unions in Germany is social and political. It is seen as part of the post-WWII model and accepted by business.

Torie: There are a couple of problems with your links. Firstly, in the Ohio link, the reason why the public sector workers are deemed more highly compensated as opposed is less, is entirely due to benefits, and the discrepancy within benefits is entirely due to the defined benefit retirement plans (the AEI finds that it is worth a whopping 45% of salary, compared to just 3% of salary for the private sector). See my post earlier in this thread, where I already agreed that the problem is the pension plans. Secondly, with your USA Today link, the link points out that the Federal government has subcontracted the majority of work it buys and directly employs only at the highest levels. It is not uncommon for a single Federal worker to manage a team of dozens of contractors and subcontractors. The Federal worker has much greater skills, education and responsibility than the contracted workers, and so he is paid more. As a matter of fact there are thousands of Federal positions, requiring all kinds of skills in language/diplomacy, security/cryptography, engineering/patent review, research/biotechnolgoy and others that the government cannot fill. On top of that, many federal positions require an extensive background check, and the number of candidates who both meet the requirements and can pass the background check process is exceedingly low. Unlike the private sector, the Federal government cannot just compensate for the dearth of skilled workers by picking up some Chinese H1B to throw into a military contracting role. Your final link, from Reason.com, is speculative in its conclusions. The main study they rely on, by their own definition, "does not account for differences in worker education, job experience, or job duties", and that "after controlling for the aforementioned variables, public sector workers actually earned 11-12 percent less than comparable private sector workers". In response to this they throw at the reader growth rates of public vs. private workers' benefits and growth rates in public vs. private sector jobs.

Never mind that since the study's data points ended in 2009, the private sector has gained about 4.1 million private sector jobs and lost 500,000 public sector jobs-- the whole premise of using the contemporary private sector as a baseline should be problematic. Ironically in fact, all of the imbalance between public and private sector workers in terms of jobs and income growth occurred under the Bush administration, and none of it under the Obama administration. I mean, isn't Mitt Romney's whole campaign essentially based on the fact that the private sector job market is broken? Private sector job growth since 2000 is well below what is needed for full employment, and private sector wage growth since 2000 is negative, which is a stunning reversal from historical norm. Has there ever been a single decade since 1790 where the jobs record for this country was abysmal as it was during the decade of the 2000s? I'm not sure even the 1930s was worse (perhaps barely), I would have to go back and check. The point is, the private sector's wage and job growth cannot be used as a baseline for what is acceptable. Simply pointing out that the more unionized public sector has performed better for workers than the un-unionized private sector proves nothing, except perhaps that unions are effective in bargaining for the people they represent. The problem is with the private sector, not the public sector.

[Beet]

     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.