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', Smith's invisible hand.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
I can agree that unions have a place in society (though not as prominent a place as most leftists would like). The problem is that while private-sector unions work to pressure corporations, public-sector unions, as an unintentional result of fighting for their own interests, also work against taxpayers in general, which includes many lower- & middle-class persons as well as the super-rich. In this way, they have a complicated relationship with other people.
As it happens, I think the left-of-center would better serve their cause by promoting a resurgence of private-sector unionization rather than fighting to the death on the hill of public-sector unions. I don't know how feasible that is now, though.
