Seven Steps to End Public Employee Unions

Jeff Carter writes a lengthy piece at Points and Figures that includes seven microeconomic steps that could be taken to end public employee unions and reduce the overall cost of government:

1. Break the link between automatic revenue generation and the government. Make unions collect their own revenue. This will decrease their revenue because unionized employees will have to actually write a check to the union. No more auto-deductions. Unions would see increased costs.

2. Have union members vote each year to have their dues raised. Since it’s done automatically today, they have no voice in the outcome. Unions would find that their members might be averse to increasing dues annually, and it will make the fat cats running the unions more accountable to their membership. They would also have increased costs annually to run and tabulate those elections.

3. Ask union workers to contribute more for their own benefits. Currently, many of them contribute very little to the cost of their health care and pension benefits. Ask them to shoulder more of their own responsibilities. Their pensions currently are risk free. Better yet, end defined benefit pensions and go to defined contribution pensions. Very different than the private sector.

3. End collective bargaining for public (not private) unions. Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) said, “the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.” This will begin to institute the ideals of merit and pay for performance into the government workplace. The government should become more efficient as well, saving you tax dollars and increasing your service at the same time.

4. Force unions to constantly be in court, filing lawsuits and paying attorneys. Business is optimal when it produces where marginal revenues equal marginal costs. If we increase the costs of the union to produce, it will lower it’s production. The unions will counter all these measures. They will incorrectly assail them as attacks on human rights by filing lawsuits. Lawsuits cost money. They will win some and lose some, but as long as the political will is there the union fixed costs of doing business will be permanently increased. Combine that with a broken revenue model and it will put their bottom lines under pressure. If unions adopt the strategy of constantly filing lawsuits, eventually public opinion will turn against them just like the boy who cried wolf.

5. Provide competition. We have already seen what competition can do to government agencies like the postal service. Fedex, UPS and private delivery services are more efficient and effective than the USPS. We need to extend this to other areas to make markets competitive. School vouchers is one place we can do that. By encouraging a private school network to compete against our public school system, we can begin to cripple the monopoly that government has over education, and thus increase the costs for unions while decreasing their revenue. Privatizing the TSA would be another. There is a lot of low hanging fruit that can be converted to private industry when you start thinking about it. Anywhere, including the Department of Defense, that we can set up a private industry to compete with the government for the same service will challenge public unions.

6. Reduce the size and scope of government. Eliminate agencies, programs and departments. Forget the scalpel or ax, we need to use a nuclear bomb. Supernatural beings don’t have the staying power of a government program.

7. Be Pro-Choice. Enact right to work legislation at the state and local level. Give workers a choice of whether to be unionized or not. States that have right to work laws have lower unemployment and more vibrant economies. From today’s WSJ, “In Indiana, where Governor Mitch Daniels used an executive order to end collective bargaining and gave members the right to opt out, some 95% of state employees chose not to pay union dues.”

Read the rest of it here.  Remember, unions are not near as much about protecting employees as they are about generating vast sums of money the unions can use to promote their political and economic agenda.