Public Sector Unions Deserve More Liberal Skepticism

Backers of public sector (government worker) unions are in uproar over a case currently before the Supreme Court, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association. The case challenges the 1977 decision Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, in which the Court ruled that public sector unions may charge both members and non-members of the union a mandatory fee to pay for the cost of collective bargaining, if allowed by state law. However, these unions cannot charge non-members for their explicitly ‘political’ activism. As of now, a majority of the Court seems ready to overrule Abood, on the grounds that the First Amendment prohibits these mandatory contributions. Liberals have responded with a fresh round of arguments concerned about American de-unionization and its impact on wages. Less examined are the very real upsides to overturning Abood—including for reasons the left purports to hold dear.

The reason Friedrichs terrifies unions is known as the ‘free rider problem’ in economics. Unions require funding from members to exist, and they negotiate on behalf of their membership. However, if the benefits that the unions wins (e.g., higher wages) are shared by members and non-members alike, economically rational actors will choose to not pay union dues while still receiving the benefits. Eventually, so few people will pay dues that the union will collapse. To avoid this scenario, public unions have negotiated “closed-shop” contracts with the states, in which all workers in a certain public sector, such as firefighters, are required to pay a fee to their union even if they do not support the union and do not want to be members.

According to Abood, the First Amendment posits that workers cannot be mandated by the government to provide funds to political causes, such as advocating for teacher tenure. Nevertheless, the decision did allow public unions to continue charging non-members. The ruling was a compromise declaring that public union collective bargaining was not a violation of the First Amendment because collective bargaining was, supposedly, not political speech, but instead a mechanism to ensure “labor peace.” This argument is dubious; issues as basic such as negotiating over how much teachers should be paid when raising their wages would require a tax increase, for example, are clearly political choices. Collective bargaining with the government, itself the defining public creation, is intrinsically political, and attempts to pretend otherwise are disingenuous.

So Abood will probably fall, but it is precisely because my politics are left-of-center that I see some positives in the ruling. Public sector unions are hardly working-class heroes fighting against evil corporate hegemony; there is no sharing of gargantuan profits taking place. Public unions negotiate for their interests against the government, or, in other words, the public taxpayer. They are not malicious, but like all economic actors, they are self-interested, and often in ways that run counter to the left’s professed goals.

Any monetary concessions that the public union extracts come straight from the common budget, at the expense of other public projects, like infrastructure, health care, and welfare. And the deals forced by public unions are often patently absurd. One local example: Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) workers earning north of $70,000 and sometimes over $100,000 doing jobs that were long ago automated in the private sector (and then, in 2013, going on strike for more benefits). Some stories are almost comical, such as a New York police officer who runs marathons while receiving an NYPD disability pension.

Isolated stories provide amusement, but the underlying issue is so severe that it may actually drive states into fiscal crisis. Across the country for the past several decades, governments at the state and local level gave into union demands for wildly hugely expensive pension systems that have proven unsustainable, and which dry up funding for everything else. Illinois, for example, has over $11 billion dollars of pension debt, and spends over 20% of state revenues on public pensions. Meanwhile, the unions’ strong-arming of the legislature to refuse any cuts whatsoever has led to credit downgrades and a budget impasse. Illinois’ pensions are only about 40% funded; meanwhile, funding for universities, welfare, and basic services has been squeezed even as Illinois hiked already considerable state taxes to try to fill the gap. A similar dynamic helped push Detroit and other cities into outright bankruptcy. Sacrificing virtually every other public project for the sake of public unions is not ‘progressive’; it is shortsighted.

Lastly, liberal enthusiasm for public unions should be measured against the political actions taken by those unions, many of which run directly counter to liberal goals or basic accountability. Police unions often defend officers who have shot innocent civilians in questionable (or simply outrageous) circumstances and bully state legislatures away from criminal justice reform. Teachers’ unions protect teachers who have been found incompetent or even abusive from being fired. These actions are particularly damaging to students in low-income areas, who can hardly switch to private schools or raise taxes on their parents to attract better teachers. In New York City, incapable teachers were infamously placed in ‘rubber rooms’ where teachers did nothing all day while still being paid full salaries. Again, public unions are neither saints nor demons; they are self-interested actors, and they will take as many benefits for their members as they can extract from the government, regardless of whether society benefits or not.

Wholehearted defense of public unions has not always been axiomatic for the American left. No less a figure than Franklin Delano Roosevelt opposed public sector unions, writing that “the very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations.” American private union membership has been in decline for decades, and in their case the argument for unions seems stronger. But the argument that even non-union public employees should be required to pay union dues is unconvincing, and the current state of public unions is unsustainable. An emotional attachment to the idea of preserving what’s left of the labor movement should not blind liberals to the very real drawbacks of the current system.

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Andrew Granato, a junior studying economics, is a staff writer at Stanford Political Journal.