Collective ManipulationWhether in courts or in legislatures, public employee unions need to be reined in.
Jace Lington
Feb 18, 2023
Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions, by Philip K. Howard, Rodin Books, 160 pages.
Public sector unions seem to make basic government operations difficult, if not impossible. High labor costs helped derail California’s dream of a high-speed train system connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles. Striking teachers injected even more uncertainty into a labor market reeling from lockdowns, mandates, and supply chain disintegration. Derek Chauvin had a history of citizen complaints before 2020, but the union agreement with the City of Minneapolis blocked the police commissioner from firing or transferring him.
After our sixty-plus year experiment with public collective bargaining, “democracy no longer works because public unions have turned the constitutional hierarchy upside down,” writes Philip K. Howard. But Howard, chair of Common Good and author of several books about government reform, found a potential legal solution to that problem. In Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions, Howard makes the case that workable government depends on the U.S. Supreme Court deeming collective bargaining by public sector unions unconstitutional. In just 160 pages, Howard marshals vivid historical examples and cogent legal analysis to make a persuasive case against allowing public sector employees to unionize at any level of government: federal, state, or local.
Today, prominent Republicans and thinkers on the right are voicing serious concern for labor interests. Howard’s book serves as a warning that while trade unions may be a necessary check on corporate predation, that logic does not extend to government workers. The unionization of public workers, according to Howard, has made officials “accountable to public employees” instead of to the people as a whole, the original sovereign over America’s republican form of government. He compares public sector unions to the old Tammany Hall political machine in New York, creating a spoils system that protects employees’ positions while allowing the quality of public services to deteriorate.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/collective-manipulation/
