But even if it doesn't happen soon, it will happen down the road. On that you can rely.
First, some background. Ohio voters defeated a recently enacted law limiting collective bargaining in the public sector. Public employees retain the right to bargain collectively and fully with taxpayer representatives. This presumably is meant to assure that public employees aren't being mistreated by taxpayer representatives.
I'll offer a contrary view on behalf of the taxpayers. Maybe we the people need to hire a union to represent us as well. Our elected officials are certainly doing a lousy job on our behalf.
With respect to the rights of public employees and the abusive treatment of taxpayers, let's refer to The Public-Union Albatross . In that article, the stiff resistance by unions to public sector productivity improvements and the resulting fleecing of unsuspecting taxpayers is discussed:
"Collective-bargaining rights have made government virtually unmanageable. Promotions, reassignments and layoffs are dictated by rigid rules, without any opportunity for managerial judgment. In 2010, shortly after receiving an award as best first-year teacher in Wisconsin, Megan Sampson had to be let go under "last in, first out" provisions of the union contract.
Even what task someone should do on a given day is subject to detailed rules. Last year, when a virus disabled two computers in a shared federal office in Washington, D.C., the IT technician fixed one but said he was unable to fix the other because it wasn't listed on his form.
Making things work better is an affront to union prerogatives. The refuse-collection union in Toledo sued when the city proposed consolidating garbage collection with the surrounding county. (Toledo ended up making a cash settlement.) In Wisconsin, when budget cuts eliminated funding to mow the grass along the roads, the union sued to stop the county executive from giving the job to inmates.
No decision is too small for union micromanagement. Under the New York City union contract, when new equipment is installed the city must reopen collective bargaining "for the sole purpose of negotiating with the union on the practical impact, if any, such equipment has on the affected employees." Trying to get ideas from public employees can be illegal. A deputy mayor of New York City was "warned not to talk with employees in order to get suggestions" because it might violate the "direct dealing law."
How inefficient is this system? Ten percent? Thirty percent? Pause on the math here. Over 20 million people work for federal, state and local government, or one in seven workers in America. Their salaries and benefits total roughly $1.5 trillion of taxpayer funds each year (about 10% of GDP). They spend another $2 trillion. If government could be run more efficiently by 30%, that would result in annual savings worth $1 trillion."
Based on my experience with union work rules and collective bargaining in the private sector, I would expect that public sector productivity could be improved by ~50%. If that were done, the federal budget deficit would quickly disappear. The federal deficit would be zero and maybe even be in surplus, all things considered (see below).
Hence, government sector work rules, customs and practices that impede or even halt productivity improvements are huge negatives affecting costs and productivity in the public sector's unproductive union environment.
Two additional factors make the public sector productivity problem much worse than would be found in a typical union shop in the private sector.
First, in the monopolistic public sector, there is no government profit motive which encourages management and employees to make every reasonable effort to enhance productivity, remain competitive in the marketplace, and thereby stay in business.
Second, public sector union dues collected are higher as the employment rolls are higher. The higher the dues collected, the better the union likes it.
Thus, public sector management isn't motivated to keep costs low, and unions representing public employees are motivated to keep employment costs high. A double negative.
Accordingly, the more rigid the work rules in the public sector, the less productive the work force, and the less productive the work force, the more employees it takes to perform a certain amount of work. Absenteeism, sick days, vacations and such also help unions collect more dues by increasing payrolls.
But it's much worse than a productivity problem. It's a perfect example of OPM at work.
In addition to productivity opportunities, the above referenced article also gives examples of excessive costs associated with the common practices of phony disability pensions, pension spiking and the like, all done for the sole purpose of raising pension payments to retirees. Of course, this unnecessarily and inappropriately increases costs to taxpayers.
Let's look at some remarkable instances of systemic pension pay padding in the public sector:
"The indictment of seven Long Island Rail Road workers for disability fraud last week cast a spotlight on a troubled government agency. Until recently, over 90% of LIRR workers retired with a disability—even those who worked desk jobs—adding about $36,000 to their annual pensions. The cost to New York taxpayers over the past decade was $300 million.
As one investigator put it, fraud of this kind "became a culture of sorts among the LIRR workers, who took to gathering in doctor's waiting rooms bragging to each [other] about their disabilities while simultaneously talking about their golf game." How could almost every employee think fraud was the right thing to do?
The LIRR disability epidemic is hardly unique—82% of senior California state troopers are "disabled" in their last year before retirement. Pension abuses are so common—for example, "spiking" pensions with excess overtime in the last year of employment—that they're taken for granted.
Governors in Wisconsin and Ohio this year have led well-publicized showdowns with public unions. Union leaders argue they are "decimat[ing] the collective bargaining rights of public employees." What are these so-called "rights"? The dispute has focused on rich benefit packages that are drowning public budgets. Far more important is the lack of productivity.
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