I wrote a post earlier today that you might have stumbled on.
Ezra Klein writes:
Earlier today, I linked to Reihan Salam saying that Virginia is a state where the public employees can’t collectively bargain. He expands on the point at his blog and says the lesson of Virginia isn’t just that the public employees can’t collectively bargain but that they can’t collectively bargain and the state is really, really well run, or at least was under Mark Warner and Tim Kaine.
I’m very confused by this last sentence. I had a very narrow objective.
Reihan doesn’t really bring any more evidence to bear on the question than that.
That’s correct — the post was reconstructing my tweet-length musings on the subject.
As he sort of notes, the performance of various state governments is complicated, and it’d take a special kind of foolishness to try to lash it too tightly to collective bargaining arrangements.
I also think it would take a special kind of foolishness to assume that collective bargaining is the only way to protect the interests of workers, public or private, and that curbing collective bargaining rights represents an “assault” on public workers.
Take a look at this map, which shows which states allow for collective bargaining and which states don’t. Now take a look at this map, which shows the Pew Center on the States’ grades for government performance. The three top-ranked states are Virginia, Utah and Washington. Virginia doesn’t allow collective bargaining for public employees, Utah allows it, and Washington enforces it.
The Utah case is somewhat more complicated, as you’ll see here [PDF].
Bargaining in Utah, a right-to-work state without a collective bargaining law, is somewhat unique. Thirty-nine states have public sector bargaining laws. Nineteen states have right-to-work laws. Obviously, some right-to-work states have bargaining laws.
The Park City case specifically states that boards of education have the authority to enter into and are bound by the terms of a collectively bargained agreement, subject to various limitations. In Alpine School District v. Ward, the court held that it was the duty of the court, not the board of education, to interpret and apply the terms of a collective bargaining agreement. Both the Constitution of Utah and state statute protect the right of public employees to organize. However, nothing in Utah law requires public employers to bargain with their employees. Accordingly, public employees have no statutory right to compel their employers to bargain with them. Several local associations have successfully bargained a provision in a CBA that require the board to bargain in good faith with the association. [Emphasis added.]
As you can imagine, the fact that nothing in Utah law requires public employers to bargain with their employees shapes the broader environment — it helps restrain the demands that are made. One can imagine a constructive scenario in which workers receive representation, yet take a more collaborative rather than a confrontational posture.
I imagine that there are many arrangements that could work well. I see nothing wrong with an elected legislature trying to make a break with past practice. Drawing on the experience of other states is never going to be dispositive — much depends on institutional history, trust, the leadership of public employee unions as well as the quality of public sector management.
Part of the confusion here could be that I don’t think that there are any easy or obvious answers. I just don’t think it’s obvious that rolling back collective bargaining is a bad idea. Moreover, I think that there is an intuitive case for giving local officials more flexibility in setting compensation schemes, which, as I’ve noted in another post, is a reason to be skeptical of lockstep compensation in any form.
Good post. But I do wish someone would point out that collective bargaining is not a right in the sense of the meaning that term has within American political culture. A right in America connotes something that is given to individuals by a power high than government and that thus cannot be taken away by government. Collective bargaining does not fall into that category.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe fact that states can be high performance with or without collective bargaining for their employees says very little about whether collective bargaining is a positive value in itself. Also, he mentions that collective bargaining may not be the only way to ensure the interests of workers are met, but provides no concrete alternative (at least in this post). And finally, back to reality, it is not as if the Wisconsin Republicans are looking for any alternative. It seems pretty clear their purpose is to cut worker representation out of the process entirely.
And in response to Longplay, the type of rights he mentions could be called natural rights, but that is only one aspect of rights discourse. First of all, you could distinguish between natural rights proper and rights that are meant to ensure the exercise of those natural rights. For example, the right to vote is only in place so that people can exercise the more fundamental right to participate in the governance of society. And then I don't think it is illegitimate to speak of certain types of rights as granted by the government. These rights are also meant to be institutional ways of exercising the other types of rights. So even if a government can take them away, should it, if no alternative means of exercising more fundamental rights have been proposed? This leads us back to my point regarding Salam's post. I think there is something fundamental about workers, as a group, being able to participate in the terms of employment rather than simply being dictated to by their employer.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIf any fundamental human right is involved in all this, it has to be the right of individuals to voluntarily exchange goods and services on mutually agreeable terms, free from coercion.
In this light it should be clear that so-called "collective bargaining" (more accurately understood as organized extortion) is a violation of human rights. The essence of unionism as practiced in reality is coercion.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAustinBishop79 states, "This leads us back to my point regarding Salam's post. I think there is something fundamental about workers, as a group, being able to participate in the terms of employment rather than simply being dictated to by their employer."
No group of people has the moral right to compel any one, employer or otherwise, to negotiate with them. To attempt to do so is to violate the right of free association. (And yes, I would take this principle to its logical conclusions in other areas of human interaction, but they are not the issue here. So if you are black and wish to have only black friends, then that is your moral right.)
If I wish to sell my used car, and a "buyers union" compels me to negotiate with only them, disallowing me to negotiate with individual buyers, then they are not exercising their natural rights; they are merely committing extortion.
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