Mickey Kaus is an influential lefty blogger and commentator. He’s been writing from the left side of the political spectrum for quite a while and recently even ran against incumbent politician, Senator Barbara Boxer in California. He lost the primary, of course, but had a respectable showing for someone without millions of dollars to fund his campaign.

One of his chief gripes with his side of the aisle has been the fact that the Democrat Party is not only just sold out to the unions, but owned by them lock, stock and barrel.

Reason Magazine recently conducted an extensive interview with the blogger cum candidate that is quite a read. We get full frontal Kaus here and it is a very good perspective showing that some on the left are even questioning the power of unions.

Kaus beat up unions prety good. Here’s what he had to say:

I do think unions have done a lot for people, but I think they’re a form that has now outlived its usefulness. What unions do is give workers democratically the right to choose a bargaining representative who’s then their exclusive representative. That’s the whole key to unionism. What are going to be the first demands of an honest democratic workforce? They’re going to demand you can’t fire me without notice and a hearing because we don’t want arbitrary firings. And when people gather in a group, they say we don’t make invidious distinctions by merit, we want promotion by seniority and layoff by seniority. Two perfectly reasonable things. They happen to be terrible for an organization that wants to succeed because the due process hearings for firings inevitably become cumbersome and you basically give up firing people, and promotion by seniority means you only have to do well enough not to get fired and you’ll advance. There’s no incentive to doing really well. General Electric would not be General Electric if it had these two policies.

So, right off the bat, unions do not contribute to productivity. The question is, what all do they do that’s so good that compensates for this effect? I don’t see it anymore.

Public employees is a much worse situation. If a private sector union asks for too much and the company gives it to them, the company will disappear, as half of General Motors disappeared. That incentive or disincentive doesn’t have impact in the public sector. All the union has to do is get some politician to vote a tax increase to pay the increased salary, and boom—they’re back in business. That’s what happened year after year and now it’s all coming to a head because cities and towns and states all across America are starting to go bankrupt under the weight of these generations of wage increases and pension increases that unions have won for themselves.

Public employees didn’t used to be able to organize. They had civil service protections. That was enough. It was only starting in the last quarter of the 20th century that politicians gave them the right to organize. That could be repealed.

There’s much more than this, of course. The interview is worth your full attention. Click on over to Reason Magazine and check it out.

No related posts.