Countervailing power

Many commentators on the right have made the argument that public sector workers should not be allowed to unionize because they can use their political power to elect the very officials who they negotiate with over compensation. For example Daniel DiSalvo writes:

When it comes to advancing their interests, public-sector unions have significant advantages over traditional unions. For one thing, using the political process, they can exert far greater influence over their members' employers — that is, government — than private-sector unions can. Through their extensive political activity, these government-workers' unions help elect the very politicians who will act as "management" in their contract negotiations — in effect handpicking those who will sit across the bargaining table from them, in a way that workers in a private corporation (like, say, American Airlines or the Washington Post Company) cannot. Such power led Victor Gotbaum, the leader of District Council 37 of the AFSCME in New York City, to brag in 1975: "We have the ability, in a sense, to elect our own boss."

This is a fair enough criticism, but it applies equally to business groups that support political campaigns and then cash in favors when their man or woman takes office. For example, road builders contributed $128,000 to Scott Walker's campaign. One of Walker's first acts as governor was then to cancel plans to use stimulus money to build high-speed rail and petition the Obama administration to redirect the $800 million of federal money to road projects. Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, one of Wisconsin's biggest business lobbying groups, spent $950,000 to help elect Walker. Danged if Walker and the Republican legislature didn't pass a big tax cut for manufacturers as soon as they took office.

Government - federal, state or local - is not a neutral forum where disinterested public servants allocate resources in the public interest. It is an arena where organized interest groups compete to wrest public resources from each other by bribing and threatening self-interested politicians. When the competing interest groups are numerous and diverse, we can reasonably hope that each group checks and balances the others and something approximating the public interest can emerge. This is John Kenneth Galbraith's idea of "countervailing power."

Critics of the public sector unions decry the attempts of unions to work the political system to feather their nests while ignoring the efforts of business interests to do exactly the same thing. Here's a proposal: let's have a system of public financing of campaigns at the state and federal level so that public officials are less dependent on organized interest groups and are therefore more likely to act in what they perceive to be the public interest. Let AFSCME continue to bargain on behalf of workers, but reduce its power to choose the people on the other side of the bargaining table. And reduce the ability of government contractors to choose the people to whom they submit bids, reduce the ability of developers to choose the people voting on zoning variances that affect them, reduce the ability of business groups to choose the people voting on their tax rates,... But if you're not willing to take that step to curtail the lobbying power of business, then leave labor alone.