Excerpt for the day - Feb 21

"When you add collective bargaining to that mix, the unions gain the power to make in private negotiations decisions that should be made in public deliberations—decisions about public priorities and public budgets. And they turn public employees into a formal procedural adversary of the public they serve. This presents some serious problems to our democratic system, problems that traditionally kept even the biggest advocates of unionism from supporting collective bargaining with the government. This is why Franklin Roosevelt said that “collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.” It is why George Meany (the first president of the AFL-CIO) said it was “impossible to bargain collectively with the government.”...Walker would not even strip state employees of the power to bargain collectively for wages, only for benefits which are easier to hide from the public. And he would not, of course, strip them of their other great advantages over private-sector workers, which are functions of their rights as citizens who also happen to be employed by the government they elect, and so could not be taken from them.

 

The notion that this involves an assault on some inalienable right to collective bargaining with the public is preposterous. Such collective bargaining is a privilege public workers have obtained by exercising their political muscle, and state officials around the country are right to try to roll it back to the extent they can."

-Yuval Levin @ the Corner