I think there's an important difference between unions in private
industry and unions of public employees. In private industry, excesses
are frequently checked by the employer's ability to, at some significant
cost, pull out of a union environment. They can ignite a strike and
hire replacements. They can move the firm to a
right-to-work-for-nothing state. They have some leverage to negotiate.
In the far more political environment of public employee unions, it's
much more complicated and the dynamic is different. Public employee
unions are big and powerful players in politics. Their ability to raise
money (hard and soft) as well as provide large amounts of in-kind
resources give them leverage other unions don't have. Private labor
unions operate in something much closer to a market environment; they
bargain for the terms under which they'll work and withhold their labor
if they don't like the deal. Public employees operate in the same
environment, using the same tactics, as an oil company seeking a huge
tax break for no good reason.
> However, far too much of my personal, direct experience of unions is
> negative. I went to secondary school in England during the early
> seventies, when the whole country could be shut down over the smallest
> and most childish of issues, often involving (you guessed it) work
> rules. We tend to forget, now, but Thatcher was elected for a reason --
> literally, to make the trains run on time. And now, my most direct
> exposure to unions is the rediculous MUNI work rules, which take all
> power from the riders (customers) and give it pretty much exclusively to
> MUNI workers.
Muni exists mainly to transfer cash from riders and taxpayers to its
largely middle-class and upper-middle-class work force (both management
and labor). In exchange for this cash transfer, they provide as little
mass transit as they can get away with.
Muni's work rules are, of course, completely ridiculous. One of the
most common questions RM gets is "when there are nine N Judahs in a row,
why can't someone at Embarcadero turn some of them into J, K, L, or M
trains?" The answer is that Muni drivers must be paid extra to drive on
a line other than the one they signed up for that day. Labor
inflexibility like this is one of Muni's most serious problems.
> Union and worker power should balance management and customer power, in
> three way tension. It should not dominate an organization to the point
> that the organization cares nothing for its customers and is essentially
> ungovernable, as on MUNI.
Private industry provides a lot of good models for this. UPS (despite a
recent debilitating strike) is a unionized organization that provides
relatively reliable service. Why? Well, partly because FedEx exists.
FedEx is nonunion (though wages and benefits are comparable to UPS) and
competes in most of the same markets. If UPS ran itself like the city
government runs Muni, UPS would have (deservedly) ceased to exist years
ago. Muni doesn't face the same kind of competition. No one else runs
a mass transit system in the city. Other forms of transportation are
limited by government: taxi licenses are arbitrarily capped at a
certain number, so even if Muni patrons could afford taxis, they
couldn't find them; parking is severely limited (not that I'm saying
this is a bad thing); and so on.
Remarkably, the left in San Francisco vociferously opposes any real
change to Muni's labor environment. The idea of people making
$20,000/year being unable to get to their work on time, getting written
up and maybe fired because the bus was late, is less troublesome to them
than the idea that a $70,000/year Muni driver might actually be held
accountable for the quality and level of service s/he provides. I
suppose that's one way to redistribute wealth.