Tag Archive for: union ideology

Public vs. Private Sector Unions

Any ideology with scores of millions of willing adherents cannot be completely without merit. For any movement numbering millions of people to flourish, at some level, their underlying ideology must resonate with mostly good people as well as with the inevitable corrupt contingent. Unions, and their ideologies, are examples of good ideas – as well as whatever bad one might ascribe to the influence of unions. And any discussion of unions in America today must assess the ideological schisms between public sector and private sector unions.

Unions for private sector companies grow when the company itself grows. If the company is not healthy, they are not healthy. When companies declare bankruptcy in the private sector, the unions and the jobs go away along with the company. Unions in the private sector envision jobs that build wealth – freeways, levees, aquaducts, new underground telecom/utility conduit upgrades in urban areas, the list is endless and inspiring. They envision jobs in capital intensive, heavy industries, construction, manufacturing, they want Americans to buy American made goods and enjoy a better and better standard of living. Private sector unions are somewhat more likely to recognize that their imperative – more union jobs – is better furthered through building infrastructure and durable manufactured goods, better furthered through competition between private companies in the free market, better furthered with less government. But the conditions that favor more jobs in the private sector conflict with the incentives that create more jobs in the public sector.

Unions represent many public sector organizations that provide absolutely essential services that are best left to government – public safety and military operations in particular. Unions in the public sector, however, also represent organizations whose numbers increase when social problems increase. Hence counter-productive redistributionist efforts by government intended to reduce, for example, poverty and inequality, because they increase the number of government worker jobs – create an incentive for these efforts to be supported by unions representing government workers – especially if these well-intentioned programs are making the problem worse. One of the most crucial battles within the public sector unions will be between those who want to see problems solved through economic growth, not redistribution, supporting a smaller government that retains the best, brightest, most capable and crucial, highly compensated employees within smaller organizations. They oppose those within public sector unions who prefer to see government power increase regardless of the economic or social cost.

One way to characterize the contrast between public sector unions and private sector unions is to say the public sector unions are internationalist and the private sector unions are nationalist. In-turn, this would suggest many well-intentioned members of public sector unions view Amerca’s national interests as always suspect to charges of being inherently ill-gotten if not criminal, because Americans consume more resources than their proportion of global population might be entitled to on a per-capita basis. These conscientious internationalists conclude America’s wealth must be redistributed to the less fortunate throughout the world. This is altruism run amok, but altruistic nonetheless.

Private sector unions, potentially, have a better understanding of the fact that it is financial sustainability, not resource sustainability, that is at issue with alleged American over-consumption. Put another way, sustainable financial growth is the result of honest hard work and innovation, which can combine in a society for centuries creating economic opportunities and wealth-producing assets, and therefore conveys to the peoples of these societies the right to a proportionately higher standard of living. According to this argument, Americans have earned the right to have a better standard of living than those of other nations. This more nationalistic position held by many private sector unions is another key reason job-creating incentives differ between public sector and private sector unions.

Private sector unions are more likely to oppose efforts to increase immigration – something that is especially harmful when fewer highly-skilled immigrants are allowed into America to work – they are wary of open borders and free trade, opposing NAFTA, for example. Nonetheless, to the extent private sector unions are nationalistic rather than internationalist furthers America’s priorities as a people; to internationalize America and redistribute her wealth to the world would require very big government and millions of new government jobs, but this new regime would diminish if not destroy the quintessential American dream, and the jobs that come every time that dream is realized again by another original American entrepreneur. The truth and reality of this uniquely American dream is the source of America’s economic vitality.

Another way unions in the public sector vs. unions in the private sector contrast regards environmentalism. In the public sector, far more revenue can be collected from the private sector by creating elaborate permit requirements and a civil/criminal legal environment of Byzantine complexity and stupefying expense, than by participating in any actual building. Private sector unions, on the other hand, benefit when something real is built, a bridge, a freeway, an aqueduct, a pipeline, a power plant.

There is a vision of environmentalism that ought to be quite popular with private sector unions, a clean development environmentalism that stands athwart the mainstream environmentalist complex (one that incorporates the entire American oligarchy – big government, big finance, big corporations, and public sector labor) and shouts “Stop the Rationing, Cut the Green Red Tape, Rebuild the Nation.”

There is a natural partnership between clean development environmentalists, and private sector unions, supporting job creating, common sense reforms – no bullet train or light rail until roads and freeways are upgraded and unclogged, no more zoning that favors building high-density clusters of McMansions that destroy semi-rural suburbs within the arbitrary “urban service boundary,” no more water rationing instead of a free water market, no more energy rationing instead of a free energy market, and especially, no CO2 regulations, which have more to do with global governance than climate management. These regressive policies further the goals of the internationalist public sector, as well as the oligarchical recipients of corporate welfare, but they do little for the private American worker, and they stunt American economic growth.

One metaphor to describe America might be said to be as a company – with assets of land and infrastructure and intellectual capital. If America can continue to create abundant wealth, America’s ability to address questions of poverty will increase at the same time as the rate of poverty decreases. Americans may owe trillions upon trillions, but America’s currency will never collapse, or hyper-inflate because America is not just a collection of financial transactions – America is a company, an economic entity of staggering wealth, a merit-based culture with a libertarian, entrepreneurial heart. How unions in the public and private sector recognize and address the consequences of their respective priorities – internationalist vs. nationalist, environmentalist vs. cleantech development, and authoritarian vs. entrepreneurial – given the fact they currently control (from within and without) a significant percentage of America’s city, county and state governments – is arguably the prevailing political question in America today.

Contrasting Environmentalism & Unions

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a man who always stood up for the worker, once made this very contrarian statement “I would continue where others have stopped, and I would rise when others sleep.” This is an inspiring explanation of the moral worth of polemics, or being contrarian for its own sake. Because not only are polemics a potentially pointless, occasionally perilous game, tolerating the polemicist is the only reason we have political freedom. One might also add that indulging contrarian thought is the only way we preserve a glimmer of truth, during every time our world is seized with misplaced monolithic zeal, and consequently, nurturing the contrarian is a way civilization can better adapt and embrace disruptive and productive innovations and more quickly evolve. So how would workers or contrarians view our latest global panic, the war on CO2 emissions? In considering this question, the differences between unions, who care about workers, and environmentalists, who care about nature, become quite interesting.

Global warming policies and environmentalist policies in general are only in part about global warming or environmentalism, they are more generally about to what extent we redesign our government to give more rights to government and fewer rights to individual property owners. Environmentalists claim their policies benefit the economy, but one might just as easily argue that is not only false, but dangerously false. In the name of environmentalism we are not simply slowing our economy down, we are failing to develop and maintain infrastructure necessary to avoid natural disasters. A certain amount of environmentalist wisdom informing government laws and regulations is healthy, indeed essential. But restricting development of water infrastructure, power plants and freeways, forcing developers to only be permitted to approach heavily restricted lists of eligible property owners based on “urban service boundaries,” and litigating literally everything in the name of some environmentalist statute or presumed statute – is environmental extremism, not common sense environmentalism. Now we have the war on CO2. This imperils the global economy, it undermines attempts to improve human safety and security, and threatens the freedom of individuals and nations.

Two of the biggest drains on the United States economy over the past 30-50 years are environmentalists and labor unions. Both have reduced the efficiency of the economy in critical areas. Environmental laws and litigation have raised the costs for all resources, dramatically slowing economic development while only yielding marginal additional environmental benefits – if any. The power of big labor, in both the public and private sector, has reduced the ability of unionized workforces to right-size their entitlements in the face of lower revenues. This inflexibility in-turn causes larger than necessary shocks when large corporations or government entities postpone restructuring because of legacy obligations.

Unlike environmentalist policies, however, the impact of unions – in both the public and private sector – are at least economically progressive in a relatively egalitarian and competitive system that values project-merit, and therefore release money into a broader and more productive sector of the economy. Environmentalism, on the other hand, funds jobs for government bureaucrats along with astronomical fees for private service professionals – people who produce nothing and are motivated by their compensation to perpetually demand additional takings. Such environmentalism is regressive and slows economic growth, it raises costs of living for working people and transfers the wealth to far fewer, far more highly compensated, far less productive individuals. Environmentalism, at its idealist core, too often worships nature and marginalizes the aspirations of individuals, and consequently restricts building activity. Union organizing, at its idealist core, is to care above all for the common man who works to build things that create wealth.

Another crucial distinction between unionism and environmentalism is there is an inevitable end to the need to have unions, because the need for unions will wither away as per capita wealth increases. Since ever-advancing technology and slowing human birthrates guarantee that per capita wealth will always increase, eventually there will be enough overall wealth in the world to provide everyone with basic needs and more. Environmentalism, on the other hand, has no inevitable limit, it must be self regulating. And the more extreme environmentalist policies become, the less wealth we will have. Environmentalist doomsday predictions of resource shortages will likely occur, if they occur, precisely because we stopped developing resources in the name of protecting the environment. Balance has been lost in the discussion – the trump card is the alleged need to stop CO2 emissions – and the zealotry and propaganda mustered today to silence climate skeptics would make Francisco Franco proud, and others, in hopefully not all of their unfortunate worst iterations.

Of course we should prepare for climate change. The climate changes catastrophically all the time, these are called “storms,” and they are perfectly natural. Sometimes, since the beginning of time, we have had “extreme storms,” and this is also perfectly natural. As our ability to mitigate risk to humans increases through technology, our values and our priorities to upgrade publically available human protections increases apace. Of course we need to better prepare for droughts and extreme weather. But we need to do this regardless of whether or not CO2 is causing overall temperatures to increase – and excuse me if, Marquez-like, I would continue with my global warming skepticism where others have stopped. Along with underground HVDC electrical grid upgrades, we should be building freeways and aqueducts and offshore LNG terminals. We should be burying fiberoptic cable and moving electricity conduits underground, and eliminate the visual scourge and dangerous tangle of overhead telephone wires and telecom cables across the old suburbia. There are plenty of union jobs out there waiting to be done, and they create real value, but approving any of these developments requires prohibitive environmental compliance costs – billions and billions and by God, nowadays, trillions of dollars. The fact that unions and environmentalists are in the same political party in America is curious, to say the least.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez also said this, “I have learned that a man has the right to look down on somebody only when he is helping him to get up.” Environmentalists may claim to have this impulse, but unlike the unionists who clearly are empathic with ordinary people, environmentalist policies are now ignoring the needs of ordinary people in favor of elites. The environmentalist mantra ala stopping global warming at any costs will benefit the established oligarchal elites, not the working man, not unionists, not minority activists, nor free thinking liberals. Why then do those who claim to speak for working people continue to embrace extreme environmentalism, when its practice yields results that are opposed to their own core values and goals?  The way the workers will rise economically to the point where unions can willingly wither away will be when we implement infrastructure proposals and public policies designed to make energy, water, transportation and shelter less expensive, not more expensive. This will require reforming environmentalism.