Public Employee Unions Derail Privatization Efforts
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Critics say public employee unions are using their growing clout to delay and derail efforts to privatize government services:
- Teacher unions filed suit against school vouchers in Milwaukee; school management contracts in Baltimore, Hartford and Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania; and even contracting out janitorial services in California.
- Unions lobbied the Massachusetts legislature to pass an anti-privatization law, over Governor William Weld's veto, requiring that contracting out a service cost less than the cost of a public department performing the work would be -- if it were run efficiently.
- An internal AFL-CIO training document suggests that goals for labor-management cooperation should include improving employment security, enhancing the role of the union and reducing the role of contractors.
However, due to the lack of competition, there are many examples of excessive benefits, job protections and inefficiencies in the public sector:
- Until recently, union contracts mandated use of three employees to change a light bulb at the Philadelphia airport -- a mechanic to remove the light cover, an electrician to change the bulb and a janitor to sweep up the dust.
- New York City spent $185,000 in an unsuccessful 1994 effort to fire a teacher who was in prison for dealing cocaine.
- School custodians in New York City earn an average of $57,000 annually.
- Transit drivers in San Francisco are guaranteed 32 minutes of overtime pay a day, and they can skip up to 16 days of work a year without calling in.
- A Hawaii state worker sent to jail after his fourth criminal conviction didn't lose his job -- he served time on weekends while working five days a week as a prison guard.
Unions now represent almost 40 percent of government employees. Since private-sector union membership is falling, more than half of all union workers may be government employees by early in the next century.
Source: William D. Eggers and John O'Leary, "Union Confederates," American Spectator, March 1996.
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