Public employee unions flourish because government is, by its nature, a monopoly. Thus, there is no need for unionized government units to compete against non-unionized units. Moreover, public officials who negotiate with public employee unions generally lack the same incentives that private employers have to keep costs down. The result has been a fiscal disaster, with numerous states and municipalities now going over the waterfall of bankruptcy.Not to mention extravagant pension plans which the taxpayers, often with very little in the way of a pension plan themselves, are obligated to pay.
Meanwhile, public employee unions have become perhaps the dominant force in our political life. They extract dues from their members which go to fund the candidacies of politicians who will pay public employees even more money. The unions' ill-gotten clout has created a vicious cycle; at the same time that government units are going broke, public employees are now far better paid than their private sector counterparts, while enjoying better benefits and ridiculous job security.
Around the nation a number of cities have had enough and are privatizing things like garbage and snow removal and are saving their taxpayers a boodle. We've experimented with public employees' unions for fifty years, but we can no longer afford to continue the experiment. It's time to end it.
It's also time to make public employees accountable for their own retirement. People who are directly responsible for the death of a newborn infant in New York because an ambulance couldn't traverse the streets that these guys didn't plow surely don't deserve to receive for twenty five years or more a pension close to, or more than, 100% of what they were making when they were working and paid for by the very taxpayers whose child is now dead.
Thanks to Hot Air for the video.