Just before the long Labor Day weekend, we got a sense from Donald Trump that this holiday was never meant to be a tribute to Big Labor. Rather, it’s meant to be a tribute to the American worker.
On Thursday, Trump signed an executive order that puts an end — or at least a temporary end — to the collective bargaining rights of certain federal government unions that have missions related to national security. The affected agencies are NASA, the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service, the National Weather Service, the Office of the Commissioner of Patents, Patent and Trademark Office, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, and Hydropower Facilities within the Bureau of Reclamation.
As you might imagine, the howls came quickly from the Left. “More than 445,000 federal employees saw their union protections disappear in August,” reported The New York Times, “as agencies moved to comply with an executive order President Trump signed earlier this year that called for ignoring collective bargaining contracts with nearly one million workers. … Last Thursday, Mr. Trump signed a second executive order stripping union rights from thousands of other employees at six additional agencies.”
Notice the tendentious word choices: “protections disappear … ignoring collective bargaining contracts … stripping union rights.”
But if the Times and its fellow Democrats have a problem with Trump’s executive order, they should take it up with the American president who first called our attention to the necessarily corrupt relationship between government and government-worker unions. That president? Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As National Review’s John Fund writes:
In a 1937 letter to the president of the National Federation of Federal Employees, FDR supported the right of workers to organize to ensure adequate pay, suitable working conditions, and the addressing of grievances. But FDR believed that collective bargaining agreements were incompatible with public sector workforces. He declared that “we the people” set public policy through the democratic process in America; binding the people to a collective bargaining agreement takes authority away from the people. For the same reason, FDR opposed strikes by government employees as “unthinkable and intolerable.”
Got that? “Unthinkable and intolerable.”
We first noted Trump’s move against these public-sector unions with national-security responsibilities back in April. At the time, we pondered whether these particular unions were working for We the People, or for themselves. The answer was obvious then, just as it’s obvious now.
When public-sector union lackeys complain about the lack of job security and the need to protect their members from arbitrary dismissal, they’re blowing smoke. Civil service statutes already do that.
But that’s not all. Rather than being forced to compete in the marketplace like their unionized brethren in the private sector, unionized government employees are impervious to competition and to the natural ebb and flow of the business cycle. Why? Because public-sector unions can raise more money, hire more staff, and increase their own salaries whenever they feel like it. How? By raising your taxes. Talk about a racket.
Then there’s the issue of collective bargaining, in which private-sector union representatives negotiate salaries, rights, and benefits for their union members by sitting across the bargaining table from the company’s ownership or management. Here, the competing interests are obvious: One side wants to maximize the benefits for its workers, while the other side wants to maximize the company’s profits and its competitive advantage in the marketplace.
Now consider the collective bargaining arrangement with public-sector unions, which is fundamentally different than private-sector bargaining. In this case, we see the same unionized employees on one side of the table, but instead of seeing fiscally responsible representatives of the taxpayers on the other side, we see elected representatives who owe their livelihoods to the generous campaign contributions they receive from, yep, those same public-sector unions. Only when a Republican is in office do we see an exception to this crooked arrangement. But even in this case, it’s likely that the damage has already been done via a lucrative long-term contract “negotiated” between a prior Democrat administration and its public-sector union benefactors.
Again, what a racket.
As none other than AFL-CIO President Georgy Meany said in 1955, back before Democrats seized and began exploiting this corrupt and incestuous relationship, “It is impossible to bargain collectively with the government.”
Meany makes the essential point, although he’s technically not correct. It is possible to bargain collectively with the government. All you have to do is move from one side of the table to the other. Like so:
Public Sector Unions: I want more staff, higher pay, and better benefits.
Government Negotiators: You guys drive a tough bargain. If you’ll accept guaranteed employment, you’ve got yourself a deal.
Again, again: What a racket.
