[spoiler]Panel one
TITLE: Top Ten Ways Teacher’s Unions Caused the Economic Crisis (note: the words “teacher’s unions” are in a dripping blood font).
GRINNING DUDE IN SUIT WHO IS WEARING A FAKE HALO: Brought to you by the coalition of completely innocent bankers!
Panel two
BALDING DUDE IN SUIT, WITH PEDANTIC ATTITUDE: Maybe bankers wouldn’t destroy the economy if SOMEBODY had done a better job teaching them addition!
Panel three
DUDE IN SPORTS SHIRT: Two words: SUMMER VACATIONS.
Panel four
GRINNING WOMAN HOLDING BIBLE: If teachers allowed prayer in class and didn’t teach evolution, GOD wouldn’t have FORSAKEN THE ECONOMY!
Panel five
MAN SITTING ON HUGE PILE OF MONEY: Teacher pay sucks MILLIONS from the economy that could otherwise be spent in more PRODUCTIVE sectors of the economy. Like finance!
Panel six
YET ANOTHER BALDING DUDE WITH A NECKTIE, SCREAMING AND GESTURING WILDLY: UNIONS ARE EEEVIILLLL!! BOOGA BOOOGA!
Panel seven
SMILING WOMAN WITH NICE HAIR: When we just GIVE children an education, we kill their instinct for the FREE MARKET! First graders need more skin in the game!
Panel eight
MAN IN KLAN OUTFIT: Teachers unions support DEMOCRATS, democrats support giving MORTGAGES to BLACK PEOPLE, loaning BLACKS money DESTROYS the ECONOMY. Isn’t that obvious?
Panel nine
RICH DUDE STANDING IN FRONT OF MANSION: If unions didn’t lower PRODUCTIVITY, we BANKERS wouldn’t have to sell worthless sub-prime mortgages just to squeak out a meager living!
Panel ten
Image shows two young people, looking angry, and wearing Hogwarts uniforms.
GIRL: After Voldemort killed Lily and James Potter, his NEXT STEP was forming a TEACHERS’ UNION!
BOY: What a louse!
Panel eleven
GRINNING, POWERFUL-LOOKING DUDE IN SUIT: If no one was teaching MATH, we wouldn’t even KNOW there WAS an economic crisis. Problem SOLVED![/spoiler]
I just need to say thank you for this!
Is that Paul Krugman in #6?
#6 reminds me of the training video they used to show at Sam’s Club when I got hired. Seriously, all the eeeeeevil union reps were only lacking a trenchcoat and an alley to leap out from.
When I worked at a major medical device manufacturer I took their internal management course. At one point they covered unions. The company had 1000’s of workers of all kinds – marketing, sales, technical, manufacturing, etc. We were informed that there were 36 union workers in the company – apparently holdovers from a small company they bought. As far as they were concerned that was 36 too many. We were told that we were to report to our management anyone who uttered the word “union” – time, place, who it was and who they were talking to.
I have no problem at all with private unions. They’re in a market, so if they overprice their labor they’ll be subject to market forces. I do have an issue with public unions, since they enjoy a monopoly and they are insulated from market forces. At least up to now public unions’ management’s compensation is independent of expenditures and their management’s continued tenure is positively incremented by giving the unions more favorable terms (campaign contributions, campaign workers, etc.) instead of negatively incremented as they would be in a private company.
I’m not aware of – or don’t understand the description of – the distinctions between public and private unions set forth above.
The principle difference I know about between public unions and private unions involves the practicalities of negotiations. Private employers that negotiate with a union have some prospect of personally benefiting when they reduce operating costs, including labor costs; thus they have an incentive to drive a harder bargain than do public managers. Put another way, private employers face a threat of being driven out of business by competitors with lower operating costs, and therefore these employers have a stronger incentive to keep operating costs low than do public employers, which typically do not face market competition for their goods and services.
Finally, do unions operate in a market? Sure; they provide some benefits for some costs, and employees can collectively decide whether it’s worth the cost to organize/retain a union. As far as I know, this same dynamic applies to public and private unions.
But as a practical matter, employees would not get to make this decision except for the existence of laws such as the National Labor Relations Act which bestow on unions the non-market power to impose majority rule on minorities. That is, an authorized bargaining unit can extract dues from all employees within the unit and negotiate on behalf of all employees within the unit, whether or not any given employee approves. How important is that non-market power of exclusive representation? States that opt out of this provision — so-called “Right to Work” states — become, in practice, non-union states.
Really? OK, then:
The two “big reasons” for unionization tend to be
1) Protecting employees from unfair conditions; and
2) Preventing employers from getting an unfair percentage of the profit which was generated by the workers.
Neither of those apply in the public sphere.
#1 doesn’t apply because “unfair” is objectively meaningless. It’s a subjective term that is defined by the voting majority. Absent short term fluctuations, the definition of “fair” comes from them. You can validly argue for the protection of a minority against majority-defined “fairness,” but “employee of the government” isn’t that sort of minority so it doesn’t apply here.
#2 doesn’t apply because the profit (if any) gets directly distributed to the public. Also, as with #1 the “fair” apportionment of profit between employees/public is defined by the public.
As for the other examples, here are a few (oh, for a way to make a table…..)
Employer
Private: Private individuals
Public: Public government
Non-union supervision over employer:
Private: None / Statutory
Government: Statutory / Voter control
Public access to information regarding employer:
Private: None/ SEC disclosure
Government: Full, FOIA or otherwise
Apportionment of any extra benefits to employers:
Private: Owners/shareholders
Public: Public at large
Need for provision of service (the particular service provided by the employees):
Private: Varies from none to high, though competition almost always exists.
Public: High to absolute (the government doesn’t usually provide unnecessary services as defined by voters; and the impetus for government intervention is usually that the private sector doesn’t or can’t do it on its own.)
Additional other-than-union controls of employees over working conditions:
Private: Limited; they can buy stock and can lobby stockholders.
Public: Good; they can lobby for political office (or run themselves;) they can vote; they can participate in the political process.
Who bears the burden of higher employee payments:
Private: Stockholders / Employers
Public: Public at large
Who bears the burden of low employee performance:
Private: Stockholders / Employers
Public: Public at large
Means of non-union employee control:
Private: Employee ownership; stock sharing; starting a competitive company; etc.
Public: regulatory capture
Controls over mistreatment of workers by employers, absent union participation:
Private: Statutory
Public: Statutory; open disclosure; voter participation; public input
nobody.really: “Put another way, private employers face a threat of being driven out of business by competitors with lower operating costs, and therefore these employers have a stronger incentive to keep operating costs low than do public employers, which typically do not face market competition for their goods and services.”
The flip side of that is that private unions also understand that they cannot be too tough with the employer because, if the employer goes under, the union loses. Both sides have incentives to keep the other side happy and to keep the business afloat. Thus, a delicate balance that pleases both sides has to be struck or everyone loses (the recent NFL and NBA labor disputes are good examples of this; in the NFL, both sides knew they had to reach a deal because there was too much money at stake for them not to).
In public unions, where the government has no real threat of going out of business, the government has no incentive to keep costs down and the union has no incentive to keep costs down. The union can make huge demands to their benefit and the politicians (many of whom depend on union contributions for their campaigns) don’t feel a pinch when costs go up.
That is one of two things that bugs me about this cartoon:
1) This sort of discussion does not appear in any panel (usually, Amp’s caricatures are more on point);
2) The whole premise is a sort of non-sequitur. I don’t think there is a claim that teacher’s unions caused this economic crisis. I think he is conflating 3 things: 1) teacher’s union’s causing state government financial crises; 2) banker’s causing a financial crisis at the federal level through the real estate bubble; and 3) the higher educational system and the banker’s causing a “student loan bubble” at the federal level.
-Jut
The idea that neither management nor the union in public employment have an incentive to keep costs down assumes that (a) neither management nor unions have any interest in accomplishing the goals of the organization and (b) management does not operate on a fixed budget.
It also flies in the face of reality. Innumerable public employee unions have been negotiating give-backs and wage freezes with states and local governments in response to the recession. The claims put forth in this comment thread about the problems with public employees unions seem to me to be incapable of being squared with this simple fact. You all say that neither management nor the union have an incentive to keep costs down, and yet they demonstrably do negotiate to keep costs down.
Anyway, I think Amp’s point in this cartoon is not to argue with the anti-teachers union claims, but to suggest that they are a distraction and a red herring. We are are in the worst recession since the great depression. Teachers unions didn’t cause it. Attacks on teachers unions won’t solve it.
“No incentive” should be replaced with “less incentive”.
Public sector unions did not cause the recession, but they are a significant component of the revenue trap that most state governments are in, and those revenue traps are extremely restrictive on the states’ abilities to enact the kinds of policies that make sense in times of recession. And then, bottom-up, the states’ paralysis undermines any Federal effort. As Krugman has pointed out, one major reason that the stimulus didn’t do anything much is that the increased federal spending was offset by state cuts; the federal money simply replaced state money and created no economic impetus.
So “teacher unions are eeevil!” may well be USED as a red herring or a distraction by someone arguing in bad faith, but the larger question of whether public sector unions are beneficial to the economy or not is far from irrelevant.
I share the view that unions tend to constrain the discretion of management (relative to a workplace without unions), and this can make an enterprise less nimble. I see this dynamic in both public- and private-sector unions.
Ironically, the example cited above illustrates the OPPOSITE dynamic. States were not paralyzed by the recession; states sprang into action and LAID OFF EMPLOYEES. True, this action proved counter-productive, but that doesn’t render it paralysis.
Alas, if only public sector unions actually had the overweening qualities people attribute to them, the economy might be doing better now….
They do? How?
Can you quote a few of mine, please–there are plenty–and explain your statement?
Just FYI, I’m not part of the “all” here.
g&w, I ignored your comment the first time around, but I just skimmed it. It seems extraneous. I should have said JutGory and RonF, rather than “all”. Apologies for implying that whatever it was you wrote was similar to what RonF and JutGory were arguing (I assumed you were on-topic and disagreeing with nobody.really). I was writing quickly and wanted to respond to the tenor of the thread rather than specific points.
g&w,
As to “how?” I don’t even know what you are asking. RonF and JutGory claim that neither public employee management nor unions have incentives to keep costs down. We have recent innumerable events of public employee management and unions successfully negotiating to actively cut labor costs. If they have little incentive to do so, why are they doing so?
I love the way #1 and 10 go full circle: it’s teacher’s unions fault for not teaching math well enough-and for teaching it too well.
“If they have little incentive to do so, why are they doing so?”
Incentive and obligation aren’t always correlated. I have little incentive to pay my ex-wife’s marital support; I get nothing from it, there isn’t much negative incentive (there are few consequences to a person in my position for not paying it, for a complex of reasons not relevant here) if I fail to pay it, and in fact it gravels me considerably to write the check.
But I am obliged to write it by my acceptance of the social contract and the notion that people who have submitted their disputes to a court should accept the rulings of the court, and so I do so.
In response to threats, mostly. Whether you view that as acting on an incentive is sort of an interesting question.
Charles S.: “We have recent innumerable events of public employee management and unions successfully negotiating to actively cut labor costs.”
You are not talking about Wisconsin, are you? I would hardly call that a negotiation and I would hardly call it a voluntary act on behalf of the union.
-Jut