Unfireable Offenders

In his latest book, Philip K. Howard argues that the lack of government accountability can be attributed to public employee unions. He cites the case of Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who killed George Floyd, and had previously accumulated numerous citizen complaints. However, the local police union contract prevented Chauvin from being fired or reassigned. Howard suggests that this lack of accountability is widespread in American government, with public managers rarely dismissing employees for poor performance, even after numerous complaints, as seen in the case of the Minneapolis police department.

Employee protections in union contracts can lead to abuse or malfeasance within the workforce. For example, a New York school principal who created a fraudulent system of school achievement was dismissed but will still receive his full salary and benefits of over $265,000 annually for the next seven years due to his union contract. An EPA employee who was caught surfing porn sites during work hours was paid for almost two years until he made a deal to retire. Even the smallest of details in municipal operations, like a Parks Department employee filing a grievance against his supervisor for asking him to straighten his nameplate, or rigid job categories written into union contracts can substantially raise maintenance costs.

Howard acknowledges that the majority of government workers are competent and dedicated to doing their jobs well, and many are even underpaid. However, he argues that public employee unions have too much power and limit government managers’ ability to provide fair and efficient public services. This can be traced back to the legalization of public collective bargaining in the 1960s, allowing unions to impose increasingly restrictive limitations on how government managers can do their jobs. Private businesses still have to limit union demands to what the company can afford to pay, unlike public employee unions, who can have their demands met by just raising taxes, as public officials commonly cave to those demands due to pressure from union members and their voting power.

The original impetus for public collective bargaining was to break political machine forces at the local level. Politicians like former New York mayor Robert Wagner saw union support as a way of gaining control. Former President John F. Kennedy’s executive order authorizing collective bargaining at the federal level, however, was motivated by payback for union political support rather than a concern for efficiency. Public collective bargaining should be declared unconstitutional based on two provisions in the Constitution, claims Howard: Article II, which vests “the executive power” in the president, and the clause in Article IV that guarantees to each state a “republican form of government.” Public employee unions’ control hinders the government’s ability to provide sufficient and accountable public services, and thus, the people’s right to self-government is being violated.

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