Philip Howard Wants Public-Sector Unions to Let Government Work

As part of a project for Capital Matters, called Capital Writing, I’ll be interviewing authors of economics books for the National Review Institute’s YouTube channel. This time, I talked to Philip Howard of Common Good about his book, Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions. Below you will find an edited transcript of a few key parts of our conversation as well as the full video of our interview.

Dominic Pino: Let’s start with a lay of the land on public-sector unions. Where are they allowed and what areas of government are they most prevalent in?

Philip Howard: Public-sector unions were only authorized in the late 1960s, generally, and they’re allowed, with variations on what they can do, in the federal government and in 38 states.

DP: When we talk about collective bargaining, what are the kinds of things that unions are negotiating when they come to the bargaining table?

PH: Right, well, there’s a lot to talk about here. In general, the way collective bargaining in the public sector works is very different than in the private sector. Over the last 50 years, the public-sector unions have bargained for procedural protections that basically make it impossible to hold anyone accountable. So, there’s an 18-year study on teachers in the state of Illinois that found that an average of two out of 95,000 teachers per year were dismissed for performance. That’s twice the rate as in California. So we’re talking about basically zero. Ninety-nine percent of all federal employees get a fully successful rating, because procedures provide that if you put one negative comment in the file, the supervisor will find himself in a legal hearing, having to prove it, with union lawyers on the other side. It’s just too much trouble, so no one does it.

Accountability has disappeared, and manageability has largely disappeared. Resource allocation — if you want some people to do this instead of that, the work crew sees an overhanging limb that should be cut, but the rules don’t allow that, you have to have a separate work crew come in to do an overhanging limb. So incredibly rigid work rules.

And then financially, over the last 50 years, they’ve gradually clawed more and more out of pension and retirement and health-care benefits, things that are somewhat opaque to the public. Public-safety officers can generally retire after 20 or 22 years, so they’re retiring in their early 40s, with full pensions, and often go back to work in the same place, so they’re collecting double. There’s a phenomenon known as “spiking,” where pensions are determined by the last year or two of compensation, so people work lots of overtime in the last year or two and double their pension. There’s often no requirement to contribute to health care. In New York City, the zero health-care contribution compared to the way it would work in other places — we’re talking about over a billion dollars a year. It’s made government unmanageable because of no accountability and work rules, and it’s made government unaffordable.

DP: You had this list on page 63 of your book listing some of the rules that teachers’ unions are allowed to bargain with, and I just wanted to read some of these because they’re so crazy. “Rules that require principals to give advance notice to teachers before visiting their classrooms to evaluate performance, rules that prohibit the use of standardized student tests for evaluating teacher performance” — I can’t think of a better way to evaluate how teachers are doing — “rules that specify all the procedures that must be followed if a teacher is evaluated as unsatisfactory, rules that give teachers guaranteed preparation time of a specified number of minutes per day, rules that limit the number of faculty meetings and their duration, rules that limit the number of parent conferences and other forums in which teachers meet with parents,” and this goes on and on. You say in the book, if we were designing schools to educate children, these are not the rules we’d have in place.

PH: I was on a podcast recently with Bob Shrum, who’s a prominent Democratic adviser, and he was saying how these contracts are the only protection for public workers, or whatever. First of all, they didn’t really need protection in the late ’60s. It wasn’t like the children were being mangled in factories. And he was sort of pushing back, and I said, just give me one example of a requirement in these contracts that’s good for the public. Just one example in these two-, three-, four-hundred-page contracts filled with the kind of requirements you just read out, that are all designed to make so that if you want to do anything, adapt to any daily situation, you have to get the union’s approval. So he thought for a minute and said that teachers’ unions negotiate for smaller class sizes. I said, aha, so it’s only coincidence that that results in the hiring of more teachers.

I was being interviewed by the columnist Joe Klein recently, and he talked about how his wife was trying to go to a parent conference for their daughter, and there was a line of parents, and this was important to them because their daughter wasn’t doing that well, and his wife came up in line and the teacher started to leave. The teacher said, it’s nine o’clock, I’m only required to be here until nine o’clock. She said, but I really need to talk to you about our daughter. He said, I can’t, union rules, I can’t talk after nine o’clock, and walked out on her. It’s incredible. So you get this mindset of not doing the job and basically following the rules, it’s this kind of central-planning mentality.

DP: One of the points you bring up many times in the book is that this whole apparatus is not that old. This only came out of the 1960s. A lot of the early labor leaders and a lot of early pro-union Democrats who were very much in favor of unions in the private sector in the ’20s and ’30s were strongly against unions in the public sector because they saw these exact problems with this encouragement to basically negotiate against the public.

PH: FDR said the process of collective bargaining cannot be transplanted into the public service, and union leaders felt the same way. But there’s another dynamic here that’s really important that the public didn’t understand, and frankly, the experts in the late 1960s didn’t understand. It’s that the difference between bargaining in the private sector and the public sector is not a difference in degree. It’s a difference in kind.

I’ll just give two reasons. In the private sector, what a union can negotiate for is limited by market forces. If they argue for inefficient work rules, that business is either going to go out of business or it’s going to move out of town. That’s sort of what happened to auto companies in the 1970s. They couldn’t deal with all of these rigid requirements. In the public sector, the government can’t move out of town and it really can’t go out of business. So what’s happened for 50 years is that the taxpayers have been forced to pay the burden of work rules and unmanageability that, conservatively, waste half the money.

In Baltimore, there were 23 schools where not one student is proficient in math. Not one student. So if you were elected mayor, you would do anything possible to shake up that school. You would change the leadership, you would change the teachers, you would change the way it works. But they have none of those powers because of the unions. It not only wastes, conservatively, half the money, but it also makes it so that really important social institutions fail.

I have an appointment at a branch of the economics department at Columbia, and we had a forum recently, and Niall Ferguson, the historian, was part of the forum. And he talked about this problem as a really serious national-security problem. How can we possibly compete in the future with China and others if we can’t do the most basic things because of this rigidity? We can’t run schools properly, we can’t solve the problem of the underclass, we can’t build modern infrastructure efficiently, etc.

The second point is that it’s not just the difference in what you can bargain for, but how the bargaining works. In the private sector, if a corporate manager took money or benefits from the labor union, both the corporate manager and the union leaders would be put in jail. That would be fraud. In the public sector, and I go through lots of examples of this in the book, the unions will spend tens of millions of dollars to get a governor elected. In the case of recent New Jersey elections, union employees ran the campaign headquarters. The unions provided busloads of union members, who were paid a per diem, to man phone banks and go door-to-door to get the governor elected. Then, the governor gets elected, and sits down at the bargaining table with the unions, as required by law, to agree on the terms and conditions of employment. Is that a negotiation? No, it’s a payoff. It’s unbelievably, obviously corrupt, and the unions crow about it. They say, we elect our own bosses. It’s unbelievable how arrogant they are and how shameless they are about this derogation of morals and democratic governance.

So the difference between public and private bargaining was not appreciated at the time they did this. The people running the public-employee associations have been angling for power ever since public employment became permanent after the spoils system was replaced by the civil-service system. They had been rejected by Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, FDR, LaGuardia, everybody. Then the ’60s came along with the rights revolution and everybody was looking at things from the standpoint of how to protect the poor individual and it was just like falling off a log to finally give them collective-bargaining power. And the experts who supported it — and I go through their discussions, all these law-school forums that were held on whether to allow public-sector bargaining — without any question, the people who supported it back in the late ’60s would say that the way it evolved is unconstitutional.