I'm not opposed to collective bargaining in general. Not a big fan of it but I recognize the necessity of it to prevent abuses upon employees. ABUSES mind you.
Collective bargaining in the private sector serves the interests of both sides ... managers (those who pay one's salary and need to maintain an effective workforce) and employees (who get paid a fair salary for good work).
'Managment' has an interest in keeping the company running which includes making some profit, ensuring investors get something for their money, producing a quality/competitive product, ability to set the company's strategy with enough freedom, and staying in business. The people granting salary increases and benefits have something to say about those, as they should in order to keep the business healthy economically and other ways. They have and ought to have the ability to control costs sufficiently to keep a healthy bottom-line or they won't be in business long. Collective bargaining works for them because they're the ones who have responsibility for the money side of the business.
Employees, on the other hand, need a safe workplace, fair work practices and fair wages in return for an honest day's work. They need some control over that so they're not taken advantage of by a dictatorial company leadership. If not for unions, company leadership has the ability to make life miserable for them. Which in fact happened back in the day and is why we have unions.
Unions in public employment has serious built-in problems. The big one is that the people with whom employees 'collectively bargain' are NOT the ones who pay for their wages and benefits. Management's incentive to do what's right for the people who pay the bills is almost completely lacking. It's an obvious formula for problems.
In government, there's actually an incentive at play for managers to give employees more or less whatever they want, not what citizens can afford. Not only does the money NOT come from that management but higher pay and more benefits gets more votes to the managers who give away the most stuff to employees. Managers don't have a big problem giving away the company's wealth because it's not their wealth. Public sector managers have little accountability to the people who pay the wages and benefits, the citizens of America. In fact, if their product or its costs get out of control, public management aren't the people hurt the most. They're accountable to no one for keeping a healthy bottom-line or product (ie, service to citizens).
The biggest problem with public employee unions is that the people who pay the negotiated pay and benefits increases are NOT AT THE BARGAINING TABLE. In that sense what they're doing is NOT REALLY COLLECTIVE BARGAINING AT ALL. It's more a form of collusion to rip off American taxpayers with almost no oversight from them. Public employment managers have almost no incentive to do the right thing for the citizens from whom the money comes. The only incentive to speak of is to give employees what they want. That's a formula for financial ruin, period.
It's also a formula for a disfunctional government that's prone to becoming bureaucratic, bloated, inefficient, and ineffective. Why is it a surprise that our education system has failed us beginning with the very year that politicians put government, especially federal government, more in charge? Don't you see the connection? 30+ years of the Department of Education screwing with our education system has gotten us what exactly? Education results that took our system from the best in the developed world to the worst in only 30 years.
How can a system that operates so free of oversight by and accountability to the people who pay the bills be expected to produce those peoples' desired results or TRULY represent their interests? Hello? IT CAN'T! For example, those who work in the education system claim to be the experts. If so, exactly why haven't they fixed our broken education system? We've given them everything they've asked for over the past 30 years and look what it got us. Clearly, it is NOT "all about the kids" as they keep claiming.
It's time we citizens took back control of our government and the nonsensical bloated bureaucracy that's had pretty much a free reign for way too long. Our country is completely broke, way in debt and our education system is completely broken in terms of results. It's not the citizens fault! It's the fault of those doing that work for us! They're clearly not capable of self-correction so we need to get back involved. Our public employees and their managers had better get used to more scrutiny. Lord knows, they've made it absolutely clear it is needed if our country is to ever prosper again.
No comments:
Post a Comment