The Public Policy/Striking the Public

...Quite aside from the political differences between private and public sector bargaining are the economic ones...

...Yet some of what makes people uneasy about unions in the public sector ought, I believe, to set them to rethinking "private sector collective bargaining models" as well...

...For it is here that organized laborers try to enforce what they believe is their right to set whatever price they please on the labor they have to dispose of-by preventing anyone else from disposing of his...

...Historically, they have claimed mis right on the basis of the time they have spent at ("invested in") that job...

...They were threatened by pickets as they left the stations and, with strikers monitoring radio calls over their own radio sets, inspectors or non-striking officers responding to a call for help were often met on the scene by strikers who snapped . pictures and threatened revenge once the strike finished (including the "hint" that the "strike breakers" might not receive rapid assistance in the future should one of them call for help in a dangerous situation...

...And indeed, strike violence and vandalism in the private sector are still far more prevalent than many are willing to recognize...

...Tires were slashed, brake lines cut, and windshields shattered...

...Whether in the public or private sector, workers who "withhold their work," as Boehm and Heldman correctly note, believe they are "keeping their jobs...

...Public sector strikes inescapably challenge the ability of government to function, a consideration which has long accounted for popular antipathy to collective bargaining in the public sector...

...Nevertheless, the entrenched political - power of the municipal unions-demonstrated, the authors suggest, by a pattern of massive voter fraud during several referenda-remained intact...

...Yet, in reading Public Employees, Unions, and the Erosion of Civic Trust, a coolly written, important, and compelling new book by Randolph H. Boehm and Dan C. Heldman,* I was once again reminded that Lord Jeffrey, as so many other liberals before and since, fundamentally misunderstood the phenomenon-the strike-he wanted to defend...

...And since the 1970s, what citizens thought they had won on the city level, namely control of their own political destiny, union strategists have been steadily undermining on the state level, and in the courts...

...Consider a few of the episodes recounted in Public Employees...

...The organized labor movement in America has never officially opted for socialism, and has strong anti-Communist foreign policy credentials, which facts have been duly applauded or deplored by conservatives or radicals, as the case may be...

...Mayor Alioto in this instance announced that he might dismiss these strikers, yet then entered into a "bargaining" session with their representatives...

...Since a "single master was at liberty at any time to turn off the whole of his workmen at once-100 or 1000 in number-if they would not accept the wages he chose to offer," there was hardly "equality or fairness" to make it a crime "for the whole of the workmen to leave that master at once, if he refused to give the wages they chose to require...

...After the San Francisco police struck in 1975, the officers who remained on the job found conditions extremely risky...

...As long as consumers can take their business elsewhere, there is a reality principle that cannot be suspended indefinitely-as some of our unionized industries have recently come to relearn...

...and so too did these individualistic sentiments prevail in America, particularly after the epochal common law decision, Commonwealth v. Hunt (1842...

...Strikes and collective bargaining can damage, and have damaged, the economic interests and prospects of consumers, nonstriking workers, and investors...

...After a frantic search, the city found a non-union plumbing contractor to repair it...

...But where no substitution is possible-where the good or service is a government monopoly ultimately supported by tax revenues-the situation is otherwise, especially so in a democracy, where the organized employees, through their bloc voting power, are : "represented" on both sides of the bargaining table...

...Aided by an unusual degree of municipal referendum power, and goaded by a fiscal crisis, San Francisco ultimately managed to defeat the more predatory of the unions' demands...

...And certainly the legal structures of all the major free societies, including our own, have come to recognize, in one fashion or another, these rights-although they have often done so only by chipping away at what Lord Jeffrey assumed were the employer's reciprocal rights...

...They don't believe they have quit...

...Unfortunately, this "scab's" identity was discovered, and he was mercilessly harassed for months thereafter, including one near escape from a sniper's bullet...

...Come to think of it, violent private sector strikes used to be referred to, by friends and enemies alike, as acts of "industrial warfare...

...Strikers believe, of course, that their right to a job is superior to their employer's right to operate his business without mem...

...This raises an uncomfortable question...

...Not surprisingly, therefore, a nineteenth-century union theorist like George Gunton could casually mention that "to prevent others from taking strikers' places is an essential feature of the strike itself...

...One of these issues is the strike itself...

...In fact, the notion that striking workers have a collective property right to their jobs is absolutely central to understanding strikes and strike behavior, particularly the sort of behavior to which we apply the military term, "picketing...

...and indeed, the flaws are recognized by many who are otherwise sympathetic to the claims of organized labor...

...even, one might say, undiscussable...

...For too long, fundamental issues have remained undiscussed...

...Yet, as Boehm and Heldman demonstrate, the analogy is deeply flawed...

...It is this extraordinary political power which is perhaps the authors' most significant finding, and it fortifies their "deep skepticism as to the value of both militant public employee organizations and of the trend toward applying private sector collective bargaining models to the public service...

...Most people, like Lord Jeffrey in the last century, define the strike as the concerted withdrawal of employees from the workplace, and equate this act with an employer's dismissal of his work force...

...But there are constraints "built into the system," as it were...

...I suspect most people find McCulloch's, and Jeffrey's, defense of the right to organize and the right to strike enormously appealing...

...A few hours later his house was bombed...

...The problem is that the strike was, and is, no such thing...

...THE PUBLIC POLICY STRIKING THE PUBLIC the dawn of the industrial era, the influential classical economist John Ramsay McCulloch demanded a reform of English law to enable wage earners collectively to set "whatever price they please upon the labour they have to dispose of...

...Everyone may induce a trespasser to leave his premises by the exercise of such force as strictly may be required...

...Yet I wonder how many people are fully aware of just how closely strike behavior can parallel that of terrorists...

...When they do, it is not they, but those with whom they negotiate, who are the true sovereigns...

...Government, after all, is not just another employer whose "interests" must be assumed to "conflict" with its employees- who must be "protected" by fundamentally adversarial unions...

...This insight has been recognized by virtually all political leaders, from Calvin Coolidge and Franklin Roosevelt on the one hand to Lenin and Mussolini on the other-or for that matter, by Rene1 Levesque in Quebec, Ronald Reagan in America, and Wojciech Jaruzelski in Poland...

...He used force with moderation...

...One of the city's vital water mains was sabotaged, and millions of gallons of raw sewage poured into the Bay, posing a grave threat to public health...

...I know I do...

...This trend has accompanied the substantial increase in public service employment in state and local governments, and has, when challenged, been defended by the so-called "private sector analogy...

...Their cars were heavily vandalized in police parking lots...

...Moreover, it is here that the "collectivist" nature of the property right they assert is most apparent...

...Are violent public sector strikes acts of insurrection...

...Finally, in many jurisdictional disputes, past and present, unions, have baldly sought to seize work never before performed by their members and boot out those presumably property-owning, unionized colleagues already doing it...

...With public sector unionism modeled on (and justified by) the private sector analogy, what can we look forward to...

...Everyone is permitted by law to impound trespassing cattle by driving them and shutting them up...

...Given this theory of property rights, explosive collisions in the private sector are virtually inevitable, modern labor law's professed concern with "labor peace" to the contrary notwithstanding...

...McCulloch's arguments prevailed in England...

...The same principle holds when a picket seeks by similar means to induce another workman not to enter the employment of the business against which a strike is in force...

...More surprising, perhaps, in light of his reputation as a civil libertarian, is the recommendation (in 1913) of Louis Brandeis, the nation's then leading "public interest" lawyer: In the control of picketing the old common law of trespass should be borne in mind, as expressed in the Latin rule, "Moiter Manus Imposuit...

...After all, he argued, since capacity "to labour is to the poor man what stock is to the capitalist," it made no more sense to deny laborers the right to combine together to "dispose of their property as they might, in their collective capacity, judge most advantageous to their interest" than to prohibit men from pooling their capital in a joint stock company...

...Based on extensive newspaper research and personal interviews with many participants and observers, Boehm and Heldman recount the dramatic, even sensational episodes of violence, political skullduggery, and sustained tension while guiding the reader through the many complicated legal, political, and economic issues surrounding public sector collective bargaining, as this institution has grown, and grown phenomenally, in the 1960s and 1970s...

...Public Employees is a well-organized, blow-by-blow study of San Francisco's spectacular public employee strikes in the mid 1970s...

...Yet during a strike they seek not only to prevent new workers ("scabs") from taking their places, but also to prevent already employed but nonstriking workers from working-that is, from exercising their presumably valid property rights...

...Sovereign governments, including democratic sovereign governments, do not negotiate their right to govern...

...Of course, as McCulloch's contemporary Lord Francis Jeffrey insisted, if employees have the right collectively to offer their individual labor for sale, they have the right to withhold it as well...