[geofft]

If a police union demands too much, they don't threaten their employer with going out of business the way private sector unions do. The private sector union is naturally constrained to saying, "We want to help you build a reliable business for the long term; treat us fairly and we will do good work." Sometimes, of course, they do better at this than other times, but it is never in a union's interest to impair the business to the point where the jobs no longer exist. There is no such pressure on the police union. No demand for higher pay will cause their employer to shut down - it will at most go deeper into debt. No demand to put up with worse work (be it worse quality or simply more illegal) will cause the market to find a different supplier - there is no market. No overreach by the old guard will risk losing newer folks to an un-unionized competitor - there are no competitors. And so forth.

So I don't think this is even hypocrisy - effective police union leaders have very different approaches from effective private sector union leaders.

[smabie]

Aren't police unions similar to other government unions, like teachers unions then?

[crooked-v]

I think the major distinction there is that no other union is composed of members who hold the legal monopoly on violence.

[geofft]

Yes, I think this argument applies to public sector unions as a whole. I think empirically, teachers' unions (and the postal worker's union, and so forth) have not been so, well, inclined to defend illegal and unconstitutional activity as police unions, so I'm not going to advocate as urgently for getting rid of them, but definitely they're also not quite like private sector unions for similar reasons.

(That said, both public schools and the post office have meaningful private-sector competitors, in the sense that the government can decide that they just don't need to fund so many teachers or postal workers anymore, and systems like vouchers for private schools make it look even more like a private-sector market.)

[briandear]

> but it is never in a union's interest to impair the business to the point where the jobs no longer exist.

Yet, that’s what they do. The Packard car company is one such victim.

Unions bankrupted Twinkies.

The work rules imposed in union contracts required the company that makes Twinkies, which also makes Wonder Bread, to deliver these two products to stores in separate trucks. Moreover, truck drivers were not allowed to load either of these products into their trucks. And the people who did load Twinkies into trucks were not allowed to load Wonder Bread, and vice versa.

All of this was obviously intended to create more jobs for the unions' members. But the needless additional costs that these make-work rules created ended up driving the company into bankruptcy.

The labor leader John L. Lewis called so many strikes in the coal mines that many people switched to using oil instead, because they couldn't depend on coal deliveries. A professor of labor economics at the University of Chicago called John L. Lewis "the world's greatest oil salesman." The higher costs of producing coal not only led many consumers to switch to oil. They also led coal companies to substitute machinery for labor, reducing the number of miners.

There is also a reason why labor unions are flourishing among people who work for government. No matter how much these public-sector unions drive up costs, government agencies do not go out of business. They simply go back to the taxpayers for more money.

[rbg246]

Unions bring far more good to society than bad to society.

They have given the non-landed class of people a life that even a century ago was unheard of.

Countries that have decent levels of union involvement have much better working conditions and standard of living than countries that don't.

Blaming unions for failed companies is incredibly flimsy argument against unions as a whole.

Sure there are unions that contributed to the collapse of some companies, people make mistakes.

Bad management is a far more leading cause of business collapse than unions.

[geofft]

> Yet, that’s what they do.

I'm not disagreeing with that (the beginning of that sentence, which you cut off, was "Sometimes, of course, they do better at this than other times").

The fact that, at the end of the day, the Packard car company no longer exists demonstrates my entire point. A police union who took the same tactics wouldn't have caused their police force to no longer exist.

There is a natural consequence on private-sector unions that overreach that doesn't exist for public-sector unions. Sometimes private-sector union leaders don't realize this, but when that happens, that's the end of the unionized workplace. Not so for public-sector unions. An effective private-sector union has to keep its employer alive if it wants to keep its members employed. (Yes, there are many ineffective private-sector unions, see Sturgeon's Law.) An effective public-sector union has no such obligation.

Now, if you want to argue that unions are bad in general, that's fine, but I think that's completely off-topic - I was responding to the claim that members of police unions should feel solidarity with members of private-sector unions. My claim is that those two types of unions work in fundamentally different ways and so one should not expect solidarity. Maybe both types of unions are bad - if so, they're bad in different ways.

> There is also a reason why labor unions are flourishing among people who work for government. No matter how much these public-sector unions drive up costs, government agencies do not go out of business. They simply go back to the taxpayers for more money.

Right, uh, that was exactly the whole point of my comment? I'm not sure why you're saying this like it's a new observation?