| > 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? |