[bumby]

>are a special industry

Public services are a special industry (not unique to just police) so the dynamics of unions are different.

For one, many public services exist because they are critical to the functioning of society. You can tell this is fundamentally special case because the govt carves out special mechanisms to mitigate the risk (see the the current threat of a rail strike). Secondly, the government doesn't allow competition, so there is not the same solvency problem that a private union has to address. This second point exacerbates the first. A private police force can't just come in and out-compete the existing one to show that they can work better or more efficiently.

[taeric]

This still feels like a bit of a stretch. In that I can almost certainly list reasons why a big industry in a city is critical to the functioning of said city. All the more true for all too many cities around here.

[bumby]

Again, the govt restricts the ability for those unions to do things like strike (existing rail union or previous air traffic controller unions as an example). The govt can also threaten nationalization which adds some leverage against either side holding the other hostage. I would argue that is harder to do when the govt is restricting itself. E.g., if the police go on strike, who is going to enforce it? Possible the national guard but that brings about a host of additional issues. Nationalization is no-factor because it's already nationalized. My main point is that these additional nuances make public unions create problems that don't have the same mitigating factors.

[taeric]

But a lot of those problems that you are painting for "public" unions seems to just be one of scale. If $BigCorp were to go on strike in a city, it would similarly cripple many of them.

Now, I grant that state sanctioned monopolies are special items. But the hand waving away of why "corruption" is somehow more likely to happen in unions for certain workforces, just feels off to me. So, back to my original question, why do you not think the same corruption can happen in other settings?

(Note... I hate that this can be seen as an anti-union argument. I am not really intending it as such. I do view all unions as a mini representational government with their own taxing mechanism in dues. As such, I view all unions as prone to corruption as all governments. )

[bumby]

Yes, many union problems are essentially problems of scale. However, a subset is unique to public sector unions. I feel like I addressed this distinction multiple times. Note, I'm not making a case that public unions are any more corrupt than private ones, just that they play by a different set of rules.

Consider a large corporation goes on strike, like a Boeing or Raytheon or a public utility, that is considered "essential" to public safety or national security. If the union isn't at least somewhat reasonable, it will cause the business to risk going under, or the govt to nationalize its property, or them to succumb to competition. It's a form of mutually assured destruction. This is exactly what happened to the automotive unions after the 2008 financial crises. They re-negotiated existing contracts to ensure the viability of the business. Many hourly rates were slashed to less than half of what they were just a year prior.

Contrast that to something like a police union. What is the backstop to prevent union demands from getting unreasonable? Essentially very little. We can't just stop having a police force. There's no competition to go hire the next contract with better terms. If the union knows they can't go under, their demands can get more extreme. Plus, they work with a captured market. A private business has to essentially woo customers to remain viable, public organizations have established clientele that have no other options and limited oversight compared to regulated monopolies in the private sector. It's also already been said multiple times that police are the very mechanism often used to break up strikes, so who prevents an illegal police strike? They are also well equipped so the threat of sanctioned violence by something like the national guard is not a good option. None of these issues are generalizable to private organizations of large scale. There's just less mitigation to keep public unions reasonable because public services are different in their application.

[taeric]

Ah, apologies then. I setup a situation where we were talking past each other.

My main question was meant to be what sort of checks prevent corruption in unions that can't be used in public sector unions. Having seen entire police forces disbanded and such, I don't accept that we have very little we can do to keep their demands from becoming unreasonable. I can accept that it is a very blunt weapon and will be hard to do.

That is, I can appreciate the idea that they, almost by default, start on the heavy end of the problems that come with scale. I'm not clear on why that makes their unions a bad idea. I am clear on why that makes their failing a bad idea.

What worries me, is that I am not sure I agree that corporations folding is honestly that much easier for most places to take. The odd partisan relationship so many places build with the corporations that make up their job market strikes me as a different kind of danger.

[bumby]

I do think corruption is inherent in most human endeavors to some degree and easier to continue in organizations of scale. So from that standpoint, I don't think there's any difference between corruption in private or public unions. There may be some argument that since public unions have greater leverage, they can tolerate more corruption. That seems like a reasonable hypothesis to me, but I don't know if there's research to support it.

The disbanding of police departments is a thing, but I think you'll find it's mainly relegated to smaller communities where they can rely on alternate policing (county and state) until they restructure their local police force. Of communities with appreciable size, where those other departments can't absorb the additional policing, it hasn't really been tried. (Minneapolis considered the idea, but it was ultimately rejected in a popular vote).

I do agree that the govt/corporate entanglement is a risk that can prevent corporations from folding, but I think that's a different issue. Going back to the automotive example, the federal govt prevented General Motors from folding but it also came with changes to the union contract driven by bankruptcy negotiations. So govt bailouts don't preclude unions from compromising.