Public Employees Unions
I'm a member of three unions. My husband is a member of a public employees union.
I'm also a libertarian.
Unions (when truly operated by workers as a collective bargaining too, not in the form of corporate unions) are an important check in a free-market system. If workers, through their union, are unreasonable, then employers are well within their rights to tell the union members that their services are no longer needed. If the employers are unreasonable, the workers are well within their right to walk out.
There is, however, a real problem when the employer is the government*.
Remember that government is the organization with the monopoly on violence.
Remember your history classes, in which business owners hired private thugs to engage in violence against striking workers? Well, folks, when government is the employer, such tactics are actually legal. They have the power of the police and/or military behind them to enforce whatever laws they pass.
So when a government simply passes a law prohibiting collective bargaining, even if they never actually use violence to enforce that law, the fact remains that they have the right to send in the brute squad to break up the strike / get workers back on the job, etc.
As a result, I believe that the government of Wisconsin has now declared war on its own populace.
The workers of the entire State of Wisconsin should be walking out right now. I will support them in any way I can in their revolution.
* I do not deny that there is also an issue that public employees unions are permitted, without disclosure of the conflict of interest, to spend heavily to sway an election toward their preferred candidates. However, that is not the most pressing issue at present, and I believe disclosure is the solution, not union-busting.
I'm also a libertarian.
Unions (when truly operated by workers as a collective bargaining too, not in the form of corporate unions) are an important check in a free-market system. If workers, through their union, are unreasonable, then employers are well within their rights to tell the union members that their services are no longer needed. If the employers are unreasonable, the workers are well within their right to walk out.
There is, however, a real problem when the employer is the government*.
Remember that government is the organization with the monopoly on violence.
Remember your history classes, in which business owners hired private thugs to engage in violence against striking workers? Well, folks, when government is the employer, such tactics are actually legal. They have the power of the police and/or military behind them to enforce whatever laws they pass.
So when a government simply passes a law prohibiting collective bargaining, even if they never actually use violence to enforce that law, the fact remains that they have the right to send in the brute squad to break up the strike / get workers back on the job, etc.
As a result, I believe that the government of Wisconsin has now declared war on its own populace.
The workers of the entire State of Wisconsin should be walking out right now. I will support them in any way I can in their revolution.
* I do not deny that there is also an issue that public employees unions are permitted, without disclosure of the conflict of interest, to spend heavily to sway an election toward their preferred candidates. However, that is not the most pressing issue at present, and I believe disclosure is the solution, not union-busting.