My first union steward position was at 22 and I’ve been a union guy my entire life (I’m an old now). I’ve been a union steward in the private and public sectors. I won’t cross lines and I drop food off when workers are out striking. I’ve been threatened before (sometimes by other union guys). I successfully argued when a company I worked for wanted to force out the older employees during a layoff, which was against the union contract and it resulted in my getting laid off as one of the newest 30 people on the job (go fuck yourself, Qwest). I’m that fuckin guy.
Police and fire should not be allowed to collectively bargain for pay. They should be allowed to bargain safety, discipline, and everything else, but not pay.
They hold unique positions in society and their jobs involve public safety and (more importantly) affect policy in a way that other jobs just don’t. Their economic interests will always be in tension with their communities and perverse incentives are endemic to their demands. To put it bluntly, the worse job they do, the more they are empowered in contract negotiations. This is the opposite of how it’s supposed to work and virtually everything wrong with public safety in America can be traced back to those perverse incentives. Almost without exception, it results in the cobra effect.
There are other public sector unions but you rarely hear about them because there are always alternatives to their services and that balances the negotiations. Trust me, if the wastewater employees decided to stop the plants for a few weeks and toilets stopped working for a month, the world would give them whatever they want to turn it back on. But they don’t, because credible alternatives exist to their work in the form of contractors and outsourcing. Not police and fire. There is no credible alternative because they will substantively decrease public safety in response to alternatives, like the CARE teams. You just can’t have that.
There is something deeply wrong with the world when your average human shit processing plant worker wouldn’t dare cause a disruption to increase their pay because the effects on society would be unconscionable but your average cop has no fuckin problem with it.
