[aggronn]

I think this makes sense, and I might have agreed before I married someone working in a public sector union and saw how awful working in the public sector is compared to private (for many, but not all, professions). My perspective has been challenged over and over again by her experiences and now that point of view is just not compatible with the reality of how things work.

So I'm going to make the case for why public unions are _more_ necessary than private union--public unions are needed to make it possible to provide competent, professional public services--, and rather deflect the conversation to a bigger question (with to me, a very clear answer), which is whether there should ever be non-market-driven revenues.

There are some very hard-to-believe dynamics that occur in a public sector job. For teachers, air traffic controllers, police, etc, there is no competition in the labor market. If your boss is abusive, if you don't get paid fairly, etc, your only option is to change your career or leave your community. You cannot go to another employer. Management does not have the resources to provide relief when its objectively needed. Government effectively has a monopoly on that job, and if there are other jobs, they usually pay even less because of a compensating wage differential for the workplace being more tolerable (private schools, for example)

There is also no profit motive. Good, effective leadership does not have a natural system for "floating to the top" like you find in for-profit settings. It doesn't happen just by chance, but as bad as leadership is in large corporate environments, its even worse and even less accountable in the public sector. Nevermind that good leadership is expensive--the best leaders do not go into public service, unfortunately, because it pays a lot better in the private sector.

No profit motive also means that there isn't a single metric that aligns workers and management. Amazon may be abusing workers, but at least they can respond to clear issues by giving raises or bonuses. At least when a business succeeds, someone is getting paid and its about who should get that money. School teachers and police officers don't get more revenue if they succeed. Administrators and management don't get more money when they succeed, or when their workers succeed. Success does not feed success, in a financial sense (with exceptions, of course). If they fail, there is not a natural incentive structure that reflects that.

Ultimately, revenue and accountability for public sector work is driven by voters, many of whom don't feel like they benefit from the service directly (whether they do or not is a separate conversation). Voters want to minimize costs and maximize services, but there is not a market mechanism that defines the equilibrium there. Voters (like you) don't know what it takes to deliver the quality of service demanded, and the systems don't naturally align themselves in a way that efficiently executes on those demands anyways. Public services will always be less efficient than you would expect--but many times they're the only way to provide the service in the first place.

So you have poor leadership. You have totally decoupled funding from performance, and therefore compensation from funding from performance. Since there isn't a profit motive, aligning individual workers with the mission is a challenge. You have cost-sensitive, captive, and hostile benefactors and service users who have a dual demands: high quality of service, and lowest possible cost.

This is the perfect environment for abusive leaders to make unreasonable asks to people who provide services at a rate well below its social value, using resources that don't reflect the real cost to provide the adequate, competent services desired.

Unions are the only mechanism that exists for these people to protect themselves from that. Not only does the market have no power, it doesn't even exist.

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So yes, public unions serve the interests of workers, and "extort[ing] money from the citizens". Public unions cause some very obviously challenging circumstances--but the alternative is that public service workers are being asked to work in offend difficult, degrading circumstances where they are resourced in a way that sets them up to fail, asks them to make professional commitments to an employer who serves whims of public opinion rather than direct stakeholds are invested the complexities of their job, and which ultimately leads to a cycle of cynicism and further removal of resources. Nevermind that the nature of their work is inherently highly regulated and high-stakes.

How do you run a public institution successfully in the long run with these core dynamics?

This is an inherently messy world, and there is not a singular, cathartic solution for providing low cost, high quality, individualized, egalitarian public services. There needs to be some mechanism for finding a balance. The market is not an option. Privatizing all large scale government services doesn't change many of these dynamics, unless you remove any requirement for equal access or standards for quality of services provided.

Public unions are the best on a field of bad options.