Most commentary on Tuesday’s recall vote
in Wisconsin has focused on the raw politics of the episode. This is what our
media thrives on: who’s up, who’s down, and what it all means looking toward
November. Some commentary, thankfully, has delved deeper into the meaning of
the entire skein of events over the past nine months, ever since Governor Scott
Walker tried to get a handle on his state’s financial circumstances by trimming
the sails of the state’s public service unions. Of that more sophisticated
commentary, none has been better, I think, that my colleague Walter Russell
Mead’s analysis here at The American Interest Online. If Walter exaggerated the role of the public
employee unions within the Democratic Party, it was only by mild degree.
Otherwise, his analysis is spot on.
I would like now to take the
commentary a bit deeper still, into what some might even consider esoteric
zones: namely, what recent events tell us about how far we have strayed from
both democratic theory and traditional practice in this most democratic of
lands. I want to talk first about
the basis for unions in democratic theory, second about the denaturing of democratic
leadership, and third about the essence of democratic representation.
Much recent commentary has lumped together all unions as
though trade unions and public service/employee unions are essentially the
same. They most certainly are not the same. The trade union movement, whose history
is long and copiously recorded and studied, arose during the late 19th
and early 20th centuries as a response to exploitation and abuse by
then virtually unregulated corporate interests. As the average size of economic
units rose, driven by the exigencies of technology, workers gradually
recognized that to garner a fair share of the value of their labor, they would
have to organize themselves into a collective bargaining voice. Any given
laborer could make a case to an employer if he was one of five or ten or fifty,
and he would know that his special skills would be appreciated in that
conversation. But where a given laborer was one of a thousand or of five
thousand or more, he would not stand a chance against bosses so rich and
powerful that they essentially held all the bargaining cards.
From the perspective of democratic
theory, collective bargaining made in the private marketplace made and still
makes perfect sense. If back in 1886 the Supreme Court ruled in Santa Clara
County vs. Southern Pacific that corporations
were for all practical purposes “virtual individuals”, meaning that they could
join together to mutual benefit to pursue their economic interests, then it
stood to reason that labor’s right of collective bargaining also had to be
legitimate. One kind of virtual
individual logically begs the other. It took some time for this principle to be
validated in practice, but again, in terms of democratic theory the case was
airtight.
The only alternative to labor’s
right to collective bargaining would be to have the state itself directly
regulate, if not itself own, corporate operations. But neither corporatist nor
communist formulas had a chance within the basic ethos of American
democracy. If the state did not
regulate corporate practices as regards fairness to labor and oligopoly and so
forth, and if labor’s right to
collective bargaining were not recognized, then the specter of anti-capitalist
violence and revolution loomed. This is why even such devout non-socialists as
Otto von Bismarck supported both the trade union movement and the birth of the
International Labor Organization—a seemingly counterintuitive fact that
actually makes perfect sense if you stop to think about it (or actually study
the history of the early trade union movement).
Now consider public service or public employee unions in this
light. Those who labor for private corporations require some capacity for
balance and redress against their employers because no other avenue of
accountability and fairness is obviously available to them. But public service
employees work for government, and democratic government is accountable to the
electorate. So if public employees believe they are not being treated fairly,
institutionalized avenues of redress are available to them: As citizens, they can
campaign and vote to oust politicians who do not appreciate them properly, and
elect ones who do. Government workers can compose a political constituency just
like any other group, and in many democratic countries they clearly do.
According to democratic theory, therefore, there is no justification for any
public employee union, which adds a vehicle for political influence on top of
those that already exist.
The origins of public employee unions are complex, and I do
not propose to go into the history or the legal basis for them here. Suffice it
to say that in the beginning, it never occurred to those negotiating over this
question that public servants would have the right to strike. Obviously, some
public servants are more essential to community safety than others––policemen
and firemen come readily to mind. Air traffic controllers rather obviously fall
into the same category. In my view, public school teachers are not far removed
as essential workers, because they really are essential professionals and deserve
to be treated as such. But since they have formal democratic channels for
accountability and redress, they should not have a right to collective
bargaining or a right to strike. If they don’t like the deal defined that way,
no one is forcing them to take a job as a public school teacher.
Not too many people know this, but
Calvin Coolidge made his national mark originally by opposing and shutting down
a 1919 strike of Boston policeman when he was Governor of Massachusetts. It
turns out to be quite interesting to go back and read what Governor Coolidge
had to say at the time about the special role of government workers. Back in
those days the size of municipal and state government bureaucracies was tiny
compared to what it is today, but the basic principle is the same: public
employees are public servants, and the good of the community must trump any
parochial interest. The assumption
used to be that to be a public servant was an honor, and that public servants
took it upon themselves to place the public good before and above their own.
The idea that government bureaucrats might form a very sizable and
self-interested constituency so powerful as to behave in ways clearly inimical
to the public interest simply never occurred to anybody back at the creation of
public employee unions.
As Walter Russell Mead explains,
public-service unions in recent decades have used their power in highly
retrograde and self-interested ways. They care about themselves above those
they are pledged to serve, and they have proved stalwart against all efforts at
institutional reform if those efforts even remotely threaten their job status
or description. But public service employees, and those on the left in general,
hold no monopoly over selfishness. When Grover Norquist rants about no new
taxes anywhere, ever, the deep dark but still obvious secret here is that he
and the vast majority of Republicans who support his thinking are appealing to
selfishness. It’s true, yes, government can be bloated, ineffective and
invasive all at the same time, but the argument that starving the monster of
revenue will shrink it has turned out to be quite false. The real reason for
taking this point of view, again, is simply its powerful appeal to selfishness:
The average guy wants to keep more of his paycheck, doesn’t readily recognize
the services that his taxes pay for as having much of anything to do with him,
and so will vote for anyone who promises to let him keep more of his earnings.
Now, whereas taming the incredible
revenue-sucking appetites of public employee unions is clearly necessary to
balance the books of thousands of municipal, county and state governments in
the United States, the economic role of real trade unions is completely
different. Public employee unions are filled with people whose only economic
role is to be a transactional cost—whether a necessary and efficient such cost
or not is a separate matter. Trade union members, on the other hand, actually
make things via skilled value-added processes that people want to buy. And that
is why the decline of trade unions, which has been precipitous and deeply
damaging, has a totally different economic impact. Some studies estimate that as much as 20% of the wage
inequality between the middle class and the very rich today is the result of
the deterioration of trade union power. One way to rectify aspects of income
inequality—though admittedly the entire subject of inequality is significantly
misunderstood––would be to strengthen the bargaining power of trade unions.
This won’t be easy. We all know most of the reasons for the
decline of trade unions. First and foremost is globalization, wherein
corporations have been able far more easily to flee from high labor cost areas,
thus undercutting the bargaining power of labor. Second, the big American
unions abused both their power and their memberships for many years, so they
have a serious reputational problem to overcome. And third, there has been an a
historic reversal in which the average size of economic units has begun to
fall, and in which automation as much as outsourcing threatens the kinds of
skilled jobs that used to represent bargaining leverage. As the capital
intensity of value-added manufacturing processes grows, labor’s claim to have
value in those processes is less persuasive. Clearly, for unions to thrive they
are going to have to regionalize if not internationalize, just as trade and
manufacturing patterns have done. They need to turn the proverbial race to the
bottom into a race to dignity for labor and laborers across national borders.
It is for that reason that the sharp decline in the international activities of
the AFL-CIO in the post-Lane Kirkland era is so very much to be lamented.
In a democratic polity, one way to describe the eternal
challenge of leadership is that it must temper the natural proclivity toward
selfishness, whether it comes from public service unions or the average Joe
persuaded that the government is the problem. As things stand today here in the
United States, that challenge amounts to reestablishing the priority of public
service over the parochial concerns of government employees while at the same
time reestablishing the legitimacy of fair taxation. Both have taken a real
beating in recent decades, and here, too, the prospects for turning things
around are not good. But even more alarming, elected leaders themselves seem to
have forgotten what they got elected to do. Let a story about my own local
government make the point.
Montgomery County, Maryland, like many municipal authorities,
has a very narrow revenue base––in this case, taxes on real estate
transactions. When the residential
housing market screeched to a near halt in 2008, the county’s budget got
bashed. Rather than look for new ways to raise money (like privatizing the
absurd alcohol control scheme the county runs), and rather than rethink the
structure of its revenue stream, the politicians looked instead for ways to cut
the budget.
One of the things they wanted to
cut was support for public transportation. Without going into details, it
should be obvious that this was a particularly stupid approach to the problem.
Public transportation saves energy, supports residential real estate prices,
helps business, reduces congestion and road repair requirements, and more. It
is clearly in the general benefit of the community as a whole. But just like
members of public service unions whose parochial interests outweigh those of
the public weal, we in Montgomery County have a municipal government that
thinks of itself as just another interest group. They pay lip service to
democratic accountability and the public good, but in day-to-day life the truth
is that it has looked at its budget situation as any private business might do
so. They show no concern for or any analysis of the affect of their decisions
on the well-being of the community they were elected to serve. They are
interested in the county’s solvency (when they are not pandering to developers
and other special interests who helped elect them) and they are self-insulated
from the broader social impact of their behavior. When this criticism was
voiced at public hearings, the County Executive and his aides literally could
not understand what was being said, so far from their consciousness was any
sense of their really being public servants. So it’s not just public service
union members who have gone parochial, their bosses have gone way narrow, too.
As Walter’s analysis mentioned, money from all over the
country poured into Wisconsin to support the left’s recall effort. The fact
that it failed to turn the trick is not as interesting from the perspective of
democratic theory as the fact that it happened at all. Let’s get back to basics
here for a moment.
In a representative democracy, a
bond of responsibility ties citizens to those they elect to represent them. At
the state level––in this case Wisconsin––only those who are citizens of the
state have a right to vote for Governor, and the governor in turn acquires an
obligation upon election to take into consideration the interests of his constituents
over all other concerns. The same goes for congressional districts. Only those
who live in a given district are entitled to vote for their Representative in
Washington, and that Representative is obliged not only for practical reasons
but also for political-contractual ones to take the interests of his
constituents to heart above all other concerns.
Of course, sometimes the interests
of constituents are diverse and conflictual, and of course democratic theory
expects that sometimes leaders will have to make decisions that take into
account factors beyond the strictly local level. So being a representative in a
federal democracy also entails being made responsible for negotiating on behalf
of the interests of constituents when matters get complicated. If enough people
don’t like the way negotiations went forward, they can always replace the
representative at the next election. The basic point remains, however, that
from the view of democratic theory, elections make sense in the context of a
binding contract between citizens and those they elect.
Since that is the case, on what basis does it make logical
sense in a representative democratic system to allow influence in the form of
money to enter a given state or a given congressional district from outside
that state or district? I cannot think of any such basis. In the context of a
political campaign, the right to free speech and the right to assemble and the
right to petition for redress, and all that goes with these rights, clearly
applies to those within the framework of the contract between electorate and
those standing for election. But it hardly follows that these rights apply
equally or at all to those standing outside that contractual relationship.
Of course, money is fungible. We
all know that there is no practical way to prevent outside money from torquing
election results in given localities.
But from the point of view of democratic theory, such interventions
violate the principle of democratic representation and should not be permitted.
This observation is to me obvious and unassailable. Yet no
one ever talks about it. Indeed, we have become so used to the dilution and
distortion of democratic processes in this country that this simple observation
will probably strike most people as surprising, as something that has never
before occurred to them. What a deal that is.
Some commentators predict that the election results in
Wisconsin amount to open season on all public employee unions. That remains to
be seen. What troubles me is that, whatever the future brings as a result of
Governor Walker’s victory, most people will not stop to think long enough to
understand the basic difference between a real trade union and a public
employees’ union. If the struggling trade union movement ends up being harmed
by this episode, that would be both maddening and tragic. If the Democratic Party knew what was
good for the country, actually also for itself, it would be at the forefront
making this distinction. But it isn’t, and it won’t. It would make sense, then,
for Republicans to recognize the country’s interest, and also their own
politically, in supporting the revival of trade union movements in the interest
of the creation and stabilization of good jobs for Americans. But they don’t,
and they probably won’t. (It’s quite possible that Governor Romney once said
nice things about trade unions up in Massachusetts, but I doubt he wants anyone
to remember that now.)
Finally, to my knowledge there’s so far been not a word said
or written (outside of this note) about the democratic integrity of electoral
districts and the assault being waged against proper democratic processes by
outsiders. If we don’t like the idea of foreign money influencing our Federal
elections—and we sure as hell don’t like it—then why do we tolerate outside
money influencing our state and congressional elections? I long for the day when a politician of
national standing so much as utters a thought on this topic. I have a feeling
I’ll be waiting a very long time.
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