Public employee unions have a death grip on the operating machinery of government. Bad cops can’t be fired, schools can’t work, and politicians sell their souls for union support. The devil is in the astonishing details, and Philip Howard, a brilliant leader of government and legal reform, provides them here. Good news: there is a solution.
Chapter 1: What are the key issues with public employee unions?
Bad schools, unaccountable police, and other endemic failures of modern American government share one defining trait. They are impervious to reform. No matter who is elected, no matter the voter demand for change, government almost never changes how it works. The effects are predictable.
Growing citizen frustration and anger, broad distrust of police and other governing institutions, students ill-equipped to compete and even to be self-sufficient, and stupendous public inefficiency and waste.
What's going on? Hi, everyone. I'm Lynne Thoman, and this is Three Takeaways. On Three Takeaways, I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers, and scientists. Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us understand the world and maybe even ourselves a little better. Today, I'm excited to be with Philip Howard.
He's a leader of government reform in America. He has advised both Republican and Democratic parties. He's also an author, and his most recent books are Everyday Freedom and Not Accountable. I'm looking forward to finding out why, no matter who is elected, government almost never changes how it works. Welcome, Philip, and thanks so much for joining Three Takeaways today. Nice to be with you, Lynn.
Right.
Because the union collective bargaining agreement in Minneapolis, as in most places, severely restricts public managers from reassigning personnel or disciplining personnel or changing their responsibilities. And in Minneapolis, I think there had been, well, he had a history of complaints.
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Chapter 2: How do collective bargaining agreements hinder government efficiency?
But in Minneapolis, more broadly, there had been, I think, in the prior decade, something like 2,600 complaints of police misconduct, of which a grand total of 12 led to discipline. And the most severe discipline was a 40-hour suspension. So you basically have a government system that's completely unaccountable.
That is horrifying. Is it the same for other government employees, such as teachers, social workers, highway crews, sanitation workers, and others?
Yeah, pretty much. It varies a little bit by state. But for example, there was an 18-year study in Illinois of teacher accountability that found that an average of two teachers out of 95,000 were terminated for performance each year. That's basically zero. That's actually twice the rate as in California. So there's no accountability.
And the harm of no accountability is much worse than having bad people on the job, which is bad enough. The harm is that when everyone knows performance doesn't matter, it's almost impossible to have a healthy culture within an institution because there's no mutual trust that everybody's doing their share because everybody knows performance doesn't matter.
And you believe that much of the blame for this stems from public sector unions' collective bargaining. Can you explain?
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Chapter 3: Why are police accountability mechanisms ineffective?
Government was never efficient, right? It's a government. So it lacks those sort of market pressures of business organization. But until the late 1960s, the rule was that public employees could not collectively bargain. FDR was a firm opponent of collective bargaining. In part, because it was a breach of duty of loyalty.
And in part, it was because the dynamics of public bargaining are very different than trade bargaining. In a business context, if the union demands too much, everybody loses their job. because the business goes out of business or moves to another town or sends the jobs offshore, as happened to Detroit with demanding too much back when. So government doesn't work that way.
You can demand all you want, and government can't go out of business. Nor can it move out of town. So what's happened is that almost without anybody really paying attention, the public unions levered the rights revolution in the 1960s into a kind of a plea of fairness. Why can't we have collective bargaining too? 38 states gave it to them.
And almost immediately, they started getting controls that effectively prevent any manager from dismissing anyone.
Can you talk more about how collective bargaining agreements in the public sector preclude and limit management choices generally? And then we'll talk about some more specific examples.
Sure. So what's happened since collective bargaining was authorized in the 1960s is there's been a steady accretion of controls. One benefit is to have wages go up. And I'm not, you know, I think that's the least of the sense here.
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Chapter 4: What are the reasons behind the failure of US public schools?
The second thing that happened is that unions and political leaders figured out they could make promises with pensions in the future without having it come out of the current budget. So then they made promises for future pension and healthcare benefits that didn't affect the current sitting political leader.
But then you have these 200 to 300 page agreements, which have gotten more and more detailed over the years, where the controls almost look like it's control for its own sake. So the disciplinary proceedings require objective proof. all kinds of warnings in advance. In police contracts in many jurisdictions, you can't interview the police officer for several weeks.
The police officer and his representative get a chance to view all the other witness statements first so they can conform their story to what other people are saying. The discipline is resolved by arbitrators who are approved by the unions. And if they don't go along with what the union wants, then they won't be approved next time. So it's their job. So they've been paid off as well.
And then there are these management controls by the federal government. Anytime there's a new word processing program, the union gets to negotiate how the training works. Whenever there's any reallocation of resources or asking somebody to do something out of their job description, the answer is no. You only can work within your job description.
So let's say a work crew is fixing the Long Island Railroad, for example. And there's an overhanging branch on the tree. The work crew fixing the rail track isn't allowed to pull down that branch. You have to call in a worker whose job it is to clean up the branch. I mean, there are controls that are designed for inefficiency.
Can you give some specific examples? Let's start with the police. What are some restrictions or limitations on the police?
The police is interesting. Police is less rigid than, say, highway work crews or teachers or bureaucrats because the police job is generally on the sidewalk, right? So they have to respond to what they see. So the biggest problems with the police contract are the ones having to do with general management, allocation of people from this job assignment to another job assignment, and indiscipline.
I mean, like with Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, people said they had never seen a police officer who had been terminated for misconduct. Thinking about what are management tools? Well, the main tool is accountability. The next best tool is resource allocation. You can't do that. You can't allocate resources differently. You can't manage it differently. You can't even make suggestions.
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Chapter 5: How do union rules affect garbage collection costs?
It's shocking to me that these contracts govern who can teach what and when they can teach. They limit the number of parent conferences, that they limit student evaluations and performance assessments. Are these contracts, these restrictions and limitations, one of the main reasons in your view that the majority of US public schools have such bad outcomes for students?
Yes. I think there are two sources of school failure in this country. The first is that no one has authority to close bad schools by and large in the Union States or authority to manage them differently. So in Chicago, there are 45 schools where not one student is proficient in reading or math. And no one in Chicago has the authority to do anything about those schools.
So a combination of kind of excessive red tape and union controls have made it so that the really important and honorable but profoundly human institution of teaching is human. You can't have a good school unless the educators are free to be themselves. And what's happened is that teachers have been disempowered and principals have been disempowered by the union controls that make it unmanageable.
When by red tape that makes you fill what special ed teachers spend half the day filling out forms. So you've got to put humans back in control of schools. And we've created this horrible kind of rigid bureaucratic institution that's designed to fail.
Chapter 6: What impact do correctional officers have on policy making?
Let's talk about the impact of collective bargaining and rules on a couple of other sectors. Can you talk about sanitation, for example, garbage collection?
Right. So you have unions bargaining over how to collect the garbage. And the result of that is that garbage, municipal garbage collection in the big cities costs basically twice as what private garbage collection in those same cities cost because of the union rules on what the routes are and what the hours are and everything else. There's just no flexibility in the system.
And so presetting work schedules in advance denies the basic microeconomic truth that nothing works unless you make it work on the ground, on the spot. You constantly have to adjust and adapt. And public unions instead rigidify everything in advance and it fails. There's a great phrase from Thomas Edison, nothing that's any good works by itself. You got to make the damn thing work.
How about correctional officers, prison guards?
Well, first of all, the correctional officers have gotten involved in the making of policy. So they were one of the biggest proponents of the three strikes and you're out rule in California, because that meant more people went to jail, which meant more demand for correctional officers. Well, you know, it was a terribly unfair rule.
You know, somebody who steals a banana goes to jail for life because he had earlier stolen a golf club. And then they have all these recent work rules. So in New York, New York City or the state, one of the rules is you can have unlimited sick time. So last year there were sick kids. Nobody came to work. Prisons were literally out of control.
And the people who were the supervisors had in their contract that they never had any obligation to go into the cell blocks. So you had people in the central office refusing to fill in after the officers all declared that they were sick, even if they weren't. It was just chaos. You know, people get killed in situations like that.
How about the cost? What does this do to costs?
There have been very few studies that have attempted to calculate the costs. At one point, David Osborne, who wrote Reinventing Government, and he and a colleague estimated that costs went up by 35% to 95%, depending on the area of government. But I think that understates it.
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