James Joyner has some thoughts on news that the biggest spenders this election cycle are the public sector worker’s unions, noting that “surely, these people have every right to vote and to organize to elect candidates who will work to enact their views into public policy. But there is nonetheless something unsettling about having our employees organizing to extract more money from us.”
Indeed. The question of public sector compensation and how public sector unions influence elected officials is a tricky one. On the one hand, as Joyner notes, a lot of public sector workers perform really important functions – teachers, cops, firefighters, just to name a few – and we should compensate them well for their labor. But there really is something of a conflict of interest when the people who determine pay increases, benefits packages, and so forth were given a bunch of money and political support from the very people who will benefit from these things – and who would have been refused that support otherwise.
