Last year, I helped author and sponsored Missouri House Bill 1413, the Government Worker Protection Act, on comprehensive public sector labor reform. It was signed into law on June 1, 2018, and earlier this week, the United States House of Representatives called upon me to testify on my experiences in Missouri.
What I said was simple: Private sector and government unions are very different, and good public policy requires they be treated differently.
Congress has long recognized that public sector collective bargaining is fundamentally different than that in the private sector, ever since since the National Labor Relations Act was signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935. That law allowed states and local governments to set their own labor policies for their own government workforces. FDR himself recognized this distinction when he stated that “all government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.”
In the private sector, employers are private companies; governments, and by extension, the people, are the employers in the public sector. Government unions, through their aggressive political activity, often end up electing their own bosses, potentially leading to conflicts between the interests of citizens and taxpayers on the one hand and those of unions on the other. In the private sector, there are natural checks and balances on the power of unions. If union demands make a company uncompetitive, everyone suffers; witness the U.S. auto industry.
These checks and balances are absent in the public sector. Government tends to grow and grow.
If we use Rich States, Poor States 2019 to look at the states with the worst fiscal conditions and the highest taxes, Illinois, New Jersey, and Connecticut stand out. And they have one thing in common: very strong government unions. These three states’ unfunded public pension liabilities average $29,311 for every man, woman, and child.
If there is one thing that everyone can agree on, it is that different states take very different approaches to labor policy. It’s because different states through the democratic process make different decisions as to how to manage the employees who render valuable public services. Some states allow collective bargaining. Some mandate it. Others ban it. But each state has very particular reasons for its decisions.
These varying policies often evolved over decades of legislative and judicial decision-making at the state level. Missouri has allowed public sector collective bargaining since 1965, and since then, policy has been made by statutes passed by the legislature and signed by the governor, by regulations promulgated by the state Department of Labor, and by the decisions of hundreds of cities, counties, school and fire boards, and other political subdivisions across the state.
Congress has no business centralizing all this state and local decision-making in the Federal Labor Relations Authority. Unfortunately, that is what Congress is trying to do so with two bills (HR 3463 and HR 1154) that would expand the Federal Labor Relations Authority to micromanage nearly every aspect of state and local labor policy.
Finally, federalization of public sector labor law would preclude reform efforts in the states that protect both workers and taxpayers. Examples of such reforms include provisions of Missouri’s law newly signed last year. Our law codified the certification process, gave workers the right to vote every three years as to whether they wanted to continue to be represented by a government union or choose a different union, and gave workers the right to annually opt in or out of union dues payment. The bill also promotes financial transparency by requiring reports of union finances similar to federal LM reporting for private sector unions.
Alexander Hamilton wrote in “Federalist No. 9” that the proposed Constitution “leaves in the states’ possession certain exclusive and very important portions of sovereign power.” Our current system of state control of public sector labor relations allows states to use their sovereign power to balance the interests of public employees, government unions, citizens, and taxpayers.
State Sen. Bob Onder, a Republican, is the chairman of the Missouri Senate Health and Pensions committee. Follow him on Twitter: @BobOnderMO.
