How is it even possible to forbid workers to strike? What do you do if they all just happen to call in sick with the blue flu all on the same day? You can’t arrest someone for calling in sick, can you?
In some places they do this, though there are significant problems with it. It’s not directly germane to the issue here, as it does happen (often illegaly). bannign them from striking is supposed to be part of the protection for the public: that in allowing them collective bargaining and a union we don’t give them unlimited power to command the public simply by striking neccessary services (see the Air Traffic Controllers strike). This purpose is very often honored only in the breach.
Yes, I’m sure its very nice for them. However, it’s punishing to everyone else, as you haven’t made any useful counterpoint to the point that unions in aggregate neccessarily hurt almost everyone.
Furthermore, unions do not defend the “common man”. They principally defend unskilled workers who pay them lots of money () against people with rare, useful, or valuable skills - and everyone else. They may get wage incfreases for union workers, but I don’t really give a shit about that. They may get a nice good feeling for sticking it to “the fatcats,” but I don’t give a shit about that, either. I do care that the price of goods and services rise faster and faster because of wage inflation, and can spark a wage-price spiral.
More to the point, you should note that private-sector unions are dying. Their industries have become so uncompetitive that their demands are pointlessly moronic. It is public-sector unions, which rape the taxpayer and deliver poor service in general, that the future of unions unfortunately lies.
You can’t arrest them. But the government can call it a job action and by doing so, can fine them two days pay for every day they don’t work.
The OP can talk about how hard the government suffers from unionized workers. But don’t irnore how much power the government has over its workers, unionized or not. I’m forbidden by law to strike even if I have no contract - and as a result the government has no incentive to sign a contract. I haven’t had a current contract since 1995.
You could presumably fire them for not showing up to work. If your entire workforce “coincedentally” all falls ill on the same day to an illness with no verifiable symptoms, it wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to realise something’s up. If the fired workers tried to sue, I would be confident in my ability to demonstrate it was reasonable to assume they were conspiring to disrupt work with this synchronised sick day.
That’s the problem. You apparently believe that corporate CEO’s are the “common man”.
I understand you have a bone to pick with your local transit agency, but quotes from bloggers really aren’t reliable cites. And I’d rather talk about the general situation of government employment and unions, because I don’t live in Toronto and have zero knowledge of whatever local issues you may be facing there.
Of course government spending has gone up, because government has been undertaking new policies which cost more to provide the health care, B-2 bombers, VA health benefits, and increased public transportation that voters want. It’s far-fetched to argue that the increases in core government spending comes because of wage growth when the functions of government have expanded so greatly in the last half-century.
Perhaps your cite for bus drivers changed between the time you posted it and I read it, because the variations in pay did not rise anywhere near $100k, and appeared to be more based on geography than employer. (E.g., the urban New Jersey and California jobs paid more, and the rural Georgia and Alabama jobs paid less.)
Finally, that Cato study is as bogus as can be because it doesn’t compare apples-to-apples. The Federal government employs very few low wage earners (that would compare to retail workers, janitors, etc) because those jobs were long since contracted out. The government employs more white collar workers, and I defy you to argue that lawyers and other professionals make more working for the government than in private practice. I don’t hear a whole lot about the private sector having problems finding people to hire because everyone is fleeing to high-paid government jobs… do you?
And there has been little to no growth in worker’s wages (link) at the same time unions are dying, while executive pay has grown out of control. Coincidence?
Oh, wait – all workers who don’t get raises are lazy, because if they weren’t lazy they would have gotten raises. And executives who get raises have earned them, because they wouldn’t have gotten them if they hadn’t earned them. It’s so easy to be an economic conservative when so little critical thought is required!
You can demand a doctor’s certification, and if they can’t produce it, you can call it an unauthorized absence/abuse of sick leave and fire them.
Well, yes, of course you can fire the lot of them. That’s the natural counterbalance against the power of the strike. But if the union’s striking, then they’re basically taking the bet that you can’t afford to fire them all and replace them. And if they’re right, then maybe they really do deserve whatever it is they’re demanding. It’s yet another example of the free market at work.
Federal employees can strike but the consequences of such an action are severe. Think air traffic controllers back in 1981.
Generally speaking in the federal GS pay system there is locality pay to account for pay disparity between local non-federal pay and private pay levels. Even with locality pay, federal employees are paid less than private employees doing the same/similar job. There’s been recent news articles claiming federal employees are way overpaid compared to private. Unfortunately, cherry-picking with an intended bias makes the headlines while accurate reporting is buried, if it exists at all.
Federal unions in the USA are limited in power and scope. The President and Congress totally control pay scales and most other major items private unions enjoy. Generally speaking, federal unions concentrate on working conditions, and fairness and equity issues. They do lobby their superiors on behalf of the American people.
The problem isn’t with the existence of unions. The problem is an unfairness, greed and corruption which exists on both sides of labor and management.
If you’re not making enough money to pay off some think tank, you deserve to be poor.
The paper you linked to was careless enough to give away the fast one the author is trying to pull – it notes that most studies (which find government salaries to lag behind business salaries) compare the government to large corporations (well, duh – any competent statistician does his best to compare apples to apples, and filter out any oranges that try to sneak in), while his dumps a bushel or oranges into the mix by adding small businesses (probably down to and including the illegal-alien day-laborers in front of your local hardware store).
I have first hand experience.
I worked for 2 mid to large sized corporations.
Help Desk staff make 30-35k starting.
Desktop staff make 40-50k starting
Public sector Help Desk staff make 47-57k starting.(job posting at TTC)
Public sector Desktop make 60-65k starting. (friend managed desktop group and told me salary band and if you added benefits another 15k)
Pretty big difference.
However management group is usually under paid… but also not part of the union.
I’m guessing also that the higher up (more skilled positions) tend to be lower or equal to private sector. But that doesn’t mean you pay low skill set jobs a lot more than the private sector.
Nobody can claim you didn’t make your case. Many people would have only collected one point of data - but you went the extra distance and collected two.
The mayor and city council are probably more to blame than the unions. The unions job is simply to protect what they have and add more, the citys job is to snatch back what they can get and protect the tax payers , while retaining services.
The only real way to sort this mess out is to amalgamate the transportation service in the golden horseshoe and , this is the biggie, fix the wage. You get bennies out the yin yang, but your salary will not change.
Otherwise your gonna be locked into an ever increasing spiral of wage growth and a loss or reduction in services to pay for it.
Declan
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/7191103/Public-Vs-Private-Sector-Compensation/
The BLS’s September 2008
Employer Costs for Employee Compensation
(ECEC) survey shows that average total compensation in the private sector is $27.07 per hour, while the average total compensation in the public sector (state and local governments only) is $39.18 per hour.
Jeffrey R. Brown, the William G. Karnes Professor of Finance, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, focused on the cost of benefi ts. He noted that according to 2008 ECEC data, the employer cost per hour for benefits is $13.41 in the public sector (state and local governments only) and $7.93 in the private sector. This difference arises primarily from health and retirement benefits.
This article is more reasonable.
Apples to apples they say public sector gets 7% more not including benefits.
Management get paid 73% of private sector equal
But as a commenter pointed out, it doesn’t take into account how many people are required to do a job.
*What about looking at the amount of state employees to do an administrative job compared the amount employed in the private sector? I would be interested in that.
The gov’t doesn’t seem to “trim the fat” it just gets bigger and spends more. In my opinion gov’t and unions get paid too much for what they do, and because of their “status quo” mentality knowing they have a pay/benefits raise coming with no bearings on their performance hinders any motivation or drive. I have no numbers to back this up, it is just my experience when crossing paths with them in the business world.*
By Megan O’Toole, National Post
Growing public anger over Toronto’s municipal strike has shone a spotlight on disparities between compensation in government jobs and the private sector, analysts say.
And as a “demographic tidal wave” prepares to wash over the workforce, public frustration will only continue to build over massive differences in wages, benefits and pensions, noted Judith Andrew, Ontario vice-president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business.
“That really is going to be very divisive for our society,” she said. “It’s like reverse Robin Hood. Why should people with modest pensions be having to pay very onerous taxes to top up these rich pensions for … public servants?”
A recent CFIB report based on 2006 Census findings shows government and public-sector employees are typically paid between 8% and 17% more than similarly employed individuals in the private sector. When other benefits are taken into account, the number rises to more than 30%.
“Expressed in dollar terms, public-sector employers have a combined wage and benefits bill that is $19-billion higher than if they had kept costs to private sector norms,” the report says.
Paul Moist, national president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, acknowledges there is a wage gap in Canada, but maintains the disparity is based on unionization, not on public versus private. A unionized cashier in the private sector, for example, is compensated similarly to a unionized cashier in the public sector, he said.
As a general rule, unionized employees earn higher wages and benefits, Mr. Moist said, “which we would argue is a good thing.” The average salary for a CUPE worker countrywide is about $35,000.
In Toronto, workers have been organized to varying degrees for almost a century, and that is reflected in their benefits and pay, Mr. Moist said. The current strike is not a wage grab, but an attempt to maintain benefits that other city workers have not been asked to give up, he said.
Toronto residents are seeing the fallout as garbage is spilling over curbs in the downtown core while the city negotiates with 30,000 striking workers, who are angry over the city’s attempt to change sick leave benefits. The program allows workers to bank 18 sick days every year, and cash out a chunk of those upon retirement.
Ms. Andrew argues unions have historically abused their right to strike, withdrawing key services — such as monopolized garbage collection — in order to pressure municipalities for generous contract perks.
“Unions have an excessive amount of power,” Ms. Andrew said. “They’ve been able to hold the public to ransom for their own game, and it’s been done largely behind the scenes.”
Rather than drawing up collective agreements in a “confrontational labour relations environment,” she said, union and city negotiators should look to set compensation by finding fair matches in the private sector.
“It really is a slap in the face … that the government taxes [small businesses] very heavily in order to compensate staff at levels that our small business members can’t even hope to pay,” Ms. Andrew said, noting the government has “no bottom line at all.”
“They can just go back and ask the taxpayer for more.”
**WAGE COMPARISONS
Hourly wages earned by some Toronto city employees at the top of their seniority level:
Arborist inspector $32.68; compared to about $26 in the Ontario private sector and $29.80 in the City of Vaughan
Cashier $27.82; compared to about $12 in the Ontario private sector and $9.50 in the City of Vaughan
Cleaner, light duty $21.30; compared to about $16 in the Ontario private sector and $19.49 in York Region
Cook $25.02; compared to $13 in the Ontario private sector and $24.50 in York Region
Daycare housekeeper $25.02: compared to about $12 in the Ontario private sector and $23.17 in Peel Region
Dental hygienist $36.38; compared to about $39 in the Ontario private sector and $39.20 in York Region
Energy consultant $40.50; compared to about $49 in the Ontario private sector and $39.61 in York Region
Food service worker $22.46; compared to about $16 in the Ontario private sector and $20.55 in York Region
Garbage collector $25.11; compared to about $21 in the Ontario private sector and $24.84 in the City of Windsor
Law clerk $34.47; compared to about $26 in the Ontario private sector and $38.47 in York Region**
Note: Private sector wages calculated based on provincial average for employees with 25 years of experience using PayScale.com
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I remember reading the LCBO (liquor store that is public sector in Ontario) pays cashiers $25-30/hr… Cashiers.
You can get cashiers off the street who are willing to do the job for $15. Why are we paying them $25-30/hr?
I hope your point is that government employees should be paid equal to private sector employees. I would like to see the private sector give some actual wage growth to workers.
Also, since apparently I’m being paid 73% of what a similar person in the private sector is worth, that you’d be okay with me getting a 40% raise. Right?
Same situation in the USA. In Boston, arbitrators awarded the Boston FD a 19% raise (retroactive to 2006)!
This raises the specter of municipal bankruptcey-the fireman are now among the highest paid in the USA.
I can see the city firing them all and replacing them with a private operation.
Why is there a union in the first place?
I’m not part of a union and surprisingly I have rights, benefits, and I’m not abused.
Surely these union workers will be abused by the public government if there was no union to protect them, right?
Tomorrow’s National Post headline: Toronto in “more expensive to live in than City of Vaughan” shock
Seriously, the NP is comparing apples and oranges. $32.68/hr in Toronto is worth nowhere near $26/hr over all of Ontario. Tell me what the private sector in Toronto is paying, and then you might have a case.