: BART strike
Topics: Transportation
14 Aug 2009
From: Ervan Darnell
California is deeply in debt and cuts are everywhere. BART operators
are going on strike Monday in hopes of avoiding any cuts [1]. That's
a good argument against pervasive goverment transit (my car never goes
on strike). What if the liberals had their way and cars weren't an
option (for commuting into San Francisco)? The government would have
handed BART operators a monopoly they could then use for blackmail by
keeping people from their jobs.
I'm not in principle opposed to unions (though the practice seems all
for the worse), but I am opposed to giving them an advantage. The
idea of a government employees union is such an advantage since the
negotiating employer is compromised (by political influence on one
hand and by not being the party paying the bills on the other).
Employees can still individually negotiate for wages and quit any time
they want, no union needed. If one wants to argue that there is high
buyers' surplus in the case of this kind of employment and unions can
extract it, then there are other ways to fix it. Well, there is no
buyers' surplus because it's all run as a tax subsidy anyway. But if
there were, one could structure the contract so that a fraction of
employees run out of their contract every 6 months. The union could
still negotiate wages, and for everyone simultaneously (where new
wages apply when the next group's contract expires), with the threat
that everyone would quit eventually. What it could not do is shut the
system down and extract the blackmail premium. The employer would be
negotiating the wages based on the value of the labor, and have a
chance to replace it if overvalued.
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[1] http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/08/13/MNQT198EVF.DTL
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