New York was a pioneer in allowing public employees to unionize (September 2009 posting). I’m wondering if the recent work slowdown by the New York Police points the way to the future of public employee labor negotiations.
Had the police gone on strike they would have lost a few weeks of pay. By simply stopping work but not going on strike they kept getting paychecks while putting pressure on politicians and citizens. That raises the question of why, going forward, public employees would ever strike. If there are no performance standards for unionized public workers and/or they can’t be fired, why strike? And why were there strikes by public employee unions in the past? Why wasn’t this tactic obvious back in the 1960s, for example?
Simple: you can’t stop what you never started in the first place.
This type of strike is nothing new, it’s often called an Italian strike. There’s an example from 1968 from Canada in the relevant Wikipedia article 🙂
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule
This is a good question. For an answer, I suggest the reason that its so hard to fire many public employees is precisely because they are unionized. And the union protections came about because the unions demonstrated their willingness to go on actual strikes in the past.
The “you can’t fire a public employee” meme is something of a myth, but then not all public employees belong to unions. I suspect that if someone did the research, they would find a strong correlation between unionization and the ability of public employees to stay on the job for absurd amounts of time.
I think there’s an even more important point lost in the work stoppage, and it surprises me that I don’t see more people talking about it: it completely exposes the lie that 95% of these laws (and the time spent enforcing them) have anything whatsoever to do with public safety.
The one place I’ve seen it is (perhaps predictably) the Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/12/the-benefits-of-fewer-nypd-arrests/384126/
Nobody’s being cited for speeding, or rolling through a stop sign, or drinking a beer on their stoop, or selling loose cigarettes, or smoking pot on the corner, or selling a soda in too large a container, or hundreds of other victimless “crimes”, and yet hellfire and damnation seem stubbornly absent. Indeed, I suspect that most New Yorkers have welcomed these past two weeks as a refreshing, if temporary, breath of actual freedom…
Just a stop on the way to communism. “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.”