NOT Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions
Many Americans are deeply dissatisfied with the current performance of government at the federal, state, and local levels. Some of the populace’s unease owes to disagreements about the proper direction of public policy, but the perceived dilemma is also largely more fundamental, going to dysfunction in the operational mechanics or administration of government in the first place. There are a multitude of plausible explanations for such government dysfunction. NOT Accountable carefully dissects a major one: the negative impact of disproportionate, self-serving, and arguably unconstitutional dominance by public employee unions (as opposed to trade unions to which only 6% of private workers now belong) regarding the content of policy decisions acquiesced to and implemented by the legislative and executive branches of all three levels of government.
The author of this concise but substantial interrogation of public employee unions is Philip K. Howard, senior partner at a major national law firm and, more importantly, the founder and chair of Common Good, a nonpartisan organization aimed at simplifying (and thereby rescuing) government by restoring common sense in daily operations. The book includes a short but incisive foreword by Mitch Daniels, former Indiana governor and director of the federal Office of Management and Budget.
This book begins by tracing the history of public employee unions in the U.S. and then sets out in clear, forceful language basic policy objections to the ways that their undue influence has evolved. Specifically, their provision of campaign funds, votes, and unpaid campaign workers, empowers public employee unions to select their own bosses, government officials whose loyalty to the unions who elected them always threatens to overwhelm their fiduciary duty to the public they theoretically exist to serve. In the legislatively authorized collective bargaining process between self-interested public workers and captured government officials (F.S. §447.309(1l)), the market discipline and incentives for efficient performance that characterize private sector labor negotiations play no part, with taxpayers left with a result that simultaneously sticks them with the financial bill and hamstrings effective government action.
The author’s analysis of the policy implications of co-government by unions and elected legislators and executives that too frequently equates to no-government joins an already significant body of political science literature. His quite original contribution, however, consists of his persuasive (to this reviewer) argument that contemporary public employee unions should be invalidated by the judiciary because these entities violate the U.S. Constitution. Namely, according to NOT Accountable, public employee unions in practice offend the nondelegation principle embodied in both art. II’s vesting of executive power in the president (since collective bargaining agreements dictate constraints on decisions and actions that make present and future chief executives unaccountable to their electorates) and art. IV’s provision “guarantee[ing] to every state in this Union a Republican Form of Government” (since policy-formulation by collective bargaining is inherently unaccountable to the general citizenry).
We can continue to complain ad nauseam about the performance of our federal, state, and local governments and our seeming inability to effect meaningful reform; or we can read and thoughtfully consider the potential implications of this constructive new approach to a potentially society-endangering problem.
