Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

But it's not propaganda. Look how teachers' and police unions across the country have pushed relentlessly to collect unsustainable benefits while completely ignoring the needs of the cities they serve. How police unions are key in protecting bad cops, like unions everywhere protect bad workers. They're functionally no different than the unions that destroyed GM, etc.

I hear unions work okay in Europe. They haven't in the U.S.

View on HN

I note that the two unions you bring up are public-sector unions. It's worth considering that public-sector and private-sector unions are different beasts. For one thing, private-sector unions are facing off against corporations - both trying to maximize their own value, and so one might hope a balance is achieved. In the public-sector, unions are trying to maximize their own value, but the government is (hypothetically) trying to maximize public good, so it's not really a fair balance.

Private-sector unions have been hugely helpful in the US. This article touches on it in an interesting way: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/19/opinion/nicholas-kristof-t...

> the two unions you bring up are public-sector unions

He also brought up the United Auto Workers, which is not.

Yes, but only his complaints about the public sector unions were reasonable enough to address.

> only his complaints about the public sector unions were reasonable enough to address.

I don't understand. His complaint is basically that public sector unions and private sector unions have the same problems.

>Look how teachers' and police unions across the country have pushed relentlessly to collect unsustainable benefits

>I hear unions work okay in Europe. They haven't in the U.S.

The kind of benefits that teachers and the police ask for are universal in western Europe, and are sustainable due to taxation that is closer to the rates that the US had during its economic rise, rather than the rates during its current fall.

"are sustainable due to taxation that is closer to the rates that the US had during its economic rise"

European taxation takes far more from low income people than taxes in the US. The US gets the highest proportion of it's take revenues from the top 10% in the OECD.

> The kind of benefits that teachers and the police ask for are universal in western Europe

Not at all. The average U.K. universal pension is about $9,000 per year. The average U.K. teacher pension payment is only $15,000 per year. The average Chicago teacher pension payment is $42,000 per year.

Moreover, average teacher pay in places like Chicago is far higher than in places like Germany or the U.K. http://www.oecd.org/edu/skills-beyond-school/48631286.pdf (D.3). A Chicago police officer with 2.5 years on the force makes $65,000. A U.K. officer with double the experience makes only $46,000 per year: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-12678661.

You are cherrypicking facts by comparing the pay of a large, expensive, city to an entire country. Either do country to country or equivalent cities. While an officer in the UK might only makes 46K I'm fairly certain an officer in central London makes quite a bit more.

Chicago is 16% more expensive than the U.S. average, while consumer prices in the U.K. are about 10% higher than the U.S. So it's really a wash. Comparing country to country would be pointless, because most U.S. teachers are not unionized. The point is to demonstrate the impact of a particularly dysfunctional teachers' union. San Francisco or New York would be other examples, but the cost of living there is vastly above the U.S. average.

As for London--average police pay is 45,500 pounds ($67,000): http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2084505/Generous-pay.... So a Chicago police officer with just 2.5 years of service earns about as much as the average London cop does in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

The average Chicago police pension is $57,000: http://www.weareonechicago.org/documents/waoc_fact_sheet.pdf. The average U.K. police pension is $23,000: http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/305105/Police-pensions-bill....

I'm not familiar with US unions generally or the ones you bring p, but if they get unreasonable concessions then their situation may be a type of survivor bias. The only unions that are left are the very tough ones?

In countries where labour is generally covered by collective bargaining frameworks and enjoys public support, there's a lot of consensus seeking about the unionization ground rules between job market players (labour unions, employer unions, legislature).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com