Two studies found relatively minimal wage effects (0 to 5 percent) associated with arbitration. However arbitratio should serve to raise management’s offers, particularly in final-offer selection states.

Management might be expected to concede toward what an arbitrator’s award might be, rather than to risk the choice of a union’s extreme position. And for the union’s part it might take a harder line when it has a final resolution available that does not entail the risk of an illegal strike. In studying fire fighter arbitration laws, arbitration was found to be associated with higher salaries and shorter working hours the longer the law was in effect. Wage increases averaged about 11 to 22 percent higher in arbitration states.

Since I’m not very fond of many of the tradeoffs made in Western Europe, I’m not entirely clear that 1,2,3 and 4 are compatible. That’s just notionally. In practical political terms at the present moment in the United States, they clearly are not, not without crimping at one end or another. It is the union’s job, since they are the ones taking public action, to articulate how they want to negotiate the relation between these competing priorities. Failing to do so is to offer a variety of “magical thinking”, which I’d argue is one of the reasons that progressives in general are strugging politically: they don’t explain well how they’d negotiate competing priorities in the public domain and in management of government, and so most people are suspicious that promises of the capacious ability to have everything and choose nothing are just that, promises. I join in that suspicion, in part precisely because arguments like “In Western Europe, everything is wonderful” that happen to be missing on the backside both a recognition of the costs of the wonderfulness of public policy there and the material differences that enable some possible choices.

Beyond the larger arguments about unionism, there is also the basic argument about politics. If what you’re doing almost necessarily requires public support to be ultimately successful, and you show no interest whatsoever in even gestures that seek that support, then you’re politically incompetent. Which is not my responsibility: it is squarely the responsibility of the union in question.

http://www.seiu113.org/appResources/scPages/union_advantage.cfm

What else other than high union density explains the higher relative average wages of European workers vs. U.S. workers.

From a theoretical point of view the case is fairly solid. A union contract reduces the supply of labor below a certain price. What reason is there to believe that it will not increase the price of labor in the reamining pool?

Your explanation of what happened in the 70s and 80s amounts to a giant hand wave. Do you really think the fundemental structures of the U.S. economy could be so easily shaped by the attitudes of union leaders. Let me suggest an alternative explanation. By the 40s, Labor organized the great industrial enterprises and gained strong toeholds throughout the economy. Then came Taft-Hartley which wiped unions out of half of the U.S. and effectively halted their ability to organize in any private sector industry. The U.S. population grew and expanded in the non-union parts of the country (South and West) not because people wanted to avoid a union but because those were the less populated areas. Then came the 70s and 80s and the decimation of the older industrial enterprises. In Europe where it was still effectively legal to organize, industrial unions were able to keep up and other union organized the growing service sector. In the U.S. this was not possible because the organizing tactics of the 30s were now illegal.

As for Philly you say ‘adequate’ health care depends on what other workers get for health care. But if I have inadequate health care, mine does not get any more ‘adequate’ if yours is less than mine.

You want the transit workers to accept give up 1 adequate health care, so that you can 2. keep the Philly tax burden low, 3. avoid increasing the cost of transit to the working poor, and 4. avoid cutting transit services for the poor.

You think 1 is incompatibe with 2,3, and 4. I suspect the transit workers think 1, 2, 3, and 4 are all compatible. All thoughout Europe they have universal health care and great public transit. You want the transit workers to accept less health care so you can avoid the public policy choices required to make 1,2,3, & 4 all compatible. Should they do a better job explaining how 1,2,3, & 4 are all compatible? Probably. But why are you so outraged that they have not? After all their job is just to drive the buses. Isn’t the task of expaining how 1,2,3, and 4 are all compatible really the job of, say, professors with blogs?

I wouldn’t begrudge the transit workers adequate health care (though that’s really not the term for it, given that “adequate” in this case is also superior to comparable health care coverage in the rest ofthe labor market) if adequate health care came from an internal reallocation of available resources within public transit systems, and came with an adequate address to the stewardship of transit workers over the public service they provide. On the latter, all that’s really needed is more political savvy, more care and attentiveness to the burdens that a strike puts on the public: that’s my most important point. The union in this case does not seem to care, particularly, and hasn’t in the past when they’ve gone out on strike. They plead meager resources for advertising budgets and so on, but that shows just how badly they misunderstand the political priorities they should have. It’s not about spending money for TV ads: it’s about getting any union officials who are not in the negotiating room out there speaking to the public in churches, in community centers, about pounding the pavement and taking the time to show concern for people, listen to the problems you’ve imposed on them, being solicitious. It’s about trying to find solutions: form carpools of union members and union supporters to help older Philadelphians dependent on bus transport get to their destinations. Sure, that’s mostly gestural, but that’s what’s needed. The lack of such gestures amounts to a big “screw you”, a vacating of the public space that unions used to occupy fairly well.

As for why taxpayers should be allowed to exploit workers, that goes to the former problem: if the demands of the workers in this case result in either higher fees to ride public transit, or the significant reduction of public services in some other domain, or higher taxes, those are all compulsory steps that result in serious public consequences. That’s what it means to be public. If a business raises its prices so high that I cannot afford their services, I can stop buying what they’re selling unless it’s basic food, basic shelter, water, heating, basic health care. (All of which are services we either work through the public sector or in some fashion heavily subordinate to public concerns or regulation). You can’t endorse doing something in the public interest that has regressive consequences elsewhere: if getting the transit workers adequate health care means preventing poorer Philadelphians from using public transit, you haven’t done anything worth doing. There is a heedlessness about the public domain and the state that some progressives have, as if the state is a boundless, infinite source of public goods. It doesn’t work that way: if you want to support one public good, you have to tell me which other one you’re going to take away from and why. In this context, I’d rather see transit workers operating closer to what the labor market as a whole is doing (and look for some general public solution to the health care crisis) than give them a better-than-market deal at the cost of increasing Philadelphia’s already high tax burdens (which are negatively suppressing economic growth in the city), at the cost of making public transit less accessible to poorer Philadelphians, or at the cost of reductions in the quality and capacity of the transit system itself. That’s my considered judgement of how to maximize the public good in this case. If the transit workers feel differently, it’s incumbent on them not to articulate their case selfcenteredly, but in full light of that larger public terrain. It’s not about them and that they do not understand this is the main problem that concerns me.

Why is this the case? It is a sort of a bizaro world where we expect the most public spiritedness from those with the least power and the least assests, while we excuse selfishness in those with the most wealth and priviledge.

I think the explanation is the classic phenomenon of free ridership. Unions lift wages and benefits, not just for their own members, but for all workers. The working poor who suffer from the transit strike gain far more when strong unions are able to lift wages and health care coverage for all. But most people, especially upper class professionals only see the imediate pain and not the broader benefit.

As for public sector unions, why should tax-payers be allowed to exploit workers any more than corporate shareholders? If the tax burden of providing adequate wages and health care falls excessively on the poor, that is a problem of an unfair tax code. Why is it worse to provide adequate health care for private sector workers by cutting into profits, than to provide adequate health care to public sector workers by taxing large corporate salaries and capitol gains?

Of course health care should be dealth with as a national issue and no boad national organization has done more to promote national health care than the labor movement. So why do you begrudge the transit workers adequate health care?

I still don’t accept your distinction between public service managers and union leaders. Both should be held to high moral standards, and I find it pretty disturbing that you are willing to allow managers to be immoral as the natural order of things.