Government Against Itself: Public Union Power and Its Consequences

CUNY politics professor DiSalvo (Engines of Change: Party Factions in American Politics, 1868–2010) capably distills familiar arguments against the nation’s public employee unions. “The conflict between the interests of government unions and the public interest is profound,” he begins. Starting with the Boston police strike of 1919, DiSalvo examines the growth of unionized government. He identifies 2009 as a pivot point: the first year in which more public than private employees in the U.S. belonged to unions. “Public sector unions are fundamentally political entities,” he argues. The book convincingly portrays government workers as aggressive political players capable of engineering the elections of the legislators who in theory are their managers. According to DiSalvo, the result is that budgetary havoc, me-first protections, and reduced productivity become the order of the day. He puts particular focus on the union contracts for public school teachers, emphasizing cases in which these agreements have shielded gross incompetence. Acknowledging pro-union arguments, this scholarly analysis also explains why expensive pensions and benefits for teachers, police, firefighters, and corrections officers continue to be popular. DiSalvo sometimes gets lost in academic hair-splitting and conflicting data, but readers of any political persuasion should be sobered by his observation that democratic government’s inevitable fate seems to be “spending more, getting less.” [em](Jan.) [/em]