We don’t allow police officers or firefighters to go on strike. Why? Because if they do, people would die.
We made a collective societal decision that there are some positions that are essential for our civilized society to proceed safely and economically.
We, therefore, categorized those employees differently from those in the private sector, who, if they went out on strike, would merely impact the profits of a private company.
The public sector is different.
If we were developing a society from scratch, would we ever put in a provision that says people who take a job to help others in the society at large can decide to strike and put their fellow residents in peril?
Of course, we wouldn’t.
We would have to make sure that the workers are paid a decent wage so that we can continue to attract them to do that job. The day the wage is too low is the day we will stop recruiting workers. There’s also pressure at the ballot box if the workers’ salaries are too low.
But to say that the public at large should suffer when there’s an economic impasse between the public workers and government management is senseless and dangerous.
The workers of the Long Island Rail Road are all quasi-governmental. Some have taken the position that they’re different than police officers or firefighters or sanitation workers. They are different to the extent that they don’t fall under the state’s Taylor Law, which indeed bars strikes from some essential employees; rather, they fall under the Federal Railway Act, which does not prohibit a walkout. The federal government must address this.
To some extent, there’s still tremendous chaos that ensues for the general public when these workers, whether we call them government workers or quasi-government workers, go on strike.
People suffer enormously when traffic comes to a standstill. Doctors and nurses being unable to get to the hospital on time is untenable. What about the other essential government workers who cannot get to where they need to go to protect us?
Many observers are shocked to learn that President Franklin Roosevelt, who was perceived as one of the most pro-labor presidents in history, had actually opposed the unionization of public sector employees. The same goes for George Meany, one of the most prestigious and famous private sector union organizers.
The leftist push of the 1960s and 70s bought with it a move to unionize public employees. It wasn’t always like that.
Who says it should stay that way going into the future? Let’s pay our public employees a decent wage and give them fair conditions, but let’s have that balance struck at the ballot box and the market itself — not by allowing strikes that create havoc and place the public in danger.