Like Other Institutions, Public Employee Unions Need More Transparency
Powerful public employee unions regularly criticize American government as undemocratic and call for campaign finance reform, more citizen participation and greater governmental transparency. Many of these unions, especially those representing teachers, increasingly seek to democratize corporations though shareholder activism.
Yet these unions themselves often operate as oligarchies with a democratic veneer. Federal law requires that private sector unions conduct secret ballot elections to choose officers. A patchwork of state laws does the same for public sector unions. But, for the most part, American labor unions are democratic only on paper.
Very few union members vote in leadership elections, if they are contested at all.
Turnout is normally below 20% (in one recent New York City public employee union election, it was 4%). Those who vote are often unrepresentative of workers in the union as a whole, with older workers concerned about retirement benefits dominating turnout.
Just 17% of New York City schoolteachers voted in the last United Federation of Teachers elections, and only half of those who did were active teachers. The rest were retirees, many of whom now live in Florida.
Union leaders often go unchallenged for years and even decades, only to anoint a successor upon retirement. The average tenure atop the nation's most powerful public employee unions is 15 years. (The average tenure of Fortune 500 CEOs is 10 years.) The vast majority of current workers have never been asked to vote on whether they want union representation.
Although statutes require a "certification" election to set up a union, some 93% of public sector union members today belong to unions that were organized before they were hired.
As recent Supreme Court cases have documented, unions often take political positions with which a portion of the workers they represent disagree, meaning that those workers are paying for policy advocacy they do not support.
Leaders who are roughly responsive to members' interests in better pay, benefits and working conditions generally run strong unions, while those that manipulate workers, misspend their dues and are otherwise corrupt usually lead weak unions — or end up in jail.
Government employees now constitute half of all union members. In some states, 70% of government workers belong to unions. Their actions have a direct impact on public policy.
In the public sector, even an issue as quotidian as pay has political implications insofar as it affects the allocation of scarce tax dollars. Money spent on firefighter pay cannot be spent to address other pressing priorities.
Yet it is hard to know what is really going on inside America's public-sector unions.
There are no requirements that they disclose information about their leadership elections or other referenda. (This stands in sharp contrast with the extensive and growing disclosure requirements for corporate governance).
There is no database of union election results that reports the percent of member turnout, the total results or the names of the candidates contesting a given election.
Sometimes this information makes it into the popular press or is reported in union newsletters. But it is not readily available to scholars, government officials or the public at large.
This should change. Only with such information can the public evaluate the quality and character of a union's commitment to democratic governance.
Public employee unions enjoy organizational privileges that other interest groups can only dream about. In many states, they have the legal right to collect agency fees from nonmembers as well as to have those fees and member dues deducted directly from workers' paychecks. These provisions ensure public employee unions a steady membership base and revenue stream.
With such privileges should come a duty of greater reporting requirements about the operation of the unions' democratic procedures.
Greater union democracy is important because unions partly govern an individual's life in the workplace, and it serves as a bulwark against corruption. And more attention to workers' preferences means that union leaders will be less apt to spend money on political causes that some of their members don't support.
Although union leadership may do a good job representing the interests of some members, a more democratic union structure might do a better job at navigating trade-offs between current compensation and retirement benefits, and the generosity of defined benefit pensions and healthcare plans and their sustainability.
States, whose laws govern our public employee unions, should update their laws to require greater openness and transparency, including adopting online voting systems to enhance worker participation.
Public employee unions owe the public a level of transparency similar to that which they demand from other institutions in American society.
This piece originally appeared in Investor's Business Daily
This piece originally appeared in Investor's Business Daily