The Logical Conclusion Politics and progress

Self Wars: The Unions Strike Back

It's in-fashion to bash the unions, which makes me somewhat reluctant to do it, but I really can't say anything positive about the November 30th strikes: they are simply a gratuitous power grab by the unions. And not against the government. They are a power grab against us, the taxpayer; we, who pay the gold-plated wages and pensions of public sector workers.

But isn't it illiberal to say that they can't strike? Surely the right to withdraw one's labour is reasonable? After all, it just levels the playing field, right?

No, actually, it really doesn't. In an equal relationship, the worker must have no right to which the employer cannot have an equal right. This would mean that if the worker can suspend his/her labour, or essentially suspend his/her half of the contract, then the employer should be able to do the same: to withdraw pay at any time that he/she feels the labour provided doesn't meet his/her standard.

What, in effect, this would mean is that contracts would be utterly pointless. We could simply refuse to pay taxes whilst the government failed to meet our standards, and the public sector workers could withdraw their labour all they wanted, but at least it would be an equal relationship.Does this make unions entirely illegitimate? Not at all, but their only actual legal power should be to threaten mass quits. If a worker doesn't like the contract placed in front of him/her, there is nothing compelling him/her to sign it. If the contract doesn't offer the pay that the worker requires, the correct thing to do is to decline it, not to accept it and then later on decide to hold the employer to ransom.

But I don't want to spend this whole post discussing the ins and outs of unions, I'd rather focus on two specific issues with unions which really aren't known or battled against well enough, namely 'pilgrims' and these November 30th strikes.

What is a pilgrim? A pilgrim (named after Jane Pilgrim, pictured above) is a full-time union worker paid for by the public tax pot. These people are paid not to look after patients or teach pupils, but to act as administrators for unions' private interests full time.

The taxpayer is paying approximately £7 million a year to fund unions campaigning to cost the taxpayer even more. If that makes any sense to you, come and explain it to me, because I can't make head nor tail of how it managed to happen.

If the unions can afford to pay their chiefs six-figure salaries and make seven and eight-figure donations to the Labour party, then they can afford to fund their own full-time employees instead of taking professionally trained nurses, police officers etc out of the public institutions they are paid to work in.

If I want to be represented by a negotiator, I need to pay for the service. If the unions want to hire full time workers to represent and negotiate for their membership, then they should fund that out of their own members' pockets (maybe cutting their donations to the Labour party would help).

But hey, at least the unions are only making sure their membership stays on a reasonable footing, right? Well, no, actually, they're trying to make sure that their overbearingly public-sector membership, which gets far better pension arrangements than the private sector already, doesn't get brought slightly down (but still nowhere near to the private sector average) into a more affordable scheme.

Personally, I don't feel that the government's scheme goes nearly far enough. All public sector final salary schemes should be abolished as soon as reasonably possible and replaced with contribution-based pensions. If public sector workers want a big pension, they need to be willing to fund it themselves on their already generous salaries instead of expecting the rest of us, most of whom get paid less than they do, to prop them up.

Moreso, the law needs to be changed such that strikes are no longer legally protected. If an employer wishes to prevent unionised staff from working for him, this should be acceptable, and it should start as the default in the public sector.