Combating Public Employee Unions.

• Author: Leef, George

Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions

By Philip K. Howard

201 pp.; Rodin Books, 2023

What if Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin hadn't been on duty the day he arrested George Floyd and brought about his death? If some other officer had made the arrest and treated Floyd humanely, that would have spared the nation a great deal of violence and destruction.

There had been many credible complaints against Chauvin for being overly aggressive and too "tightly wound" for the job. Those complaints went for naught because the city's police commissioner had no authority to dismiss or even reassign him. The collective bargaining agreement between the police union and the city made it virtually impossible for city officials to take action against bad cops. Managerial control had been ceded to the union and cumbersome procedures meant to protect members were put in place. If only that hadn't been the case.

In his latest book, Not Accountable, lawyer Philip K. Howard looks at the damage that has been done to America by allowing public workers to unionize. He writes:

Micromanagement and expansive rights became integral to the public union playbook for control--no innovation is allowed unless the official can show it complies with a rule; no decision about a public employee's performance is valid without objective proof in a trial-type hearing. Clearing out the legal underbrush is what's needed to restore officials' freedom to use common sense in daily choices. Moreover, he argues, the power of public employee unions allows them to dictate governmental priorities, invariably with public resources flowing to union members rather than to public needs.

Collective bargaining / How did this happen? Private sector unions have existed and bargained with companies since the latter decades of the 19th century, but public employee unions were unthinkable well into the 20th. The early union leader Samuel Gompers opposed the idea of police unions, seeing a conflict of interest between public service and personal gain. And President Franklin D. Roosevelt, so friendly to trade unionism, was adamantly opposed to it in government, declaring, "The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service."

Nevertheless, by the 1960s, unions and collective bargaining for government workers was being discussed, with academics leading the way. Law professors argued that it was unfair to...