The fallacy of union busting: taking power away from labor won't rescue states from their fiscal woes--but giving power to voters might.

• Author: Schieber, Sylvester

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If you are an informed, fair-minded person, chances are you feel at least conflicted about all the hard-knuckle attacks on public employee unions in Madison, Wisconsin, and other state capitols. While Governor Scott Walker's agenda was clearly much larger than balancing his current budget, there is no denying the magnitude of the pension crisis. Long predicted, it's finally here, and it's constricting the art of the possible in almost every state.

California finds itself paying more for benefits to public workers' pensions than it does to fund higher education. And because public employees now on the job keep accruing new, underfunded retirement benefits, the pension debt keeps growing. Despite having some of the most underfunded public pensions in the country, Illinois will reduce its pension trust holdings this year to meet its pension payroll. One study suggests it will exhaust its assets by 2018 and finds that New Jersey is close behind. In places like Indiana and Louisiana, where policymakers have been making added pension contributions to cover past underfunding, they are still losing ground. Perhaps needless to say, any money that state and local governments use to bail out their pension plans can't be used for any other purpose. Not only is that money needed to replace the teachers and police officers now retiring in their fifties; it could also be spent on exploding costs for health care and other pressing social needs.

Yet many Americans are uncomfortable with the solution being pursued by Governor Walker and some of his Republican counterparts, which boils down to busting public employee unions. Whatever the faults and excesses of some unions, polls confirm that most of us support a basic right to collective bargaining, even in the public sector. It's one thing to, say, criticize the opposition of some teacher's unions to merit pay or demand that firemen contribute more to the cost of their own pensions and not game the system, and quite another to assert that teachers and firemen have no right to organize and communicate their grievances collectively to their employers. Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights identifies trade union organizing as a fundamental human right.

There are also political considerations that factor into the discussion. Many people are concerned about the ramifications of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, which struck down any restraint on political spending by corporations and wealthy individuals to influence elections. Not only partisan liberals fear that, without a counterbalance, there will be no effective check on the power of well-heeled corporations in either party. Public-sector unions can serve as an important element of this counterbalance. At the same time, however, nothing could be more toxic for the Democrats than insisting that ordinary taxpayers fund pensions that are far more generous than what most can ever expect to receive themselves.

The problem doesn't just involve the...