I & I Editorial BoardFollowing President Pen-And-Phone and President Autopen, President Donald Trump is also making use of the White House quill. But his directives have tended to be more practical than political. For instance, last week he issued an executive order banning employee collective bargaining at a number of federal agencies.
The American people should be grateful that he’s willing to take on the bureaucracy that has nullified voters’ preferences and become an unaccountable political force – the real power in the country.
To support our point, we look back at the Obama administration’s IRS targeting of Tea Party and conservative groups. It began the day after the late National Treasury Employees Union President Colleen Kelley visited the White House. A coincidence? Possibly. But it is not out of the realm that she was making a preemptive strike because Senate Republicans were thinking about banning unionization at the IRS. She needed to neuter the GOP.
NTEU members eventually admitted “they went after Obama’s political opponents with the full power of the federal government.”
Across all federal departments and agencies, unions have taken on the authority that elected officials have ceded to them.
Trump’s most recent order is a supplement to one he issued in March in which he banned employees in agencies with national security missions from participating in collective bargaining. Labor bosses and various whiners are accusing him of “union busting,” as if that’s some sort of tragedy. It’s not. National Public Radio says “Trump is decimating federal employee unions one step at a time,” to which we say “hallelujah.”
Government workers, from the federal level down to the smallest municipality, should not be allowed to unionize. We made this point a decade ago when we were writing opinions at Investor’s Business Daily:
When the public-sector unions negotiate with government, collective bargaining is actually more like collective taking. The group across the table has the same interests as the union. There is no one to say no to union bosses’ demands.
Even Franklin Roosevelt, that great defender of the union man, understood that “the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management.”
Government workers should be civil servants, not the bullies, obstructionists and layabouts they’ve become. It’s unethical for them to place their private interests over public service, which they do with impunity. A free people should not be subject to their whims, nor financially responsible for their cushy lives.
To that last point, federal employees have been riding in the luxury car on the gravy train for decades. Their salaries and benefits are about 30% higher than comparably skilled private-sector workers, and when compared to all workers in the private sector, they make 80% more, on average. Their incomes bear no relationship to their productivity. Powerful unions, says the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, have made it nearly impossible “to fire even the most incompetent federal bureaucrats.”
Federal employees were barred from organizing until President John Kennedy signed an executive order that allowed them to unionize. It was a mistake that the public will be paying for as long as public employees are part of a mob that has regard only for its own selfish agenda.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
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Johnny Kampis
Public service is a privilege, not a right.
It is against the public interest for government employees to be unionized.
No one can threaten to endanger the Republic for personal gain.
It’s not only unionization of public employees that’s a problem. Employees compensated through taxation shouldn’t have the vote at any level either, for many of the same reaons.
I find it very troubling that most of the federal workers who have been laid off somehow believe they are immune to such things and act as if they are employed for the rest of their lives. Until that mentality is excised from those folks, we will continue to have those employed by the federal government thinking somehow the rules don’t apply to them.