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Government against Itself: Public Union Power and Its Consequences Illustrated Edition

by Daniel DiSalvo (Author)
3.8 3.8 out of 5 stars 45 ratings
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As workers in the private sector struggle with stagnant wages, disappearing benefits, and rising retirement ages, unionized public employees retire in their fifties with over $100,000 a year in pension and healthcare benefits. The unions defend tooth and nail the generous compensation packages and extensive job security measures they've won for their members. However, the costs they impose crowd out important government services on which the poor and the middle class rely. Attempts to rein in the unions, as in Wisconsin and New Jersey, have met with massive resistance. Yet as Daniel DiSalvo argues in Government against Itself, public sector unions threaten the integrity of our very democracy.

DiSalvo, a third generation union member, sees the value in private sector unions. But in public sector, unions do not face a genuine adversary at the bargaining table. Moreover, the public sector can't go out of business no matter how much union members manage to squeeze out of it. Union members have no incentive to settle for less, and the costs get passed along to the taxpayer. States and municipalities strain under the weight of their pension obligations, and the chasm between well-compensated public sector employees and their beleaguered private sector counterparts widens. Where private sector unions can provide a necessary counterweight to the power of capital, public employee unionism is basically the government bargaining with itself; it's no wonder they almost always win. The left is largely in thrall to the unions, both ideologically and financially; the right would simply take a hatchet to the state itself, eliminating important and valuable government services. Neither side offers a realistic vision of well-run government that spends tax dollars wisely and serves the public well. Moving beyond stale and unproductive partisan divisions, DiSalvo argues that we can build a better, more responsive government that is accountable to taxpayers. But we cannot do it until we challenge the dominance of public sector unions in government.

This carefully reasoned analysis of the power of public sector unions is a vital contribution to the controversial debates about public versus private unions, increasing inequality, and the role of government in American life
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  1. ISBN-10
    0199990743
  2. ISBN-13
    978-0199990740
  3. Edition
    Illustrated
  4. Publisher
    Oxford University Press
  5. Publication date
    January 6, 2015
  6. Language
    English
  7. Dimensions
    9.3 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
  8. Print length
    304 pages
  9. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Readers of any political persuasion should be sobered by his observation that democratic government's inevitable fate seems to be 'spending more, getting less.'" --Publishers Weekly

"A sober analysis, both scholarly and political, of public sector unions. DiSalvo shows both sides, argues cogently, and concludes reasonably--against them. This is political science at its best." --Harvey Mansfield, Professor of Government, Harvard University; Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution

"Daniel DiSalvo has laid bare the harsh political realities facing mayors across the country who want to improve the quality of life in their cities. In the annual battles over cutting services, raising taxes or controlling costs to balance the budget, public employee unions usually have the upper hand. In many jurisdictions, costs are skyrocketing, taxes are up and services are deteriorating, yet fiscal reform seems impossible. This book explains how and why the narrow interests of unions in improving pay and benefits frequently overwhelm the broader interests of the people in improving services." --Chuck Reed, Mayor of San Jose

Book Description

A nuanced but devastating account of how public sector employee unions are eating away at the government-and how we all pay

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oxford University Press; Illustrated edition (January 6, 2015)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0199990743
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0199990740
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.26 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.8 3.8 out of 5 stars 45 ratings

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Daniel DiSalvo

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Top reviews from the United States

  • David c. Keehn
    5.0 out of 5 stars An insightful and balanced review of why government isn't working and why we're getting less while spending more!
    Reviewed in the United States on August 18, 2015
    Verified Purchase
    An insightful analysis of public unionism in America, particularly with respect to state and local governments. Mr. DeSalvo explores the growing pension and benefit costs of public workers that is bankrupting major cities and making balancing state and local government budgets difficult while crowding out other essential education, environmental, public health, and transportation services, Unlike private unions which have been declining, he makes the case that rapidly-growing public unions offer few benefits for broader society. Instead, their primary focus is on the parochial interests of their members, many who are forced to participate through agency shops and mandatory dues part of which go to union-promoting lobbying and political expenses. Public workers are really our employees but until recently, Americans and public officials have been lethargic in exercising the time and muscle to address public union's impact on government productivity. Mr. DeSalvo does not demonize public workers but instead focuses on the current broken system and recommends changes such as those recommend by Governor Brown in California.
    One person found this helpful
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  • William L. Brown
    4.0 out of 5 stars Can Public Employee Retirement Benefits Survive?
    Reviewed in the United States on October 13, 2014
    Amazon Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )
    As the title of this book implies, government employees and their unions are demanding increasing shares of government revenues for salaries and fringe benefits, leaving less and less funding to accomplish the generally expected functions of cities, states and federal entities. The result is increasing demands for tax hikes while parents are charged for student participation in school activities, the transportation infrastructure crumbles, and police and fire protection are reduced.

    DiSalvo is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the City College of New York--CUNY, and a fellow of the Manhattan Institute's Center for State and Local Leadership. This book, which will be released by the Oxford University Press in January, 2015, is a thoroughly documented study of the effects of unionization of government employees. As such, it is necessarily complicated and difficult to follow. DiSalvo backs up every statement with statistics from a broad range of social science research (which makes for slow reading), but without such evidence a topic this controversial would be unconvincing to the critical reader.

    Public education provides an example of how complex the issue of public funding really is. A recent survey by the Friedman Foundation showed that half of the respondents thought that American public schools spend under $8,000 per pupil and that education funding is too low. Yet, the average funding is actually over $10,000 per pupil, with many districts spending nearly twice that amount. For a classroom with 25 students, then, the average funding is over a quarter of a million dollars, with the average cost of the teachers (salary, healthcare and pension) around $100 thousand per year. According to DiSalvo, the culprit is the shortfall in funds set aside to pay pensions when the teachers retire, and a significant portion of the spending is used to bring the pension funds up to a level where the retirement benefits can be paid after the currently employed teachers come to the end of their active teaching careers.

    It is a common contention of public employees that they are not seeing the funding in their classrooms or on the job where they work, and this is largely true. The author shows that the retirement and health benefits negotiated by the public employee unions require ever increasing levels of taxation to support, yet these benefits tend not to show up in the workers' paychecks. On average, public employees earn compensation (salaries or wages) that are comparable to those earned in the private sector, but after they retire they tend to earn much more generous health and pension benefits than are received by those who worked in the private sector. The author demonstrates that these after-work health and pension liabilities are a major source of bankruptcy of the governments that negotiated them.

    Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg stated, "We now spend more on pensions than we do on the operating budget of the NYPD, the Fire Department and the Sanitation Department combined" (p 160). Because retirement benefits are increasingly crowding out discretionary spending, New York Times analyst Eduardo Porter has stated, "Without [discretionary] spending, the government becomes little more than a heavily armed pension plan with a health insurer on the side" (p. 153). President Barack Obama's 2012 budget proposal included less than 2% of economic output by 2022 for discretionary expenses (i.e., spending on areas other than on defense and entitlements, including Social Security and Medicare) (p 152).

    As is often the case with social science issues, the arguments over the effects of public sector unions are very difficult to sort out. Much of the statistical information is inconclusive, and even as thorough a presentation as this book provides is unlikely to settle the debate conclusively. As long as the employer (the government) owns the pension liabilities of its employees, the hazard of potential bankruptcy will hover over the taxpayers. Many units of government have begun to adopt Defined Contribution (i.e., 401(k) types of retirement investments) in lieu of Defined Benefit pension systems, thereby putting the responsibility on the employees rather than on the taxpayers. Needless to say, this kind of change is not popular with the employees or their unions, but it does make fiscal sense if governments are to avoid serious problems in the near future.

    This book provides hundreds of references that ensure that the author has done the footwork to educate the reader about the issues surrounding the shortsightedness of current governments and the necessity for taking a longer range view to prevent repeats of what happened recently in communities such as Detroit. It is not an easy read, but the informed citizen needs to know the issues in order to make wise choices for dealing with the public employee pension issue.
    4 people found this helpful
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  • Cecil Bothwell
    3.0 out of 5 stars Sloppy and lame
    Reviewed in the United States on October 13, 2014
    Amazon Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )
    Reviewing an "advance reader's copy" of a book is generally not a problem. Typos and grammatical errors may be present, along with the "TK" which in printers' lingo means "To Come" (often an index or a photo that wasn't ready when the publisher was racing to get the review copies out the door.)

    So take this for what its worth - but I was dumbfounded at the sloppiness in my copy of this book. It felt like, perhaps, the book had been dictated rather than typed and the author hadn't bothered to re-read the result. If there was an editor she/he should be drug out and shot.

    DiSalvo's principal argument, that public sector unions are destroying democracy, seems overstated to me. I get that there is a substantive difference between private sector and government employee labor organizing, and that the latter have rather more leverage because they often help elect the legislators who determine their pay and benefits. But the author seems to lay every ill in governance at the feet of those organized workers.

    I simply can't accept that teachers' unions are the bane of education, or police unions the undoing of law enforcement. Certainly there have been mistakes made in decisions about compensation, about pensions, and so on, and those mistakes need to be corrected. But corporations have received far more government largesse, and if we are looking for ways to balance the books it seems to me that cutting massive subsidies to petrochemical giants and Wall Street banks would be a great deal more fair than quibbling over a fire fighter's retirement plan.
    2 people found this helpful
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  • Jim Hart
    5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book even though it makes me sick to my ...
    Reviewed in the United States on September 12, 2015
    Verified Purchase
    Excellent book even though it makes me sick to my stomach. Little improvements will not work. People at all levels are to self-serving as demonstrated by where we are after 40 years. Have to go back to FDR. No public sector unions, as he believed in.
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  • Richard Hahn
    1.0 out of 5 stars In my opinion this was one of the worst books that I have ever read
    Reviewed in the United States on April 13, 2015
    Verified Purchase
    In my opinion this was one of the worst books that I have ever read. The story and theme was just fine but I felt that it was just poorly written. What puzzles me is that this author has received many accolades in his life of writing and other things related to European history so perhaps my complaint is simply mine alone----but as I said, I did not enjoy this book at all---not one page.
    2 people found this helpful
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