CWA strike

Richard Epstein on the strike by the Communications Workers of America. The analogy to regulated utilities is a useful one, and it had never before struck me to think of strikes and lockouts as generators of negative externalities (i.e. costs imposed on innocent third parties) that are not compensated. Surely the optimal response is to tax those, namely the firms and unions, who generate the externalities?

Foiled by FOIA

The UM's official publication attempts to explain what, exactly, is covered by state and federal Freedom of Information Act requirements.

Unfortunately, the article does more to illustrate the sometimes inability of university administrators to communicate clearly than anything else. After reading the article, for example, I am still unclear about whether or not an email I sent to a co-author about the Wisconsin demonstrations would have to be released or not, which seems like the key question surrounding the Mackinac Institute's FOIA request, and whether or not the answer to that question depends on, for example, whether I am a faculty member in a labor-related unit and/or whether or not I am engaged in research on issues related to unions.

The key paragraph is this one:

Email messages are considered public records under the FOIA if they deal with university business or are maintained by the university related to university business. The law specifically excludes computer software from the definition of public record.

So, my hypothetical email is presumably not university business, but it is "maintained" by the university in the sense that it sits (essentially forever, as I rarely delete emails) on the university's disks. Or maybe it is university business if I work at a unit that studies labor relations or if my research has to do with unions? Does it matter if my union-related research is funded by a grant run through the university? The line about software seems oddly irrelevant - how many faculty will write a program to express their views?

Sigh.

More on Wisconsin

A nice piece from Tim Cavanaugh at reason. I wonder if it would not have been smarter to offer up a law removing defined benefit pension plans from the bargaining table for public workers rather than curtailing their collective bargaining rights more broadly. Most private sector workers already have defined contribution plans so this could have been framed as a move toward comparability in compensation. Switching government workers to defined contribution plans would solve a lot of the problem.

Stepping in the cuddle puddle

Former Reasoner Dave Weigel gives a (surprisingly) sympathetic, on-the-ground account of life as a protester inside Wisconsin's state capital building.

One take-away from the Wisconsin episode is that there is a huge latent demand for experiences like this in which one can, in some sense, relive the glory days of the 1960s. If some clever entrepreneur could find a way to reproduce and package this sort of experience she could make a lot of money.

More on Madison

A nice piece from the Economist on the battle between Governor Walker and (some of the) public employee unions.

In addition to the thoughtful arguments it makes, the Economist piece illustrates a clever and largely untried approach to the dispute. I call it analytical thinking.

Most of the takes one reads around the internet are, instead, based on moral reasoning, or perhaps just moral ranting, sometimes supplemented with dodgy evidence from interested sources. I don't think there is really any moral content here at all, just a principal agent problem between the taxpayers and voters and their state and local governments that needs to be fixed with better institutional design.

Egypt = Wisconsin?

Judging by my lefty friends on Facebook, the meme of the day is the equation of Wisconsin's new republican governor with deposed Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak. The idea seems to be that the following two things are roughly equivalent:

1. Duly elected governor and state legislature propose to reduce (not eliminate) the ability of state workers to form labor cartels with the purpose of raising their compensation above the value of their marginal product by exploiting the government's soft budget constraint.

2. Brutal, unelected dictator runs a repressive regime with a vast secret police apparatus and loots his country's wealth for three decades.

Here's a relatively calm example from the American Prospect.

This is Glenn Beck level stuff, the lefty equivalent of calling Obama a socialist.

It is also really insulting to the Egyptians.

Sigh. Would that we had a better left (and a better right).

Look for the union label ...

The Daily Show - Working Stiffed
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

This starts off slow but the last half is hilarious.

Hat tip: Ken Troske

Greek unions at play

From the WSJ:

On Thursday, the country’s generally docile tourism workers’ union planned to officially announce strike plans for later this month — their first in ages. But somebody there overlooked the fact that Greece’s journalists union was striking on the same day, in a move likely to generate an empty press haul for the tourism union’s big moment. When nobody showed up, the news conference was canceled and rescheduled for Friday.

More generally, do the Greek unions have any idea how ridiculous and self-defeating their behavior looks to outsiders?

One hopes that the events of the past few months can provide an opportunity to change the political and social equilibrium in Greece in ways that will bring greater honesty and a deeper attachment to the realities of economic life as well as, in the medium and long runs, greater economic growth, but this is by no means a sure thing.

Hat tip: anonymous VIP

Oppressed francophone professors, unite!

Some clever soul signed me up on the email list of something called portside.org, where port here means left; in particular, an old-style, 1930s trade union sort of left, with an occasional bit of New Left environmentalism thrown in for variety.

I actually occasionally read the emails as they provide a glimpse into a strange and wonderful alternative world. I have always found it fascinating how reality is fundamentally under-identified, which is to say that there are a finite number of facts but an infinite number of theories to explain them. That, combined with the various cognitive tics and emotional overrides that worry our mental machinery means that people can draw from the same reality completely and utterly different theoretical frameworks. Wandering into other frameworks, and recognizing that they are sincerely held, is an exercise both useful and bracing. Nothing is more intellectually deadening than reading only things written by people who share your priors.

One of today's portside emails links to an overheated description of a strike by the faculty of the University of Quebec at Montreal (UQAM), the lesser of the two francophone universities in Montreal. The piece largely speaks for itself in regard to, among other things, the massive self-delusion required to imagine that professors at UQAM (or, indeed, any other Canadian or US university) are oppressed in any substantively meaningful sense of that word and that it is somehow morally right that their oppression should be salved by raising taxes on actual working people.

Do secret ballots suck?

The current legislative initiative by organized labor seeks to allow union certification without secret ballots elections. If enough workers sign the cards after helpful guidance from their big, burly colleagues who support certification, then certification would take place.

George McGovern (!) summarizes the case against from the left here.

It seems to me that if this is the best that organized labor can come up with as a policy initiative, they are in a sorry state indeed. It is ripe for parody and not very subtle in the way it tilts the field in favor of the unions.

The study of trade unions has largely disappeared from labor economics as unions have faded out (in the private sector anyway) in the US and Canada. Even European labor economists do not write about them much anymore. This seems to me too bad in a couple of senses. First, I think there is a lot of interesting research to be done, both theoretical and empirical, on public sector unions, which continue to flourish. Second, I think there is work to be done thinking about the role of unions (or the lack thereof) in the decay of the U.S. auto and steel industries and in the remarkably long transition period to a new equilibrium in the airline industry following deregulation. I suspect that both equilibrium models that incorporated unions and behavioral economic models in this area would yield new and useful insights.