I’ve been thinking a lot about unions.

Namely, how does a progressive (like me) balance between agitating for reform of an institution (like the police force) and a commitment to labor and organizing rights (like police unions). My general stance is that workers organizing to empower themselves is a good thing, an important check on the ability of employers to take advantage of individuals and their control of the market.

But in the case of police, it’s clear that the unions are an active force in the way of reform: this piece (http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/how-police-unions-keep-abusive-cops-on-the-street/383258/) counts just some of the ways. In view of this, other leftists have come to support a more limited purview for police unions, like this editor at Jacobin (https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/01/the-bad-kind-of-unionism/).

In the second article, Shawn Gude stakes out a case for why police unions — and police unions alone — should have a narrow focus on compensation and working conditions, as opposed to the more activist agendas of other unions, because when they do organize, “it’s been almost exclusively to conservative ends.”

This seems weak to say the least. I’m not going to do a thorough take-down of this article (because this is a Short!), but the claim seems to be that most unions “advocate for the broader working class, rather than members’ narrow self-interests.” I can’t convincingly make this case, though. Aren’t all unions working for their members’ self-interest? Even if they attempt to organize around workers’ rights at a national level, it’s not clear that workers’ rights is intrinsically a good thing applied across the board.

Police unions seem like an easy case: they do shitty things that protect shitty police officers. But how different is that, really, than teacher’s unions that oppose testing and accountability, or United Auto Workers preventing the kind of cost-cutting at GM that might have saved it? I won’t pretend to be knowledgeable about either of those things, but it seems, just logically, like unions would more often than not be an impediment to large-scale reform — reform that could be crucial for Big Problems.

One thought is that unions in the public sector should have significantly less power. There’s certainly human suffering that comes when UAW prevents GM from staying alive, and everyone looses their jobs as a result. But at least there UAW is somewhat incentivized, if they’re thinking long-term, to capitulate.

For public unions — which includes teachers and transportation workers as well as police — no such incentive exists. The state keeps on paying their bills regardless of whether their preventing change that would benefit the broader population. And in a sense, being citizens of the state, they already have recourse against their employers through the normal mechanics of democracy. This is in stark contrast to private sector employees, who rarely are stakeholders in their company.

Now I don’t mean to suggest that a teacher’s ability to vote is enough to offset the loss of organizing power if all employment were at-will — it’s not. I think there needs to be some additional mechanism of recourse for employees to employers.

At the end of the day a robust democracy needs to be able to make changes, and the power of public-sector unions prevent that. We need to envision ways to provide worker’s protection that still allow the state to make hard but important choices that affect all of us.

If you have ideas, please share.