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Most importantly, public sector unions inhibit managers from being effective while encouraging an exaggerated sense of employee entitlement. The negative effect of unions on efficiency is why we should follow the lead of Singapore, which mandates that union leaders take classes in the importance of productivity in powering economic growth. As public administration expert Donald Savoie has concluded, “Non-government employees have every right to ask why public sector employees can remain isolated from the requirements of the global economy.”

Public sector unions acquired these benefits because naïve politicians gave them the right to negotiate and strike in the 1960s without regard to the key difference between the private and public sectors. When workers at a firm go on strike, customers can still buy products from competitors. But because the public sector has a monopoly, when its workers go on strike the public unavoidably is deprived of services it cannot get elsewhere. As a result, while the marketplace acts as a check on union power in the private sector, there is no such restraint in the public sector.

Another key difference between public and private sector unions is that the public sector ones actively try to influence the election of the people it negotiates with. This leaves public sector unions free to make unbridled demands for their simple, perpetual goal: “More.”

“More” remains the central demand of public service unions, no matter how outrageous or how burdensome they are to society. Pursuing their self-interest prevents them from fulfilling their public duty. As one American teacher’s union leader, Alberta Shanker, is claimed to have said, “When school children start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of school children.”