This November, Vermont will vote on Proposal 3, a legislatively referred constitutional amendment to entrench collective bargaining rights in the state’s constitution. If it passes, the Vermont legislature would be barred from adopting any law that “interferes with, negates, or diminishes the right of employees to collectively bargain with respect to wages, hours, and other terms and conditions of employment and workplace safety.”
The most immediate impacts of Proposal 3, if it passes, would be to authorize unionization for farmworkers and supervisors, the two categories of employees currently exempt from collective bargaining under state and federal law, and to effectively end the ability of the legislature to limit the scope and terms of public sector collective bargaining. The latter change is an especially big problem, because a growing body of evidence demonstrates that public sector collective bargaining undermines accountability to taxpayers and users of public services.
Take public education. Teachers unions exist to promote the interests of teachers, not students, and their activities have damaged school performance and raised costs for taxpayers. Sophisticated empirical studies have repeatedly confirmed these findings.
Stanford economist Caroline Hoxby used state “duty-to-bargain” laws as an instrument to predict the timing and geographic scope of collective bargaining in K-12 education. She found that collective bargaining increased per-student spending but also increased the high school dropout rate, especially in places where there is less competition among public schools.
Political scientist Terry Moe examined “restrictive” collective bargaining contracts in California and found sharply negative effects on student test scores in larger districts. The negative effects on performance were most pronounced for minority students. “Restrictive” contracts are ones that provide due-process protections against firing bad teachers, limit the role of merit rather than seniority in determining assignments, promotions, and layoffs, and cap work and training hours.
A recent national study of the effects of duty-to-bargain laws in the prestigious American Economic Journal: Economic Policy found that the laws had long-term harmful effects on the labor-market success of men who were students at the time that these policies were enacted, with total negative effects on earnings of more than $200 billion every year.
It’s important to acknowledge that one of the authors of that study previously found null effects of union certification elections in Iowa, Indiana, and Minnesota on per-student spending and dropout rates. It could be that effects differ across states or in the long run versus the short run. That’s the reason why social scientists say “read literatures, not papers.” The overall evidence on public sector unionization is firmly negative.
In general, unionization in public schools seems to reduce accountability to parents. School district unionization rates predicted longer school closures during the COVID pandemic, resulting in massive and possibly irreversible learning loss. More unionized schools were less likely to require teachers to teach in person during the pandemic. Stronger unions are associated with fewer effective literacy programs — though this relationship is a rough correlation, not a sophisticated study.
Public safety is another area where collective bargaining has proven harmful. Union contracts frequently shield police from legitimate accountability. Collective bargaining contracts include “delay privileges” that require investigators to wait a certain period before interviewing a police officer who engaged in the use of force. These delay privileges obstruct investigations, reduce the odds that officers face internal discipline, and normalize the excessive use of force.
According to a survey by law professor Stephen Rushin, a whopping 88 percent of police union contracts contain at least one provision that could thwart legitimate disciplinary action, such as mandatory destruction of disciplinary records, bans on civilian oversight, prohibitions on anonymous civilian complaints, and time limits on internal investigations.
Collective bargaining rights increase police misconduct. That’s the conclusion of an empirical study that leveraged a 2003 Florida Supreme Court decision expanding collective bargaining to sheriffs’ deputies. After the change, there was a substantial increase in reports of “violent misconduct” by sheriffs’ offices relative to police departments.
The negative consequences of collective bargaining for the taxpayer are also evident in police and firefighter contracts, according to a causally identified study in the ILR Review. Collective bargaining substantially increases firefighter pay and more modestly increases police pay and reduces their workweek. A well-designed synthetic control analysis published by the Heritage Foundation found that collective bargaining increases the cost of government on average across the US by about $600 to $750 per person per year.
Why are public sector unions so harmful? The biggest reason is that unions are often on both sides of the negotiating table. They fund politicians’ campaigns and lobby them for favorable legislation. In low-turnout local elections, they can be the dominant force. So it’s no surprise that local elected officials give the unions exactly what they want.
The science is clear: public sector unions are bad for taxpayers and the people they are supposed to be serving and protecting. Abolishing public sector collective bargaining is necessary to make government a servant of the people, rather than its master.