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The Los Angeles teachers union this week joined a three-day strike by school service workers, such as custodians and cafeteria workers. This means 400,000 students were locked out for three days. Many of these students get their only square meal of the day at school.
It’s not a surprise that the teachers union put its interests above the students. What’s rich is that the teachers union contract is the reason the school district lacks resources to pay service workers more.
Accountability is basically nonexistent in American government today. Performance doesn’t matter; many public managers tell me they’ve never seen a public employee dismissed for poor performance. The Minneapolis Police Department had received 2,600 complaints in the decade before the killing of George Floyd in 2020. Twelve led to discipline, of which the most severe was a 40-hour suspension.
In “Not Accountable,” Philip Howard shows in vivid detail how such practices have made government at all levels unmanageable, inefficient and opposed to the common good. He argues that, in fact, public unions—that is, unions whose members work for the government—are forbidden by the Constitution. The argument, he notes, would have been familiar to President Franklin Roosevelt and George Meany, the longtime president of the AFL-CIO.
Common Good Chair Philip K. Howard’s new book, Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions, was published by Rodin Books on January 24. In the book, he argues that public employee unions have undermined democratic governance and should be unconstitutional. Constitutional government can’t work when elected leaders lose control over public operating machinery.