Posts tagged New Orleans City Council
Quin Hillyer: New Orleans should not put public-sector union power into law
May 22, 2023 // Credit Sarah Harbison, general counsel for the Pelican Institute, for flagging the well-intentioned but misguided proposal by Council Vice President Helena Moreno. “Collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) are typically negotiated in secret and remain in effect for years at a time,” Harbison wrote May 11. “They generally govern pay, working conditions, and establish a reduction in force protocol that typically retains workers based on seniority rather than merit.” Union CBAs can be fine things in many instances in private enterprise, but even famously liberal President Franklin D. Roosevelt and longtime AFL-CIO union leader George Meany fiercely argued that unionizing should be anathema for public bureaucracies. Meany said that it is “impossible to bargain collectively with the government,” and Roosevelt explained that “the process of collective bargaining … cannot be transplanted into public service.”