Definition and the public/private distinction
Across the episodes, guests and host treat “public service unions” as a category distinct from private-sector unions, not merely a variant of them. Bob Zadek frames the subject as a “special type of organization” and asks why it justifies separate treatment; Philip K. Howard answers that the collective bargaining power of public employee unions “only came in really in the late 1960s,” and that it arrived not in response to any scandal or abuse but because union leaders wanted more power. Private unions, by contrast, he locates in the Progressive Era, with an origin story of factories abusing child labor, endless work hours and horrible safety records. Government by the Unions, of the Unions, for the Unions (2023)
Howard offers four differences. First, incentives: in a trade union such as the auto workers’, both sides have a vested interest in the viability of the enterprise, because inefficient work rules or excessive demands can cause the company to move out of town or go out of business. With public unions, he says, “you can demand anything and you know the government can’t move.” Second, the private negotiation is about the split between capital and labor — how to divvy up profit — while in the public context the officials are not paying; the taxpayers are, so unions “can demand anything they can get away with.” Third, an ethical difference: Howard cites Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s opposition to public employee unions, quoting FDR that “The process of collective bargaining cannot be transferred to the public sector,” because public employees have a sworn duty of loyalty to serve the public rather than to negotiate against the public interest. Fourth, and in Howard’s account most importantly, trade union negotiations are an honest adversarial process in which collusion between management and labor would be unlawful, whereas public union negotiations are “nothing but collusion”: unions amass power, get people elected, staff their campaigns and send people in buses to knock on doors, and then sit on the same side of the table as the official. Government by the Unions, of the Unions, for the Unions (2023)
Zadek supplements this by cautioning that “collusion” here is not meant to imply illegality; Howard agrees that it would be illegal in the private sector but is not illegal in the public sector, though he calls it dishonest and not a good idea. Government by the Unions, of the Unions, for the Unions (2023)
Leverage over legislatures and taxpayers
In the 2023 episode on IRS hiring, Zadek sets out a mechanism: public service unions, including the union representing Internal Revenue Service workers, have an advantage no other worker has, because if they want a raise they need only have the legislature enact legislation. He compares this to a private company being able to enact legislation compelling you to buy its service or product, and describes public service unions as enhancing their own well-being by persuading legislatures to force people to patronize them. What the IRS’s Hiring Spree Means for You (2023)
Ashley Varner, asked why a funding measure for roughly 87,000 new IRS agents has a union component, answers that government sector employees are the single biggest funder of radical leftist politics in the country and have a guaranteed revenue stream because they have a huge workforce. She says the vast majority of those people pay union dues because they do not know they have an option, and that taxpayer dollars — “that’s your money, that’s my money” — are being used to pay dues against taxpayers’ will, with those dues turned into political activity. She adds that the 87,000 agents are a guaranteed new crop of people paying into union dues. What the IRS’s Hiring Spree Means for You (2023)
Varner draws the public/private distinction in her own terms: a private company has shareholders it is beholden to and customers it must provide a product they want to purchase, and even private membership organizations must prove their membership offers something worth paying for. She invokes FDR again, saying he loved private sector unions but was against public sector unions because he considered it inherently unfair for union representatives to sit across the table from politicians whose campaigns they directly support, with no representation of the taxpayer who funds it all. She describes unions telling leadership in the House and Senate to remember how much money they gave, and telling the Speaker, the Majority Leader, the President or the CDC in the teachers’ unions’ case to remember who put them there. She also cites Biden’s 2020 campaign statement that he would be the most pro-union president the country has ever seen. What the IRS’s Hiring Spree Means for You (2023)
Pensions, work rules and the accountability problem
Zadek describes two ways public service unions extract value: making future promises that come due after the politician has left office, and reams of restrictive work rules that make government virtually unmanageable — moving a desk requires negotiation, and contracts contained nothing about working in a pandemic, remote learning or teaching. He characterizes this as government in which the spokes are disconnected from the hub, so nothing moves without union approval. Government by the Unions, of the Unions, for the Unions (2023)
Howard supplies a history. Before the 1960s, public unions existed but lacked collective bargaining power and could not require an official to reach agreement with them; the National Education Association was, he says, like the American Bar Association or the American Medical Association, a professional group with ideas but no power over politicians. Then JFK, as payback for union support, entered an executive order authorizing collective bargaining in federal government, following a report chaired by Arthur Goldberg that Howard calls the most vacuous, substance-less report you can possibly make. In the late 1960s unions agitated with state employees, governors and state parties. Howard notes that the civil service system, created in the late 19th century to avoid the spoils system, naturally allowed public employees to organize, because under the spoils system they lost their jobs every four years, whereas now there was a permanent cohort that grew as government grew. He cites a report by labor law professor George Taylor holding that management control could not be given up, that arbitrators could not be allowed to decide disagreements, and that decisions ultimately had to be politically accountable or the arrangement would be unconstitutional and unlawful — after which, Howard says, the laws were passed in exactly the way Taylor said would be unlawful, with California and L.A. repeating the pattern. Government by the Unions, of the Unions, for the Unions (2023)
Howard’s accountability argument is that democracy is a process of accountability — you elect somebody, and if they do a lousy job you elect someone else — but that this assumes elected officials actually have authority to manage government operations, and they do not. He cites COVID: officials lacked authority to say schools must open or that distance teaching had to happen, and he cites a learning decline of about 17 percentile points that experts say will never be recovered. He describes a direct compromise of the core governing principle of answerability, and points to C-SPAN hearings in which frustrated members of the House and Senate try to make the executive branch accountable. Government by the Unions, of the Unions, for the Unions (2023)
Zadek’s framing of the same point is that the result of public service unions exercising power is as if a statute was passed, and that during COVID it was specifically the teachers’ unions that called all the shots, a direct line between the life of the average American and public service unions. Government by the Unions, of the Unions, for the Unions (2023)
Dispersal and the future of cities
In the 2020 episode on cities, Zadek speculates that once the link between where you live and where you work is severed, people can live anywhere, and that as population and economic power decline in major metropolitan areas and increase elsewhere, the power of public service unions — which he says derives from large cities — is diluted. He names the teachers’ union, the transport workers’ union, the prison guards’ union and the policemen’s union as among those whose power would decline, along with pressures on pensions and city budgets. He calls the virus, in the long run, a gift from God in terms of economic and political power being dispersed. The Future of Cities (2020)
Brent Orrell responds that the analysis has the weight of history behind it, describing suburbanization as a process underway since the end of the Second World War, and shares Zadek’s preference for people being free to choose where they live. He pushes back on two fronts: that cities have traditionally pulled together disparate people and skill sets that drive innovation, and that face-to-face communication matters because 90% of human communication is non-verbal. He also argues that not everybody can move — that elites always have the option to opt out of a bad situation and generally exercise it, while middle and lower income groups do not, so the worst effects fall on the most vulnerable. The Future of Cities (2020)
Across episodes: the same argument, extended
The public/private distinction is argued in all three episodes, but the treatment changes. In 2020 the unions appear as a downstream variable: Zadek predicts their power will be diluted by decentralization, and Orrell’s reply concerns who can move rather than unions themselves. In the two 2023 episodes the unions become the direct subject. Varner supplies the funding mechanism — dues deducted from a workforce that does not know it can opt out, directed into politics — while Howard supplies the historical and legal account, from JFK’s executive order through the Taylor report to the COVID school closures. FDR’s opposition is invoked by Varner and by Howard, and Zadek’s “collusion” framing is answered by Howard’s distinction between illegality and dishonesty. The later episodes thus supply the mechanism and the history that the 2020 episode only assumed.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not identify the specific statutes, executive orders or court decisions by name beyond JFK’s executive order and the Goldberg and Taylor reports, and they do not state what any case held or which amendment was at issue. They give no membership figures, no dollar amounts for pensions or budgets, and no founding dates for the unions named. The 2020 excerpt ends at a section break, and the 2023 IRS excerpt breaks off mid-question, so several lines of argument are left incomplete in the sources.