Myth:  Public employees do not need unionization.

While the rate of private employee unionization has declined dramatically since 1980, the rate of public employee unionization declined only slightly and has generally remained steady.

Data Source:  US Bureau of Labor Statistics

The logic behind the argument that unions are not needed in public employment is based on the fact that public employers have no profit motive from which to extract wealth from workers.  Additionally, since public employee’s pay comes from taxes, arguments against public employee unions play into anti-tax rhetoric as well. However, the existence of public employee unions demonstrates benefits of unionization that go behind a simple matter of jobs and wages. That is, unionized employees have a greater input into job and organizational objectives. Members of public employee unions tend to have higher educational levels and be more “professionalized” than their private sector counterparts.  As such, their grievances against the “system” frequently involve conflicts between professional norms and public service versus bureaucratic rules and budget reductions. In essence, public employees often represent “the public interest” when the privately employed public (who may be too broke or too busy) is unable to make their concerns heard. Examples of this are public health workers demanding more neighborhood clinics or public schoolteachers demanding smaller class sizes.

There is a massive, well-funded, but generally unacknowledged propaganda campaign to not simply destroy unions, but to pit workers against each other. Private employees, who find themselves working harder for less year after year, are made to be resentful of public employees who have managed to hang on to some semblance of a decent livelihood.  In a 2008 New York Times editorial aptly entitled “Race to the Bottom,” Bob Herbert laments the demonization of schoolteachers and autoworkers, and suggests that public vilification of working people in general is not based on real facts as much as it has been manufactured. In a dynamic similar to that perpetrated in The Hunger Games story, workers are indoctrinated to see each other as desperate competitors for diminishing scraps, which directs their attention away from the real enemy—the oligarchs at the top who have expropriated most of collective production for themselves.