If you think government unions are not a threat to good government, just take a look at the U.S. Postal Service, which is what eventually could happen to every governmental unit that has union workers who are allowed to collectively bargain.

The Postal Service is hemorrhaging money. It is spending $1 million a week paying employees not to work. In its 2010 annual report, the post office reported a loss of more than $8 billion on revenues of $67 billion and expenses of $75 billion. It is facing a second year of losses totaling $8 billion or more. Postal officials have said they will be unable to make a $5.5 billion payment to cover future employee health care costs due Sept. 30 because they will have reached their borrowing limit.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt was a communist and near-dictator who ran roughshod over the Constitution and likely allowed thousands of people to be killed at Pearl Harbor because he didn’t want to enter World War II until it was popular to do so. There is not much about Roosevelt I like.

Still, there is one area in which we share a common belief and that is opposition to government unions.

“The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service,” Roosevelt wrote in 1937 to the National Federation of Federal Employees. “A strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government.”

And this from a man who capitalizes the word Government.

Even the AFL-CIO was opposed to giving government employees the privilege of collectively bargaining.

In 1955, George Meany, then-president of the AFL-CIO, said, “It is impossible to bargain collectively with the government.” In 1959, the AFL-CIO Executive Council declared, “In terms of accepted collective bargaining procedures, government workers have no right beyond the authority to petition Congress — a right available to every citizen.”

Government unions create a competing power when it comes to controlling the public business. Government collective bargaining means voters do not have the final say on public policy. Instead, elected representatives must negotiate spending and policy decisions with unions. This loss of control over the budget is not exactly democratic — a fact that unions such as the AFL-CIO once recognized.

Those who doubt this only have to look to the disaster of the Postal Service.

Postal officials want to cut 120,000 jobs, 20 percent of its workforce, many through layoffs, which are prohibited by union contracts. The leaders of the three postal unions all categorically rejected the idea of layoffs. In other words, the government cannot take the fiscally responsible act of reducing its workforce because the unelected union thugs won’t allow it.

The Postal Service also wants to withdraw its employees from the health and retirement plans that cover federal staffers and create its own benefits programs. Again, the union thugs are opposed to this fiscally responsible measure.

Union apologists might blame the Postal Service for entering into those contracts in the first place.

However, and this is an important distinction between the private sector and government, if the Postal Service were a private company, it could achieve these goals by declaring bankruptcy and reorganizing its labor agreements to better reflect the economic realities of today.

Governments don’t have that option (another reason to privatize the Postal Service and solve the problem for good).

That gives government workers a level of protection that no worker in the private sector, union or otherwise, has.

Government workers are part of the ruling class and this special protection is a slap in the face to Americans who live and work in the real world. When union leaders reject such common-sense reforms as proposed here, they are no different than Queen Marie Antoinette telling the poverty-stricken French peasants to eat cake.

In the end, there are simply far too many government officials who support the reckless idea of allowing government unions to collectively bargain. If a government official supports this irresponsible idea, that person has no business being a government official. You cannot claim to be a good steward of the public treasury and, at the same time, support the idea that government workers should be permitted to collectively bargain. The two concepts are incompatible.

Just look at the Postal Service if you doubt my words.

Cross posted.

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