I have always felt that when a public union organizes they are organizing against the taxpayer, and IMO since they are making a labor contract in which the taxpayer has no say, it must be contrary to the Constitution. Where am I going wrong?
I think a contract between government and union is not the same as a contract between GM and the UAW, for example. As I understand it, a government contract is an act of the legislature and can be rescinded at any time.
Well, the Constitution has nothing to say on the subject one way or another. Not all bad ideas are unconstitutional.
In particular, the Constitution does not and should not prohibit a state from doing something stupid.
And, of course, the taxpayers DO have a say on the subject, whenever they choose to exercise it. Which they finally did last week.
The whole public employee union issue is sort of the ultimate example of "regulatory capture," where an entity set up to control something is instead taken over by it.
As an example, consider barber licensure. The boards have public meetings, but nobody from the general public ever shows up. Why should they? Nobody cares enough to take time out of their lives.
But of course the decisions of the board are critical to barbers. So the only pressure or input the board ever gets is from barbers and their organizations. Over time, the board operates more and more in the interests of barbers and less and less in the interests of the consumer, whom it was originally set up to protect.
In the case of public employee unions, the regulatory capture was of state and local governments, which they operated in their own interests rather than in that of the citizens. Until the citizens begin to pay attention and swat them down.
You must realize that when someone has their hand in your pocket they don't care about your rights. Does a professional extortionist care about his victims' rights? All he cares about is his meal ticket.
It has always been a cornerstone of Western law that contracts signed under duress are unenforceable, but somehow unions, who always get their contracts through duress, are exempt from this just legal principle. It's only starting to end now because the victim is broke.
However, as we see in Wisconsin, unions are quite content to steal from the corpse. These people are vile, and deserve our utmost contempt.