Should Public Employees Be Allowed to Strike?

Taxpayers invest billions of dollars into a municipal rail system like the Bay Area Rapid Transit system (known as “Bart”), and the employees running the system have three year contracts.  When the contract comes up for renewal, should the employees have a right to strike the rail system and hold hostage billions of dollars of public investment and paralyze the transportation network?  If the system is publicly owned, then before such systems are built, the transit authority should secure a 99-year union contract for employment or do not invest and build the system.  This length of time would prevent periodic holdups for additional pay and avoid serious disruptions to a publicly financed system.  

If the system is already constructed, to avoid ruining the public’s investment, the transit authority should be able to hire replacement workers.  The political system favors unions with large political action committees and large numbers of employees advocating for large public infrastructure projects.  The unions know that after a system has been built, the ability to strike the system to shut it down — while the bonds to finance the system continue to require interest payments — favors the unions at the negotiating table.  No sane business person would invest billions in a system and allow another party to control the destiny of the system, but governments do that all the time with transit and other large infrastructure systems.  That would be considered malfeasance in the private sector; in the public sector is called union vote buying.  

Immediate solutions are to not build any new systems without long-term employment agreements.  Allow for non-union replacement workers, and allow for non-union labor at the outset of the project.  There is no rationale to having unions control the employment at each of these projects, but for some reason they do.  Perhaps it is the weak-willed, vote-buying politicians.