Posted by Eugene Volokh:
Mandatory Community Service and Labor Unions:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2008_11_02-2008_11_08.shtml#1226102228
InstaPundit, OverLawyered, and Coyote point to the [1]Obama transition
site, which says:
The Obama Administration will call on Americans to serve in order
to meet the nation�s challenges. President-Elect Obama will expand
national service programs like AmeriCorps and Peace Corps and will
create a new Classroom Corps to help teachers in underserved
schools, as well as a new Health Corps, Clean Energy Corps, and
Veterans Corps. Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve
America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community
service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community
service in college every year. Obama will encourage retiring
Americans to serve by improving programs available for individuals
over age 55, while at the same time promoting youth programs such
as Youth Build and Head Start.
This sounds like mandatory community service ("require") for millions
of 12-to-20-something-year-olds, but whether it's mandatory or
voluntary, I'm curious: How would unions react to this? I take it this
means somewhat fewer jobs and less overtime for their members,
especially since many government organizations of the sort in which
these community servants will serve are unionized workplaces.
If, for instance, college students help out in schools, I take it
there'd be fewer jobs for teacher's aides. Moreover, the loss of such
possible union jobs will be roughly proportional to the public value
that the community servants will provide: If the college students
require more supervision than they provide value, that might mean more
union jobs, but it will also mean that they won't do much good to the
institution they're supposedly serving.
Is this a political difficulty that has already been resolved with
past community service proposals? Is there some obvious way of
finessing it, for instance by making sure that the community servants
will only go to institutions that unions are for some reason not
interested in organizing? (For instance, say what you will about
mandatory military service, it's unlikely to run into this sort of
particular obstacle, at least so long as the military sticks with
military service and doesn't take over traditionally unionized
civilian programs.)
I should stress that this need not be a normative argument against the
propriety of mandatory community service (though I'm certainly open to
such normative arguments), but only a question about the likely
politics of the matter. I should also stress that these questions
really are just questions -- I'm not remotely expert on the subject,
and it might well be that there are very simple and satisfactory
answers to them that I just haven't thought of.
References
1. http://change.gov/americaserves/
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