Strike Back by Joe Burns

Strike Back by Joe Burns

Author:Joe Burns [Burns, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781935439950
Publisher: IG Publishing


7.PRIVATIZATION AND THE “FREE MARKET”

During the fiscal crisis of the late 1970s, public employers began to look more and more toward contracting out public services. Initially, these “privatization” efforts were concentrated upon peripheral functions such as food and janitorial services. By privatizing such services, public managers argued that their financially strapped agencies could save money and concentrate on their core functions. Over time, however, privatization expanded well beyond these fringe services. A 1995 survey of America’s largest cities found that 50 percent privatized solid waste collection, 48 percent contracted out building security, and 40 percent outsourced street repair.1 As of 2007, 25 percent of municipal public services in the US were provided by corporations and nonprofits.2

No area was safe from privatization, as formally public mental health clinics, grade schools, even the running of prisons, were transferred to private hands. As a hospital worker and local union president in the 1990s, I confronted a privatization effort at the University of Minnesota Medical Center. The hospital was a premier research institute as well as a provider of public health services to poor communities. Despite a vigorous fight by our local union, the university administration teamed up with a non-profit hospital chain to privatize the medical center.3 (Several years later, when I was a negotiator for the Illinois Nurses Association, nurses and janitors successfully teamed up to beat back an effort to privative the clinics at the University of Illinois Hospital and Health Sciences System.)

The increasing efforts to privatize public services present a number of concerns for the labor movement. The most obvious is that privatization means a loss of unionized public employee jobs to non-union private companies. Beyond that, privatization also puts pressure on public employee unions during the bargaining process, as public employers can use the threat of privatization to gain concessions from public workers. At a more fundamental level, privatization seeks to destroy the public sphere. As public education or the management of prisons is transferred to private companies, something is lost for society as a whole.

One can see the damaging effects of privatization over the past few decades by examining the shift in federal employment to non-union private contractors. In 1993, Democratic President Bill Clinton launched an initiative known as the National Partnership for Reinventing Government. According to a 1999 report on the initiative, Clinton was able to shrink the federal civilian workforce to its smallest size “since Kennedy held office and, as a percentage of the national workforce, the smallest since 1931.”4 Overall, the size of the federal workforce “shrunk by nearly 20 percent relative to total employment during the Clinton years.”5

In addition, federal employment shifted from being largely unionized to an increasingly subcontracted workforce in the 1990s and 2000s. From 1999 to 2005, while the size of the federal workforce remained relatively stable, the use of contractors expanded rapidly, rising from an estimated 4.4 million in 1999 to 7.6 million in 2005.6 Today, federal contractors outnumber federal employees by a ratio of four to one. Although the



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