&gt; No matter how I look at it, I can&#x27;t see any net good for voters when public employees unionize.<p>The benefit goes to the workers (not the voters, except inasmuch as the workers form a moderately large part of the voting public). The private sector consists of many organisations, while in the public sector there&#x27;s basically a single employer and the employees NEED to unionise to bring about a balance with the powers of the employer.<p>Put it another way: imagine someone saying &quot;I can&#x27;t see any net good for voters when public employees aren&#x27;t indentured slaves&quot;. Sure, the voters would get better value from public servants who didn&#x27;t get paid and could be whipped into working faster, but that&#x27;s not how we want to run society.<p>It can be incredibly frustrating to see unions fighting against progress and protecting their own against reasonable discipline. I&#x27;m not some union advocate (I&#x27;m a non-unionised private sector worker) - it would be great if members could take a more temperate line and bring their unions to a more reasonable position. But what the unions ARE isn&#x27;t necessarily about bringing about ideal outcomes, it&#x27;s about sheer exercise of power to fight the corner of their members.<p>The argument in favour of their existence is that it wouldn&#x27;t be reasonable to prevent them, risking exposing their members to exploiting by power in the opposite direction.