They can't strike?
You'd better tell the Chicago Teachers Union that. Apparently they didn't get the memo. In reality, that's a state-by-state question. Not that it really matters, when strike isn't allowed,
everyone just takes "sick days, of which they have
plenty, and the effect is the same. Wisconsin's citizens wanted a public education system, and the teachers unions told them tough cookies, if we want to protest, you aren't going to get it.
In Europe, where the public sector unions are stronger, so are their abilities to - yes - seize control.
Protesting Austerity Moves, Unions Shut Down Greece
Anti-austerity general strike paralyses Portugal
Unions try to shut down France over pensions
and so on and so forth. Each one of the examples above (and those randomly selected) represent a seizure of sovereignty from the people of those governments. Each of those populaces voted to
have public education, public transportation, and so forth, and each one of them had their public goods
taken from them by public sector unions to use for
their ends rather than the public's.
You don't think that public sector unions exercise incredible control over their areas of government? Try reforming
anything in California. Even the
Governator had to bow down to someone bigger and badder than him - 80 cents of every government dollar in California goes to Public Employee Compensation, their fiscal hole is bigger than ever, and the state is collapsing because of it. In most localities, the most powerful political force is the Teachers Union.
As
SEIU likes to brag, they have the power to elect their own bosses. But when you elect your own boss, you sit at both ends of the negotiating table. And when you sit at both ends of the negotiating table..... (...drumroll...)
you control it.
And they do elect their own boss.
It turns out that when you look at those actual local elections that
Public Union Support Is Just As Or More Powerful A Political Force Than Incumbency.
At the local and even at the state level, our elected leaders often answer more to public sector unions than the public sector unions do to them. That's an inverted power structure, and it means that the voters (who are powerful only as much as their representatives are) are effectively neutered in a general basis from affecting their own government. As
AFSCME's Larry Scanlon put it: "We're the Big Dog."