we are careful and pragmatic and respectful of government workers' irre- placeable roles in functions ill-suited to private delivery, this is not a bad thing.
These trends discussed in these three paragraphs are calculated from Office of Management and Budget data taken from The Budget of the United States, Fiscal Year 2000, Historical Tables 15.3 and 17.5. All of the growth in public employment -- indeed, more than all of the growth -- has been in local and state government. Fed- eral civilian employment was just fractionally higher in 1998 than it had been in 1962, and federal military employment was about 1.4 million lower. Meanwhile, local and state governments added 9.4 million people to their payrolls.
This figure and others in this section are drawn or calculated from NIPA data, Survey of Current Business, Section 3, various issues, Tables 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, and 3.7.
The data compilation used here does not net out local and state transfers, which would be somewhat preferable; however, this does not distort the trends in any major way.
The economist Thomas Schelling, author of Micromotives and Macrobehav ior ( 1978) and Choice and Consequence ( 1983), and one of the founders of Har- vard's Kennedy School of Government, has so characterized this question.
The strength of this argument depends on the relative size of the public work force and is probably strongest in the middle range. If public employment is tiny, governmental employment practices would have little leverage over private prac- tices. If public employment is large relative to private employment, a substantial fraction of workers who care greatly about benefits offered earliest in the public sec- tor may have already opted for government work, rendering the extension into the private sector of progressive employment practices somewhat less urgent.
The specific figures are 10.4 percent of private workers and 42.5 percent of government workers. Data are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on-line data col- lection made available online at 〈stats.bls.gov/news.release/union2.t03.htm〉, accessed June 1999. Other figures in this paragraph are from Statistical Abstract of the United States 1998, Table No. 712, Labor Union Membership by Sector, 1983 to 1997.
A counterargument may be that unionized workers in the public sector stronghold are in a position to support the organization of their private sector brethren. This doesn't seem to be occurring to any major degree, however.
These issues are explored at more length in Donahue ( 1989), especially Chap- ter 5.
REFERENCE
Bureau of Economic Analysis. Various years. National income and products accounts. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce.
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Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com
Publication Information: Book Title: Local Government Innovation: Issues and Trends in Privatization and Managed Competition. Contributors: Robin A. Johnson - editor, Norman Walzer - editor. Publisher: Quorum Books. Place of Publication: Westport, CT. Publication Year: 2000. Page Number: 266.
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