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More on student unionism

Chris replied.

I should have made it more clear that I'm not particularly in favour of compulsory student unionism; I'm just annoyed by facile arguments against it.

I think one major difference is that unlike many taxes, compulsory student union fees are fixed, regardless of the ability to pay. This would be similar to everyone having to pay $20,000 per year in income tax regardless of how much they earned.

It's not really similar: $20k is perhaps half the average income, but even when I was a moderately poor student my income was more than twice the union fee of ~$180. So it's really comparable to everyone paying $1400 per annum. (Which, when you put it that way, sounds pretty good.) And of course many taxes are unrelated to income.

(Not that this would hold any water with the user-pays approach espoused by Julian, mind you: since people get the same benefit, they should pay the same amount. Indeed, strictly applying user-pays, we should tax poor people *more* because they're more likely to use healthcare, social security, prisons, etc...)

Why is there such a strong objection by the student unions to HECS fees which don't need to paid until people are able to, and at the same time strong support for up front union fees?

Because student unions tend to have a socialist, redistributivist bent, and so to want government services to be funded by a wide base, not just the people who use them. So for example the Women's Room should be funded by all students, not just women who use it, and universities should be funded by all taxpayers not just students. If they could get their funding from federal consolidated revenue (ie from all taxpayers) and not just from students, then I think they would. It is consistent, although I don't really agree.

Surely if the student unions are correct about the importance of the services, they will be able to convince the majority of the students (who being able to qualify for university courses should be reasonably intelligent) that the fees are going to a good common cause, and that they should continue to pay the fees.

Right, and you can make the exact same argument about taxes: if I feel that, say, hospitals are good, I ought to join a private HMO or pay my own bills or donate to a charitable hospital. I wouldn't personally go that far, but the logical conclusion of Julian's argument is no compulsory taxation at all.

One argument for compulsory taxation is redistributive, another is the free-rider effect: I benefit from the existence of the judicial system, even if I don't directly use it in any particular year. Similarly: all students supposedly benefit from their representatives' participation in the university senate.

Having said all that I think you could probably wind back the union budgets a great deal and try to make them more representative and efficient. I don't see why compulsory fees should go to fund political, religious, sports or recreational societies. I have nothing against clubs, but it's clearly something people will pay for themselves, and people who don't participate shouldn't be forced to fund them. But then I think that goes for a lot of state and federal programs too.

Therefore, I'd like to see competition between different unions: if one university wants to have a low-taxing union, why not let them? Why is this a federal government issue at all? (Well, I know why, but that's a different story.)

posted Thu 24 Mar 2005 in /issues/politics | link

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