http://www.solidaritycenter.org/where-we-work/americas/costa-rica/

According to it, 91% of 11.5% of the union members in Costa Rica’s workforce are in public sector unions. Doing the math, this comes to around 10.3%.

If it’s all the same to you, I’ll stand by my 10% guess and pass on your 28% correction.

I’ll also continue my aversion to wearing pant suits, despite my apparent resemblance to Hillary Clinton.

So far ordinary Ticos aren’t even paying attention to these union excesses. They aren’t in part because they are so accustomed to union actions that they haven’t noticed how much more strident the public employees’ unions have become. But they also aren’t paying attention because the main politicians calling for their attention are from the far right, and they don’t pay much attention to these politicians to begin with.

The question then becomes why politicians from the center and left aren’t also bringing the unions’ excesses to public attention. I get it that the left is pro-labor and therefore pro-union, but despite the caricature, leftists aren’t so stupid as to confuse overpaid, bratty public employees with the real exploited labor they want to defend. Neither are centrists. Why are these politicians remaining silent?

The answer has to be votes. I think unionized public employees make up around 10% of the electorate, but also a portion of the electorate that is more attuned to politics than others. Odds are that they therefore vote in greater numbers than the electorate in general, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they are good for upwards of 15% of all votes cast.

Well, only rightwing political parties can afford to alienate 15% of the voters. They can afford it because this 15% of the electorate won’t vote for them anyway. Neither center nor left political parties can however afford to risk losing this number of votes. They therefore remain silent about the union excesses.

The solution may be to vote in the right and crush the unions. There is a remote chance of this happening. If things keep going as they have been, the next election may find the electorate lurching to one or the other extreme. However, a leftward lurch is frankly more likely than a rightward lurch–and we know that the right will lose 15% of the vote off the top from the public employees.

The better solution is to make relinquishing the right to vote as a condition of public service.

It’s not actually a bad idea, even one that used to be common among US military officers. The reasoning is that public servants serve the public as a whole, and as such are obligated to refrain from partisan politics as long as they serve.

Of course, public employees are probably opinion leaders in their families and neighborhoods, so would remain a politically potent force even if they themselves didn’t vote. Nevertheless, eliminating the pressure of catering to 15% of the voters put on center and left politicians would introduce some sanity in the political culture.

Then again, the way things are going, the public employees’ unions may manage to dig their own political graves while retaining the vote. If they piss off journalists, generally a center-left bunch, they’re daring the center-left to retaliate anyway.

(1) A person commits the offense of intimidation when, with the purpose to cause another to perform or to omit the performance of any act, the person communicates to another, under circumstances that reasonably tend to produce a fear that it will be carried out, a threat to perform without lawful authority any of the following acts:

(a) inflict physical harm on the person threatened or any other person;(b) subject any person to physical confinement or restraint; or(c) commit any felony.

Here the attack on Daniel Bizier was watched by the police so who knows what the rules are any more? Ann Bender and Jairo Mora would have to agree.