Badly written state labor law is draining state budgets, not public workers organizing for a voice. In “Government Unions Are Making a Comeback — and Taxpayers Will Pay the Price”, David R. Osborne of National Review argues that four large public-sector unions clawed back 230,000 members since 2024 by pushing card-check laws, mandatory contact-information handovers, and access to government email and payroll systems — then used legislative victories, higher wages, and binding arbitration to stick taxpayers with the bill. He is reporting real wins. He is blaming the wrong author for the cost.

Picture a school district. The school board approves a $50 million budget in June. The vote is public. The members can be fired by voters. In November, an arbitrator awards a wage package adding $3 million, and the board says the arbitrator made them do it.

Taxpayers get angry at the union.

But who picked the arbitrator? Who wrote the rule allowing an unelected third party to override an elected body’s budget? The legislature did. Decades ago. And it kept the arrangement because firing workers was politically easier than disciplining itself.

That is the mechanism Osborne leaves out. The cost is not a union crime. It is a design flaw written into state law by people voters actually elected. The union is the messenger. The legislature is the author.

To be fair to Osborne, the union comeback is real. The Commonwealth Foundation reports that the four largest government unions added 230,000 members since 2024, and that two of the four — AFSCME and SEIU — reversed their post-Janus v. AFSCME decline. Public-sector unions did pivot from litigation to legislation after Janus removed fair-share fees. The courts closed one revenue stream. Unions went to statehouses to find another route to organizing.

Osborne calls that gaming the system. A more accurate word is adaptation. Every institution does this when one of its revenue streams is cut.

And a teacher who wins a 3 percent raise is not simply “taxpayers paying the price.” She is also a taxpayer. She pays income tax, sales tax, and often property tax through her rent. The wage she negotiates with her school district is a wage, not a subsidy. A police officer who gets a raise is still paying into the public budget. A teacher who negotiates smaller classes is paying for her own children’s schools.

The “taxpayer” frame collapses two roles — worker and citizen — into one and then declares the negotiation a loss. It pretends public employees are not part of the public.

That is not economics. It is a rhetorical trick.

Osborne counts 495 pro-union bills introduced across the states since 2024 and 87 enacted. Those bills were introduced by state senators. State senators voted yes. Governors signed them. The union lobby proposed; the legislature disposed. Voters can punish senators at the next election. They cannot punish AFSCME.

The arithmetic is not mysterious.

The Connecticut state-employee union deal is expected to add about $722 million in wages by 2029. That is not a palace coup. It is catch-up after a decade of frozen wages while private-sector pay rose — a closing of a gap the state underpaid for years, not a windfall.

The “taxpayer cost” is partly the price of paying workers what the labor market eventually required. Pretending the old wage was permanent does not make it fair. It makes the budget dishonest.

Rhode Island, Osborne reports, passed seven pro-union bills in one session. He calls this “gaming the legislative process.” A better word is winning elections. When 87 of 495 bills become law, that is the normal rate of legislative success for an active interest group. It is not corruption. It is democracy, with paperwork.

The Utah referendum is even more revealing. Governor Cox signed a collective-bargaining ban in February 2025. Ten months later, voters repealed it. Osborne reports that the pro-labor side spent $4 million and the anti-labor side spent $130,000. He presents the disparity as asymmetric political combat.

It was. But the asymmetry had a direction.

Tens of thousands of public workers cared enough about keeping their bargaining rights to help raise $4 million. The people who supposedly stood to save money on their tax bills did not bother to raise $130,000. The side with skin in the game showed up. That is asymmetry of stake, not proof of democratic fraud.

Now, Osborne’s strongest point: card check deserves an honest examination.

Card check lets workers organize through signed cards rather than a secret-ballot election. It can be voluntary. An organizer talks to workers one-on-one. Some sign. Some do not. If a majority sign, the workplace is recognized. There is no ballot box, but there is individual choice.

There is also a real danger. If organizers can identify and pressure individual workers, card check can become coercive. Workers should not have to sign a card in front of someone who knows where they live, supervises their social world, or can keep asking until “yes” becomes the easiest answer. The secret ballot exists to protect workers from retaliation. That protection matters.

But the secret ballot is not a sacred ritual that settles the question by itself. It protects workers from one kind of pressure while leaving another intact. Employers can hold captive-audience meetings, withhold contact information, and campaign against organizing inside the workplace. A genuinely democratic labor process needs protection from intimidation by either side.

The choice is not card check or democracy. The choice is whether workers get a real, protected path to collective bargaining.

The comeback is a response to a labor-relations system that spent forty years giving government employers every advantage: captive-audience meetings before union votes, contact information withheld by default, bargaining units drawn by management-side lawyers, and arbitrators empowered to bind budgets elected officials never agreed to. Workers organized because the system was stacked.

Of course they organized harder when legislatures tilted the rules back.

Build this instead.

Keep card check as one lawful path, but require genuinely voluntary authorization and real penalties for intimidation by organizers or employers. Preserve a genuinely secret ballot as another path. Do not hand contact information, government email access, or payroll access to either side without clear worker protections and consent. The point is not to make organizing impossible. The point is to make the choice real.

Make arbitration respect budgets. If an arbitrator can override an elected body’s spending plan, the body is not governing anymore. Cap awards at what the legislature has actually appropriated. Require an up-or-down vote on any override so voters can see the cost. Repeal statutes that let arbitrators bind future budgets without legislative approval. That power was a legislative choice. It can be unchosen.

Make contracts transparent. Publish every public-sector deal in full before ratification: wages, benefits, pension obligations, and the multi-year cost. Score it the way a legislative bill is scored. If elected officials want the bargain, they should own the bargain.

This is the boring machinery of a democratic labor market: protected organizing, transparent contracts, accountable arbitration, and elected officials who cannot outsource their own budget decisions and then blame the workers for the invoice.

Osborne is right that taxpayers are paying more than they were told to expect. He is wrong about who wrote the bill. The union is at the bargaining table. The legislature wrote the rules under which the bargaining happens.

Fix the rules. The arithmetic follows.