This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, March 7th, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Many of the checks that constrain private sector unions simply don't exist for those in the public sector.

Private sector unions at the very least know that profitability will at some point constrain the ability to deliver better benefits.

Neil McCluskey, Associate Director of the Cato Institute Center for Educational Freedom, comments.

The last 10 days or so, there has been a great deal of tumult of uproar in Madison, Wisconsin.

And what set it off was Governor Walker there proposed a number of restrictions on collective bargaining, which is especially important because

it didn't apply to firefighters or police, but it did apply to teachers, by far the biggest

group of people who collectively bargain for their

compensation. What his law or his proposal would do would would be to eliminate

their ability to collectively bargain benefits, so health care, life insurance, things like that,

and would put a cap on the total amount of money that could be bargained over for wages, de facto limiting

their ability to bargain over salaries.

And those are the two biggest sticking points in this proposal and it's really what brought

tens of thousands of people of Madison to protest. These teachers are coming out on

weekdays, presumably.

How does that happen?

One of the kind of powers of labor unions, of course,

is that you could easily organize people.

They all belong to one organization and the great thing, depending

on your perspective, for teachers is you tell them all to go somewhere and what they do is often like what they did in Wisconsin.

All the teachers called in quote unquote sick so that they could all go to Madison for

...