Democracy does nothing whatever to protect workers, niclemn,
So are you claiming that public workers
should be protected from wage cuts even if a majority of voters supported them, or that representative democracy should be curbed from being able to make unpopular wage cuts?
Well, political debates are inherently subjective. But baseless? There is plenty of public choice literature about the phenomenon of rent-seeking. The general idea is that lobby groups are able to achieve privileges for themselves because the benefits to them are concentrated, whereas the costs are diffused through numerous taxpayers who individually have little incentive to attempt to stop it.
Now, this
doesn't show that public employees are "overcompensated" (even if we could agree on a definition of that). Perhaps, in the absence of unions, public employees would be "undercompensated" and so union power simply balances out whether would cause the low compensation. But without knowing the size of these effects, it's possible that it goes too far. If you're coming up with a theory for why democratic forces reduce public employee compensation below the optimal, it's disingenous if you don't consider the ways that democratic forces may also increase it.
