Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Nice link, OP. I've only dealt with two public employee categories in my life -- the IRS and Post Office. Obviously neither were over-paid, and possibly, in the latter case, from the drained and despairing looks on their face, not paid at all.

However, out here in Calif we have a semi-public union of prison workers (Correctional Facility Supervisors, or something like that) and they are definitely over-paid and properly resented.

"However, out here in Calif we have a semi-public union of prison workers (Correctional Facility Supervisors, or something like that) and they are definitely over-paid and properly resented"

Careful, Lil' Milty will come along and smack you for disrespecting the upstanding working class folks running those fine prisons there in Cali.

It makes me laugh remembering how I begged and pleaded with the overlords at my old public sector job for a semi-scheduled day off w/o pay every month or so. They looked at my like I was out of my mind. Now, of course, enforced unpaid furloughs are all the rage in the public sector. [shrug] I still think I was right to bolt five years ago when I did. Something about that culture just seems to make people squirrelly as hell in the end. Or else you end up on anti-depressant meds, like I did, trying to fight off the rodent-i-zation of your once-functioning soul.

Public sector used to be okay for the relative security and the benefits, but it's always been a crap shoot on working conditions. There's a touch of distilled corporate snake pit culture throughout. There are also wingnut patronage hounds who shouldn't be employed in any capacity, ever, anywhere, who slither their way into supervisory positions on the strength of their connections.

What amuses me no end are the "libertarian" career public sector employees. Tens of thousands of free-thinking rugged individualists, committed to small government, appalled by Waste, Fraud and Abuse®, determined to uphold the principles of thrift and accountability... provided none of their cherished reforms take effect during their tenure.

That said, the collective punishment enthusiasts have a gift for taking dreariness and turning it into hell.

Okay, fish in a barrel, but as for the hacks being "properly resented," I assume that refers to the hoi polloi who want, who are trying, who endeavor to be better prison guards than the ones now performing that bitter job for the incarceral state.
The alternative to prison guard unions is to make them non-unionized? Prison guard unions, like the public sector "union" I belong to, are job protection rackets, with little to no regard for the poor whose misery they (we) profit from - but they must be so to protect their members from the misery that can be inflicted upon them from raging morons like Andrew Cuomo, academics full of fantasy reforms, and the libertarian dumbasses who blame the jobbing class for getting a job (Hey, Miltie!).
If "another world is possible," then there could be a public sector union full of compassionate, picketing and marching communitarian workplace dermokrats, but in the logic of the supersystem, there are only God Bless America management-friendly Andy Stern neurotics. The only effective militancy that I see, in any union, is when the prison guards decide upon their anti-management slowdowns - they make their points, they keep their jobs, at least so far - the Knights of Labor would be proud.

"The alternative to prison guard unions is to make them non-unionized"

In so far as we must have prisons and prison guards (and I have this radical idea that perhaps we don't actually have to have them but discussion of that is beyond the scope of this little comment area) then its fine for them to be unionized.

But the real point is that the US has the most punitive legal system in the world and the prison system represents a gulag every bit as vast and dehumanizing as anything the soviets came up with despite the fact that we don't starve them or execute them without due process like the soviets did.

With a huge prison/industrial complex the prison guard unions have outsized influence compared to unions for other more mundane jobs.

stark fact
a third of pub sec workers
have a union job
one out of fourteen private sector workers
have a union job
this about reverses
the situation in the ike 50's

we have prolly 40-60 million
private sector
predominantly low skill
service/commercial jobs
that oughta be under a CBA (collective bargaining agreement )

its precisely these tens of millions
of unorganized
'McShitski-jobbled'
wagery souls
that would swing behind
their pub sec brothers and sisters
if they shared the advantages of a CBA

'CBA' ?

..the facility had become a den of drugs
and crime with the co-operation of the guards,

who allowed inmates to control what transpired inside.'

the once upon a time people's republic of pavon -
prior to which only place i've seen a broomhandle mauser, carried by a
chilean prisoner