Public involvement keeps politicians more honest. Examples of privatization efforts include public-private partnerships, which uses funds from both sectors to build or guarantee private infrastructure. Delays in securing financing can be an obstacle to the success of public-private partnerships, though. Partial privatization, or competitive bidding, has been one of the most widely praised endeavors so far. The results have been both lower costs and improved efficiency in the portion of the service still provided by the public sector, which feels threatened by the prospect of further privatization.
Unions feel especially threatened by privatization.
In interviews conducted by the authors, union leaders expressed their concern over the resultant loss of membership and bargaining power. Hass and Reingold concluded by citing sources that say privatization works best when there is natural competition or the opportunity to build it into the deal. However, given the incidents of success and some of the benefits it appears to have over public sector delivery of service and goods, privatization is not the solution to everything.