I wanted to write a post about unions for Labor day. I have to be nice, because my conservative neighbor to the north really likes unions, and there are conservative people who work in unions. In fact, many people who work in unions don’t like that they are forced to pay union dues in order to work, because they know those union dues go straight to the secular left, to push for leftist policies.
Let’s start with this article from John Stossel, that appeared in Daily Signal, because it explains how unions like the Teamsters work:
Another was Yellow Corp—once one of the largest freight carriers in America.
Then the Teamsters threatened to strike, demanding faster payments of healthcare and pension benefits.
The company warned that a strike could bankrupt it.
But O’Brien kept pushing, saying, “The company has two more days to fulfill its obligations, or we will strike. Teamsters at Yellow are furious and ready to act!”
Yellow gave in. The strike was averted.
Days later … the trucking company shut down for good.
Thirty thousand people lost their jobs.
Asked if he felt responsible for the lost jobs, O’Brien said, “No, not at all … they were so mismanaged.”
I think a case can be made for private sector unions, but not public sector unions. Public sector unions are unions composed of government workers.
Here is an article written by my favorite economist Thomas Sowell. As usual, Sowell is able to dig around in the past to show you how policies that sounds so good to the ears have worked out so badly when tried.
He writes:
The old-time, legendary labor leader John L. Lewis called so many strikes in the coal mines that many people switched to using oil instead, because they couldn’t depend on coal deliveries. A professor of labor economics at the University of Chicago called John L. Lewis “the world’s greatest oil salesman.”
There is no question that Lewis’ United Mine Workers Union raised the pay and other benefits for coal miners. But the higher costs of producing coal not only led many consumers to switch to oil, these costs also led coal companies to substitute machinery for labor, reducing the number of miners.
By the 1960s, many coal-mining towns were almost ghost towns. But few people connected the dots back to the glory years of John L. Lewis. The United Mine Workers Union did not kill the goose that laid the golden eggs, but it created a situation where fewer of those golden eggs reached the miners.
It was much the same story in the automobile industry and the steel industry, where large pensions and costly work rules drove up the prices of finished products and drove down the number of jobs. There is a reason why there was a major decline in the proportion of private sector employees who joined unions. It was not just the number of union workers who ended up losing their jobs. Other workers saw the handwriting on the wall and refused to join unions.
So, just think about how unions work on Labor Day, and ask yourself whether they are good for anyone except the union bosses. I do think that a case can be made for private sector labor unions, as long as they let workers who want to join opt-in voluntarily. But I don’t think any case can be made for public sector unions. They end up costing taxpayers a lot of money, and they can’t be stopped by a company going out of business. That’s why we have a $37 trillion national debt, and our children (and children’s children) will be the ones who have to pay it off.
