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Wednesday, December 28, 2005
What The State Hath Joined Together, Let No Man Put Asunder
No, this won't be about marriage.
The Transport Workers Union's executive board voted Tuesday night in favor of a new contract with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York City, union president Roger Toussaint announced....Collective bargaining sessions ended in a stalemate early Dec. 16, when the union walked away from what the MTA called its "final offer."
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in his first press conference after the walkout, blasted union leaders for calling a "selfish and illegal strike."
The next day, Toussaint said, "When you have transit workers stand up for their rights and their dignity, then we are then called thugs, selfish, greedy, overpaid, by a billionaire."...
"We explored other things that didn't work," as ways to achieve long-term savings, Raynor said. "The mayor has been a big advocate of finding the money somewhere -- like productivity increases," he said. "We weren't able to achieve anything, so health care became a way to resolve it," Raynor added.
Last week's three-day transit strike was estimated to have cost New York City businesses about $1 billion and caused a public transit nightmare for New York bus and subway commuters.
What's missing from this report is as important as what's present in it, if not more so:
- The Taylor Act makes it illegal for unionized public-sector workers to strike.
- The Taylor Act has not been enforced in living memory.
- Roger Toussaint took the TWU out on strike without the backing of the larger union of which it is a part, and according to some reports, against the wishes of a very substantial percentage of TWU members.
- A judge has levied heavy fines against the TWU for its three-day work stoppage, but it is unclear whether it has the power to enforce collection.
- Toussaint and other TWU officers have been ordered into court to show cause why they should not stand trial under the Taylor Act, but Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said publicly that he opposes punitive measures against them.
- Federal laws -- The National Industrial Recovery Act and the Wagner-Taft-Hartley Act, both passed in the New Deal years -- tie Washington's hands in cases such as these. Since state-level officials and local police forces are also unionized, and often have mutual-support pacts with other municipal unions, there is seldom a force for public order willing to act against disruption by a municipal workers' strike.
In all probability, the TWU and its top officials will get away cleanly, with much, if not all, of what they've demanded, while New York must simply bear the losses from their illegal strike. Mayor Bloomberg, generally a decent sort, is wary of inflicting penalties for this massive, 38,000 perpetrator violation of the law -- a violation coercively imposed on the violators themselves by the Norris-LaGuardia Act, which compulsorily unionizes any workforce if 50%-plus-one of its workers agree.
Public approval of and sympathy for unions has been on the wane since the end of World War II. Union membership embraced about 27% of the American workforce at its peak. It's down to about 12% today, with the majority of those being public-sector workers. Yet those unions retain the power to wreak immense damage upon the rest of us, whether by strikes, slowdowns, or "Washington Monument Defense" tactics. New York's transit-union woes are but one especially dramatic example.
Nevertheless, there are persons who defend the union as an institution, even unto its grubbiest and most violent manifestations. Some of those persons call themselves conservatives; check out the conclusions presented in Richard Viguerie's book Strike, which chronicles the New York Daily News strike of the Eighties, for an example. Why?
The problem is multicausal. Popular opinion proceeds as much from what it doesn't know as from what it does, which has given (unionized) government-school educrats and the (unionized) Old Media immense power to shape it. Public attitudes toward "labor" have tended to lag behind objective developments, as well. And we must not neglect the unions' superior capacity for garnering sympathy by Old-Media-promoted tendentious presentations of their side of any controversy -- presentations that almost always distort or omit the most salient facts of the case.
On an objective reading, your Curmudgeon concludes that the unions as presently privileged by law -- that is, with the power to compel workers' membership, to compel their members to strike, and to evade any legal consequences for their actions or the actions of their members "in pursuit of union objectives" -- are an evil force that should be cast down and destroyed. But this opens several other questions:
- Since a union without legal privileges would be just an exercise of the right of free association, are there any arguments against it?
- What would an economy without legally privileged unions look like, and would it be morally acceptable?
- Can one imagine a state of affairs in which unions that possess the legal privileges they have today would be justifiable?
There is no distinction, legally, between a group organized to promote its members' well-being in commerce and any other sort of voluntary group without special privileges. Therefore, a union that could not compel membership, could not compel its members to strike, and whose members were held individually liable for anything they do regardless of motive or objective, would conform to general American principles. But what could such a union do for its members that would justify its costs to them? What could such a union do for an employer to justify negotiating with it, rather than with workers as individuals?
Several things, actually:
- It could act as a concentrator in the purchase of many things, most especially training and education.
- It could employ ultra-skilled negotiators to wrangle contracts and resolve disputes about workplace conditions and employee treatment.
- It could act as a convenience for employers that prefer collective labor agreements to individual hiring and firing practices.
- It could assist laid-off workers in relocating to places where jobs are available, whether permanently or temporarily.
- Perhaps most important, it could stand behind its members as a guarantor of quality. This "mint-mark" effect, if it were scrupulously nurtured, would do more for the American laborer than any deed of any union organized under the conditions of today, by making him more appealing to employers by virtue of his union membership.
These are not trivial matters. They suggest that coercive privileges have distracted unions from what they could be, and ought to be doing. But coercive privileges are like that; the worst do rise to the top, and ever after will use their powers to remain there and further aggrandize themselves, even at the expense of the persons they've supposedly been chosen to represent. Take our Congress as a case in point.
Given the above, it would seem that union members themselves ought to be the first to demand the rescission of unions' legal privileges. The shrinkage of unions over the past fifty years might be interpreted as a sign that this recognition is penetrating unions' memberships.
Of course, to make this case en masse to the members of today's unions is close to impossible. The Old Media would never carry such a message, nor would union power-brokers permit it to be received or acted upon. Besides, union bosses have a rather cozy relationship with the federal Department of Labor, where an awful lot of rice bowls would be upset by any change in the status quo. So we're unlikely to see the revocation of unions' legal privileges to coerce any time soon. We must follow another road.
Were unions with coercive privileges to be subtracted from our economy, what would disappear with them?
- Unemployment caused by artificially high wage rates and union-shop rules;
- Sinecures and featherbedding;
- The delay of technological improvements to capital equipment and industrial processes opposed by unions;
- Work rules and arbitration schemes that shield lazy, incompetent, or disruptive workers from penalty;
- Union dues disproportionate to the actual services unions perform for their members;
- Union enforcers and violence currently protected from prosecution by union privileges;
- Political pandering to unions.
Unions arose originally to give their members an edge over management in wage negotiations. In practice, this has produced unemployment among those workers who would have been employed at lower wage rates -- long-lasting unemployment in those industries where unions are powerful enough to prevent productivity criteria from being enforced. Significant numbers of workers have endured long stretches of unemployment because of union machinations: in some cases indirectly, because of the elevation of wages above a free-market level, and in others because to sustain those wage rates, unions have had to restrict membership.
Unions almost uniformly protect "senior" workers from dismissal even if the need for their specialties has disappeared. This is quite visible in the newspaper industry, where several labor categories that were critical to the days of "hot metal" typography have become technologically obsolete but remain on the books even so, due to union protection. In consequence, those jobs become sinecures: jobs without duties. Those who occupy them have no work to do, which, ironically, can leave them as miserable as the hardest of the hard-core unemployed.
Of course, sinecures made visible are a black eye to unions, which therefore strain to prevent them from occurring in the first place. This militates toward opposition to capital improvements, which almost always result in a lessened need for workers. The aforementioned Viguerie book, Strike, tells a poignant tale in this regard. Similar things have happened in nearly every other unionized industry, albeit with varying effects.
Since a union demands uniformity of treatment for its member-workers, the employer finds himself in the position of having to treat all alike despite any variations among them. Consequently, lazy workers who never exceed the absolute minimum requirements of their jobs get the same raises as industrious, ambitious ones. Nor can an employer demand that a shiftless worker be replaced by someone with more spirit. This has led to the "slow down, you're working too fast" ethic of rate-busting that has characterized so many union shops.
Of course, unions must sustain themselves financially from members' dues. But dues, being a compulsory exaction that occurs before the worker ever sees his paycheck, have a tendency to grow, while the actual services rendered by the union to its members stay the same or decline, according to incentives. This is a mirror image of the provision of public services funded by taxation, and is driven by the same dynamic.
The ultimate power of the union as currently constituted is based on the threat of the strike. Federal labor laws and cozy relations with state and local forces have made it possible for unions to harass, intimidate, vandalize, and assault persons opposed to a striking union's cause. Viewed objectively, how could it be otherwise? The individual worker suffers badly from a strike, whereas the union's negotiating power is founded on it. Therefore, the worker, and all those who exhort him to return to his task, must be kept in line by the threat of violence -- violence that would get anyone outside a union prosecuted for a felony.
Finally, unions are voting blocs, enforced by the same forms of coercion, both express and implied, as they use to support their strikes. This creates an incentive for politicians to strike mutual-support deals with union power-brokers. This is perhaps the most pernicious of all forms of special-interest politicking, since it almost always conduces to the aggrandizement of the union bosses but to the detriment of individual workers, unionized or not.
No doubt your Curmudgeon has omitted a few things, but the above should suffice to make his point: the union without coercive privileges is a better deal than the union with them, both for the economy at large and for unionized workers themselves. All that remains is to conceive of an ingress against the coercively privileged union.
As previously mentioned, union membership is at a postwar low, and is likely to sink further. Union bosses, cognizant of this, will naturally fight back, on at least two fronts:
- First, they'll mount increasingly strident propaganda campaigns for the virtues of the union, both to workers in traditionally unionized industries and to workers in "new economy" industries that have suffered recent dislocations.
- Second, they'll do what they can to leverage their most powerful existing bastions: government workers at all levels. Since government workers determine how the laws will be applied, and control 40% of the nation's Gross Domestic Product (GDP), their potential power over just about anything one might name is extraordinary.
Countering these assaults will be difficult. The unions have the initiative, their operators are powerfully motivated, and they operate from a position of privilege. More, the political class would hate to see them disappear; it would increase the difficulties of campaigning and forecasting their electoral fortunes. But must they be opposed frontally?
Counterpunching strategies would be preferable:
- As opportunities arise for unionized workers to better their fortunes by moving into non-union industries, those opportunities should be publicized and marketed aggressively. Sometimes this will be at a near-term cost to those offering them, but the possibility should not be discounted if one can see beyond the near term.
- Legal means whereby unions can be prevented from using members' dues for political purposes should be exploited to the hilt. This can be difficult, because of the reluctance of the enforcement agencies to hew to their tasks, but whenever it succeeds, it has a large effect.
- Commercial and cultural trends that move activity away from union-dominated industries should be encouraged. For example, homeschooling and education vouchers are the bane of the National Educational Association (NEA), which has spent many millions of dollars opposing them from coast to coast. Internet publication is the bete noire of the newspaper unions; though they've been successful at thwarting technological advances in paper publication, they can do nothing about the Net.
- Term limits at state and local levels will reduce the desirability of union-politician alliances, since a politician's reach into the future is limited thereby, and the value of a union's support to him is truncated as well -- possibly below the point where it would compensate for the odium of his neighbors when he must perforce return to the private sector.
Your Curmudgeon has barely scratched the surface. Intelligent, creative minds can surely come up with more approaches. If he has established that the stakes are high enough to make the game worth playing, that is more than enough.
Comments
ow. Not you too.
Posted by og on 12/28/2005 at 12:44 PMAnd thank you for a dispassionate, articulate, and accurate assessment of the situation.
M
Posted by Mark Alger on 12/28/2005 at 04:34 PMI hope and pray that nobody I know ever has to make any of those choices.
Posted by og on 12/28/2005 at 05:29 PMGreat assessment. Interstingly enough, though, it was what I learned about unions while in High School (class of ‘98) that created my distaste for them. What I learned in college cemented my view that they are hardly necessary anymore. But if unions did what you think they should do (and which I agree with), that would probably be the greatest thing to labor since the cotton gin. Or interchangable parts. Or sliced bread. Something to that effect.
Posted by Jason on 12/28/2005 at 09:33 PMWhen I was in college I worked one summer as a shuttle driver for Budget RAC. I paid bargining unit fees to the desk agent’s union because they had been the ones moving cars between sites. I still don’t understand how they managed that under the nose of the Teamsters’ Union.....
PA was an open-shop state in the 70’s and the newspapers around Philadelphia frequently reported yet another vandalism incident at an Alitmose construction site. They were non-union, and the contruction trades were constantly trying to get the sites shut down . I can remember contaminated diesel fuel, destruction of trailers, and out right arson being reported.... Of course, there was never any serious (RICO-level) investigation of why this one company was always targeted.
I have to agree, the only way unions in the private sector should be allowed to exist is if they are held absolutely liable for their member’s actions.
Public sector unions should be banned outright.
Posted by on 12/29/2005 at 05:43 PM
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