Dear Friends,
It seems to me, the basic idea of unions is good, the problem is in the implementation… because of the pernicious incentives created by political favor. I would never argue that a higher standard of living for the workers is a bad thing. If unions actually provided this outcome they would be unambiguously good. Sadly, political favor creates pernicious incentives for the union bosses, to defecate where they eat. Ideally a union would protect their members pay, benefits, safety… AND JOBS. Instead, unions today make it corporate suicide to hire union members, or have a union shop in the US. Not only that but unions support policies that drive jobs overseas… as well as politicians who favor offshoring. Not because they demand good pay for their members but due to the anti American faction they promote.
The first order, duty and obligation of a union boss, is to protect the jobs of the workers he or she is supposed to represent, not a political faction that is antithetical to their jobs, children and future. Political favor however creates a reverse incentive. The more political favor the fat cats at the top can garner, the fatter they can get. There is no filling a black hole of pride, greed and envy. The union bosses support a political faction that lays waste to the cities they take over, with the support of the unions. Then all the industries that had union members, go belly up, and the cities become husks of what they once were. Wastelands filled with abandoned buildings, drug addiction and a princely elite. All because of the pernicious incentives of political favor on the leaders of the unions.
A union should staunchly protect their industry, protect the workers and especially the firms that employ their members. Why do you suppose it is that businesses fight becoming unionized so fiercely? It’s not because they don’t want to pay fair wages… it is because a union is the death knell of a firm. The union will do everything in it’s power to bankrupt, hinder and hobble every company that has the misfortune, of having a union to deal with. These negative effects are magnified when the union is a public sector union, because the firm that hires their members cannot go bankrupt! So the union can do any absurdity it wants. Take the teachers union, it undermines the education of the children, abuses the trust of the parents, and creates hopeless drug addicts who don’t know if they are a boy or a girl.
Examples abound, of unions where the fat cats at the top do everything in their power, to undermine the people they represent… or resent. By supporting legislation that is antithetical to a functional market, to gain political leverage, cutting deals under the table, maintaining an adversarial relationship between management and workers, protecting worthless workers and throwing good workers under the bus. Unions do the opposite of their duty. While there are those who would argue, it wasn’t the progressive administrations backed by the unions in Detroit, Bethlehem and Allentown, that pushed out industry, but anyone pragmatic cannot miss the correlation. Unions are like the Mayans who sacrificed people to their water god then threw the corpses into their wells.
If unions took their rightful place, as partners to business, protecting their industries instead of undermining them, defending the firms that are unionized instead of stabbing them in the back, and doing everything in their power to make the firms that hire union workers more profitable so the profits can be shared with the workers, instead of driving profits to zero as a goal. A parasite can take one of two paths. It can kill its host or it can help its host. The first path leads to eventual extinction no matter how fast the parasite is able to jump. The second leads to immortality. Sadly, unions take chosen the first, when the second would have benefited them, the workers and the nation. In this case, I would say the fat cats at the top are, as Bonhoeffer would call them… stupid.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
