“I have had more trouble with the union than with management and after this I will never come back to the UAW,” he said.
He felt the need to speak out after witnessing the establishment of voluntary unions in Chattanooga and Alabama. The UAW has said it merely wants to give voluntary union supporters an option, but the worker sees it as a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
“What they do behind the scenes is harass non-members, those who choose not to belong,” the worker said. “The workers [in Chattanooga] can look forward to seeing their names on a list just like this one.”
Reading this, it occurs to me that the long-term relationship between unions and gangsters–especially on the East Coast–is natural and obvious.
How does a normal protection racket work? Three guys–one with a suit, and two plain dressed but large–walk into your store one day and suggest that you need protection, and that they are the ones to provide it. You say you’ve never had a problem, and don’t need their help. The suit tells you that things happen. Who knows? Your windows might be broken tonight, one of your workers might break his leg, someone might through a nitric acid bomb through the window. Who knows? It’s a dangerous world. You get their drift, and if you are in New York or New Jersey, you can’t legally own a gun. They, of course, have illegal guns because that is what they do. You fork over $1,000, $2,0000–who knows? Whatever they thought they could get away with–and in exchange they don’t attack you. This works particularly well for foreign born people in ethnic neighborhoods whose experience with the police in their home lands has not been good.
What do unions do? Something quite similar.
If you want to work at a car plant in Michigan, you have to join the union. There is no opt in. There is no choice. And if you tried to work without joining, you would both be breaking the law, and risking an assault on your person or property. Most people don’t realize this, but laws were passed under FDR making it legal for unions to do many things which would put people in jail if done by anyone else. This includes physical violence, the threat of violence, and damage to property. It is an outrage that these laws are still on the Federal books–they effectively grant unions their own class of citizenship; they effectively make them above the law in some ways–but as far as I know they are.
And what people fail to grasp is that unions are a BUSINESS. The top executives make very good money, and to keep it that way they have to keep the union dues coming. And how do they get the union dues? Coercion, in almost all cases.
Protection racket.
Barry Goldwater (and Brent Bozell, who was arguably the brains behind Goldwater) argued in 1960 that unions need to be reformed in three ways:
1) Membership must be voluntary. As they note in the article linked above they provide many more services, and work harder in Right to Work states because they HAVE to. Everywhere else they have State granted monopolies and coerced membership.
2) One company, one union. The UAW is the labor equivalent of Ford, Chrysler and GM executives getting together and price fixing labor, which is against the law. It is not against the law for the UAW, again, only because unions are in a place somewhat above the law.
3) No political contributions. Unions are tax exempt, in my understanding. They pay no taxes, and should therefore not be able to contribute to elections. In practice, they use their protection racket, which was created both by and for certain dissolute, dishonest policians, to keep them in office. This is not contributing to the generalized public good, but rather the good of union leaders and crooked politicians. It is wrong and should be abolished.
Hell, I’ll add a couple more obvious points.
Unions are inherently unproductive. They create nothing. If we had only unions and no corporations, then we would have no unions, because no one would have anywhere to work. Unions exist solely as counterbalance to an otherwise monolithic corporation, but even in this case, no one company can command wages when people can do work somewhere else. And as I said, collusion is illegal.
Only in socialist systems can companies achieve sufficient monopolies that people can be forced to work somewhere they don’t want to.
And on a lesser level, only when we pursue socialist policies, as Obama has, can the economy remain so bad that people feel they HAVE to remain at jobs they hate because management is awful.
A pro-business bias is a pro-people bias, and an anti-business bias is an anti-people bias. As I say from time to time, just look at Detroit, once the envy of the world, once flush with cash,and filled with happy prosperous people. What happened, effectively, is that the policies pursued by City Hall told people with money to leave, and they did. That simple. If you want a recent example of a country where that happened, look at Venezuela, which is increasingly Fascist.