Annabella of Future Fabulous! wrote:
Corporations have more influence, through legislation, through controlling supply and demand and through violating anti-trust laws. They need to be held responsible for their labor practices.
There are vastly more laws regulating how corporations must treat their employees than there are controlling how unions should operate though. I'm not sure what you're demanding here. You mention anti-trust laws, but then suggest that they aren't held responsible for their labor practices. We have tons of laws to prevent abuses of employees. You're pulling a bait and switch here. You're advocating for government intervention, not in preventing abuses by companies on their workers but to provide additional power to the unions when negotiating their contracts.
I'm sorry, but that's going to far. I've stated my position in past threads, and it hasn't changed. Labor, as a group, should have as much power to strike successfully as it actually has. Without any government regulation helping or hindering. If you can actually convince all the labor necessary for a particular business to operate to strike, then this means that the need for the labor is greater than the need of the labor. If you don't, then that isn't true and your strike should not be artificially allowed to succeed.
The *only* way to ensure that a labor union is honestly representing the labor force is to allow anyone who wants to cross a picket line to do so. If their labor can be replaced by people who don't want or care about whatever the union is striking over, then that thing obviously wasn't that important and their labor isn't rare enough to justify it.
My other major problem with labor unions is that while they purport to empower "labor", they really empower themselves at the expense of the labor they represent. What happens is that over time, if strikes are assisted or enforced by some outside entity (like the government, unfair contracts, etc) the labor itself becomes less valuable on the open market than its being paid as part of the union. When this happens, the workers in the union become "stuck" in the union. They can't make the same wage outside, so they have to keep supporting the union. The union itself will work to prevent competition, either by expanding its influence in the field, or supporting political changes which benefit it (like prevailing wage laws). This in turn amplifies the problem as more workers are drawn into a field in which the actual demand isn't sufficient to support them.
The end result is that individual worker's ability to compete for good wages is eliminated and replaced by a structure in which only the union can maintain sufficient leverage on the market place to keep the whole thing going. At every point in the workers career, the union appears to be a benefit to him. When starting out, he'll make a higher wage than he would have in a different field. As he gets older, the delta between what he could earn with his current skill set and what he's earning in the union is always beneficial. What's lost though is that had he been subjected to non-artificial pay scales his skill set would have evolved more correctly with the actual demands of the market. He likely would have earned a similar amount of money in the long run, but without needing the union for help.
It's a crutch that when used long enough becomes required. 50 years ago, when labor laws were rudimentary at best, unions were useful tools to force those legal changes. Today? They're just a waste of productivity and should be discarded.
