http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/11/us/union-power-analysis/index.html
The arguments against the bill amount to truisms and commonsense. For example, "Their fear is populism," which describes one of the principal concerns of big business leaders. This fear is as old as power itself. Big business, its lobby, and its attendants in Congress (the GOP more so) are not the only entities to have ever suffered such anxieties. Even a whirlwind tour of world history reveals that dictators, autocrats, and tyrants throughout the twentieth century have also been anti-union, and for precisely the same reasons.
The arguments for the bill, on the other hand, are difficult to take seriously - though they should be. According to Chris Edwards, an economist at the libertarian Cato Institute, "Unions have lost power in the private sector over time because of competition, globalization, and the fact that they don't add any value to worker productivity." Every point in this sentence is wrong and/or misleading.
The unions have lost power because of state-corporate collusion (based on the above-mentioned anxieties). The issue has nothing to do with competition or globalization; industry has merely been subsidized to seek cheaper labor overseas. And Edwards's point that unions "don't add any value to worker productivity" is rather chilling. Has Edwards considered the worker here? Historical comparisons abound. This remark is something one might have heard in early Politburo meetings right after the Bolshevik revolution. Also as stated by Adolf Hitler's appointed Labor Front leader, after the Third Reich had crushed Germany's trade unions: "It has been the iron principle of the Nationalist Socialist leadership ... not to permit any rise in the hourly wage rates but to raise income solely by an increase in performance" (William Shirer, Rise and Fall, 263; see also 202).
Edwards then asserts that business "can't pay above-market wages forever.... So either they will move work abroad or they will automate to try to get rid of as many workers as they can." Inability begins to look like unwillingness in light of recent reports on US corporate profits:
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/29/record-corporate-profits
And we all know how wages have trended and continue to do so.
Edwards also avers in the article, "Unions are going the way of the dinosaur in the U.S. private sector, which is a good thing for workers and businesses because it will make America more competitive." The facts of the last thirty years are in; the facts of what life was like prior to labor unions and collective bargaining have long been in. That aside, when I read the word "competitive," a paragraph came to mind from a piece in the New York Times last week (Dec. 6) about a deadly fire that swept through a garment factory in Bangladesh:
Bangladesh is now a garment manufacturing giant, the world’s second-leading apparel exporter, behind China, which is no longer the cheapest place to make many basic goods. Bangladesh has the lowest garment wages in the world, and many of the Tazreen factory’s victims were young rural women with little education, who earned as little as $45 a month in an industry that now accounts for $19 billion in exports.
Is this what Edwards means by competitive?
The unions as they exists are not ideal. But despite needed improvements, unions are democratic institutions that help give workers a voice in a domain where those voices are thoroughly unwelcome.
