Unionizing the Village in Order to Democrat it
Matt Welch | April 30, 2008, 12:53pm
The Washington Post's resident Labor toady, Harold Meyerson, is refreshingly direct today about our coming union/Democrat world:
[H]ow, Democrats wonder, can they secure the white working-class vote?
Well, they could start by re-unionizing it.
[bunch of numbers showing unionized whites voting Democrat, unlike their non-unionized co-racialists]
What do unions do that has such an impact? Chiefly, they remind their members what's at stake.
That's the ticket! Meyerson goes on to let slip what a Democratic-run Washington would do within the first 100 minutes of a Hillbarry Clinbama presidency:
Today, the party is united behind the Employee Free Choice Act, which, by enabling workers to join unions again without fear of being fired, would also greatly help Democratic prospects at the polls.
What is the Employee Free Choice Act, a.k.a. "card check"? Get ready to read all about it in the June issue of reason, care of David Weigel! In other words, subscribe today, for less than 20 bones a year.
joe | May 1, 2008, 11:06am | #
So, I both have never experienced being in a union AND, simultaneously, am in a union. In actuality, I was once an officer of a union, belonged to a different one before that, and am currently in a union. Since, apparently, the ad homenim attack about whether my (and only my) work history plays such an outsized role in the arguments against me.
Sadly, this is the level of discourse we can rely on from people like Other Matt, Episiarch, and joshua corning.
But enough about them. A couple of people who don't have to keep corks on their forks have made some points.
RC, J sub, as I've written several times already, the existence of laws on the books protecting people from retaliation for union activity does not, as libertarians rarely fail to understand in any other context, mean that the problem does not exist. In the absence of good-faith efforts to actually enforce those laws, they are dead letters. Not to mention, the enforcement process and the low costs associated with violating them are, to many companies, just a cost of doing business. You don't trust the existence of gun laws to protect you from armed robbers; why should workers trust the existence of these laws to provide reliable protection to them?
And, no, I'm not going to restate what I've already written about the secret ballot. Any time anyone cares to address what I've said, instead of repeating the same question I've already answered, that would be just great.
joe | May 1, 2008, 11:22am | #
Fluffy makes a real, honest-to-God argument:
Joe's supposed "free rider" objection is BS, because it's not like he's paying dues to the auto companies because their massive purchases of steel created economies of scale that brought down steel prices worldwide. In a free market sometimes you will benefit from the economic actions of persons other than yourself.
When a union engages in collective bargaining on behalf of every employee in a workplace, the increased pay and benefits are some second-or third-order effect created by third parties. The union is actually providing a service of value directly to those employees.
grylliade raises a couple of good points, too.
First, the state of unions in America, and going too far. Well, sure. And there are empoloyers who have gone too far, too. I don't really see a connection to the issue at hand.
Now, this is the first legitimate response to the point I have made so many times about the necessity of card-check, and why it outweighs the need for a secret ballot:
I guess to me the secret ballot system seems fairer overall (i.e., less biased to one side or the other), but what advantage exists tilts in favor of employers. The card check system seems more open to abuse, but the advantage tilts to the unions. So yeah, I'll support the fairer system, even if it's not perfect.
In a vacuum, open ballots are worse than secret ballots, but keep in mind, that isn't the only issue at hand. Card check isn't a response to secret ballots, but to a different problem - retaliation by employers against organizers in the period between the collection of signatures and the election.
To people who take the Dr. Schact position on unions - employers are the natural leaders of their workplaces, and the workers should not be allowed to check or challenge them in any way - this is not a bug, it's a feature. Many upthread have made this point specifically - union organizers should be fired, and employers who do so are well within their rights. If you hold this position, I turst you'll forgive me for not paying much attention to your thoughts on the fairest way to do something you would like to see eliminated from the face of the earth.
But that isn't grylliade's point. He recognizes the problem, but just minimizes it, putting it on roughly equal footing with the intimidation of workers by their coworkers, and using the superiority of secret ballots as the tiebreaker. I guess I just disagree with the idea that those two problems are equivalent. It would seem necessary to define out of existence the power employers hold over their employees - which some libertarians do - in order to miss the fact that this happens.
One last question: J sub D, is is currently illegal for workers to physically threaten their coworkers during a union drive? A simple yes or no will do. (It won't, actually, but the combination of naivete and hypocrisy behind his question to me just begs to be thrown back in his face.)
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