Labor Unions and Big Government
So I sat musing last night and got to thinking about the meeting that
President Obama had with the union bosses yesterday. I wonder if anyone
has ever bothered to tell the unions that Big Government and labor unions
are ultimately incompatible.
Consider...
In the private sector, if a union wishes to renegotiate with
management, if management will not acquiesce, they declare a work
stoppage. It is their most powerful negotiating tool. The business is
greatly incentivised at this point to resolve the differences quickly
since every day that work does not continue, more of their customers
begin migrating to competitors. If the stoppage continues long enough,
that company will simply go out of business.
With government, it is a little different. As government gets bigger,
more of the pay, time off, and benefits are set down as a matter of
law, not contract. Consequently, negotiations are not done with
management, they are done with law makers. But these are the same
people who have to figure out how to fund it. Most often, they'll do
this with taxes and probably on the union members themselves. (Ala
taxing health care benefits as income.) If negotiations reach an
impasse, if the unions declare a work stoppage, the law makers will
eventually declare this strike to be illegal. At that point, the
workers have two choices: go back to work and take what you're given
or go to prison. A union facing this prospect has essentially been
broken.
Some see the ultimate goal of unions to get their leadership into
government positions which is why most labor unions more closely
resemble political action groups. But this is a contradiction. The
more attached to government this leadership gets, the less they will
be able or willing to represent the union and the workers will lose
out.
As government gets bigger, the power of the unions actually begins to
diminish. The biggest of all big governments are dictatorships and
communist societies. In most of these areas, labor unions are outlawed
entirely and the workers have no right to collective bargaining
whatever. So at the end, Big Government destroys unions.
In terms of survivability, the unions actually depend on limited
government and a free market and therefore have more to gain from
conservatives than from progressives. At the end of the day, all that
the Big Government Democrats have to offer labor unions is betrayal
and ultimately extinction. One wonders why they continue to give the
Big Government Democrats and progressives their undying support.
Big Government and labour unions are inherently incompatible. In my
opinion, any union member who thinks otherwise is just kidding
themselves.
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