Unions are Their Own Worse Enemies

Unions Are Their Own Worst Enemies

There once was a time way back in the early 20th century, when labor unions were evolving out of their 19th century infancy and were being perceived by many of those who weren’t a part of a union as being something good. Those days are long gone.

Back then, American corporations were the big bad wolf, often making it a part of their policy to extract maximum labor from their employees, in the poorest conditions they could get away with and for the cheapest wages acceptable by the individual worker.

It didn’t take long for the “power in numbers” concept to be grabbed by some of the smarter and bolder laborers who possessed the will to organize with the goal of balancing the playing field between big business and labor. These early labor leaders had an uphill battle in fighting for worker rights and fair compensation, and fight they did.

At that time these organizers had goals for their union members that were altruistic and fair, and business gradually began to see writing on the wall. They came to realize that there had been a paradigm shift in the way of doing business and managing employees, and they grudgingly complied with the newly formed labor unions.

Labor unions these days are often viewed as organized pariahs, sucking dry any and every industry that they associate with, often at the expense of the consumer. Organized labor has gotten too big for their collective britches through bulldog labor bosses who have strong-armed big business way beyond what is considered by many to be fair.

Somewhere along the line, government workers felt the need to unionize (why, I don’t fully realize). Government entities are far different than corporations, mainly due to the fact that governments have no competition and produce no wealth. All that governments possess, whether at the federal, state or local level, is obtained from the hard work of the taxpayers. This creates a completely different relationship between employer and employee.

When a corporation goes to collective bargaining with their associative labor union, they must consider their bottom line, which is dependent on a number of factors, most importantly their production levels and their competitive realities. This goes a long ways in checking down the negotiation process with their laborers.

Government, on the other hand, is not constrained by production levels and competition. If they feel the need to appease their employees, as a result of tough labor negotiations by labor leaders, they can just extract it from all the rest of the taxpayers within that jurisdiction. This is a significant conflict of interest between two classes of taxpayers and the reason why many governments, at all levels, have drawn the line by banning collective bargaining with their employee’s unions.

As many of us, outside the State of Wisconsin, have come to realize recently, the American Dairyland is not one of them. The Badger state has collective bargaining with many of their state employees, across a number of state services, and the fiscal reform efforts by their governor, Scott Walker, has created chaos. This effort to reel in these state employees in order to place them more in line with their regional non-union workers has caused significant wailing and gnashing of teeth.

This day of reckoning has been coming for a while and with it’s arrival, at least this one state has been exposed for allowing such a practice to ever have become a means by which to negotiate with their employees. How many more states will soon be facing this same problem remains to be seen.

These Wisconsin employees have no one to blame but themselves and their union leaders for extracting from the state more than their non-union counterparts were being compensated in their region. Now they are being forced to give back and the (metaphorical) blood in the streets is beginning to flow.