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The case against unions in America.
Vic Biorseth, Saturday, May 02, 2009
https://www.catholicamericanthinker.com
We’ve all heard the clichéd pro-union talking points most of our lives:
- Unions built this country.
- Unions got better work conditions and pay for non-union members too.
- Union workers build the best products in America.
- American union workers are the best workers in the world.
- If it were not for unions working conditions and pay would be horrible.
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And so forth and so on. Are all these statements that we’ve all heard all our lives really true? In a word – no. The main problem here involves the view of what the
purpose of a business is.
To the business man, or the would-be business man, the purpose of starting a business and running it is to make profit; the more the better. Every potential entrepreneur begins with the notion of, first, being his own boss, and second, of making more money than he could ever make by working for someone else for wages. That’s the
business view of the very reason for the existence of the business.
To the union, just as to the
Marxist, the purpose for the existence of a business is to employ workers to produce a product or a service, and profit has nothing whatsoever to do with it. Indeed, profit is a bad word. Any businessman who seeks to profit from his business is seen to be evil. Where the union and the Marxist differ is in what to do with excess revenue. The union would prefer that it all to go to the workers, and the Marxist would prefer that it go to the dictator – I mean to the Party – ostensibly for the support of all of society. (But
really, for the dictator.)
The goals and the purpose for being of the union is
antithetical to the success of the private business. The goals of the union and the goals of the private business in a free market are at cross-purposes. They oppose each other, straight up. The only way for the union to fully succeed in its purpose for being is if the private business stops being private or otherwise stops seeking private profit, as if it were owned by someone other than the union. If that point were ever reached, where the union fully controlled the business, of course, the business would soon die.
Customers drive the marketplace, and the customer will be pleased; as soon as the customer is no longer pleased with the product or service – or the price of it – the fickle customer will turn to competing businesses for the same product or service, which will
always be provided better, faster and cheaper by competitive private businesses. That’s just the way it is. Union guys don’t want to accept it, but that’s
still the way it is.
Patriotism – the “buy American” slogan – has nothing to do with it. Cold economics, especially in hard economic times, trumps bumper sticker slogans. Nobody is willingly going to pay more for less of a product or service, and that’s just never going to change.
Unions consistently and continually seek higher wages and more benefits for less work. They do not care what that does to the competitive price of the product or service the business in business to produce. So long as there is any profit visible, they want it applied to more pay and benefits for union members. Unions actively instigate work “slow downs” in which members under-perform or take longer to complete tasks, to force the business to hire more workers in order to increase union membership, just to meet business work quotas. Unions, which are big businesses, profit from union dues, the more the better.
When I came home from Vietnam, the first civilian job I got was at the GM Fleetwood plant in Detroit. I was mildly surprised to learn that I
had to join the UAW. ??? It was what they called a “closed plant,” which meant that all employees had to be UAW members before they could be hired as employees. No choice in the matter. The union dues would be automatically deducted right straight out of my paycheck. I didn’t like having nothing to say about it. The biggest surprise, to me, was that it was a
law. The
government was involved in this.
The law said closed shops were legitimate. The law bound stalled contract negotiations to government “arbitration,” in which the government would almost always lean to the union position. Historically, businesses always yielded and unions just about never lost any ground; they always gained, even if only a little. The courts and the government seemingly joined together to gang up on “big business.” And the
SLIMC1 joined right in – you can guess who’s side they were always on.
There was a purely union man, who had no “company” tasks, who was on the payroll and made more hourly than the rest of us, but who did nothing involving the production of Cadillacs. He was called the “Committee Man” and his sole function was to walk around or hang around making sure that no union rules or contracts were in any way violated. He was always anxious to write up “grievances” against the company. GM had to pay him to do that, and there were many more like him; every section of the whole assembly line had one. What do you think that did to the price of a Cadilac?
On the matter of loyalty – meaning to whom it was owed – you would think that it would be GM. But no. The logos you saw on hats, jackets, shirts and so forth were predominantly UAW, not GM. It was the same with bumper or window stickers on their cars. Workers were more proud of being union men than of being GM auto-workers. They felt less loyalty to the one who paid them than to their union.
I’ll go out on a limb here and say that every big and famous union in America was originally organized by:
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- Organized crime families or other gangsters;
- Communist organizers; or,
- Both of the above.
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If that is not true of any major American union I’ll be very surprised.
There has always been a close relationship between Marxism and the criminal element. Marxists need criminals, from the lowest levels of society, and from the highest. Marxism
draws the criminal element. Major crime leaders, corrupt politicians and officials, corrupt big businessmen come from the top levels. Petty criminals from the lower social levels become the grass-roots “organizers” and trench-soldiers at the street level. Every historical Marxist dictator, especially the bloodiest ones – Stalin and Hitler – surrounded themselves with and inner ring of ruthless thugs, sociopaths and killers.
Even Castro, mild among Marxist dictators, had his Che Guevara, chief of his political murderers, who could have ordered all on the
enemies listskilled, but who so often preferred to pull the trigger himself, and who so enjoyed killing people’s children before their eyes, before finally killing them. We can only guess who Obama might use in a similar capacity to “purge” his Party of enemies.
Now, some might think I’m going a bit far a-field here, but I don’t think so. “Workers Unite!” is the fundamental battle cry of Marxism; it is the grass-roots starting point of social revolution. But when the Marxists take the field and win the victory, everything changes for the workers. Take long, hard look at the
Solzhenitsyn Speaks page to see how Marxism deals with worker negotiations in a full-on Marxist society. The chief labor negotiating tool of Marxism is the
machine gun.
This is quite serious.
Look at the authority Obama is now exercising over formerly private industries and formerly private banks, with no opposition, and take fair warning.
Pray for America, Western Culture, and the whole world.
Get down on your knees and pray.
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Addendum Sat Jul 11 09:09:14 2009Church teaching, a sense of justice and common sense should tell you that workers have every right to organize unions to collectively secure just compensation and working conditions.
We do not quarrel or argue with that obvious right. What we argue against is the “right”, or power, of a union to force someone to join against his own free will. When unions attain the size, power and scope that many American unions have attained, the
Rule of Subsidiarity is violated just the same as when a government, or a monopoly, interferes with it. No union should become a monopoly itself. No union should be able to shut down an entire industry over the problems of one local workshop.
The conditions in Eastern Europe leading to the eventual fall of the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union were somewhat different. There, the
Solidarity Movement was an organization of workers who resisted the owners of the means of production, which is to say, the state. Worker-citizens of a so-called Socialist and so-called Communist absolute dictatorship stood up to show the world the true nature of their “Worker’s Paradise.”
Up until then, no workers had ever dared to participate in a determined worker’s strike against a ruthless dictator and survived.
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Topic: Catholics and Labor Unions (Read 793 times)