Enough is enough. I'm tired of all the hate being directed at labor unions.
The casual ease with which Americans now talk about outlawing unions and collective bargaining is breathtaking in its audacity. The normalcy accorded to this very radical idea is evidence of just how far right political discourse has moved in the USA. The state legislature in Wisconsin passed just such a law and despite some early press coverage, the story has turned out to be basically a non-event. Teachers have once again been made out to be villains in order to advance this agenda. We have an odious Supreme Court that is so cruel and dismissive of individuals that it effectively denied women the right to sue for any substantive back pay if they discover that their employer has been paying them less than a man with an identical job. Against this legal backdrop, unions are more important than ever!
Where is the moral wrong is forming an organization to represent collective interests? Though the very word 'union' has come to connote corruption and inefficiency, let's not forget that it's ultimately just a group of people coming together to negotiate from a position of greater strength. The owners are always organized: it's embedded into the very structure of a corporation. Management acts collectively on behalf of the owners. Similarly, in the case of public employees, government organizations act collectively on behalf of the taxpayers. To assume that unionized employees are somehow 'cheating' the companies that employ workers is either disingenuous or dangerously ignorant. If anything, the unfair situation is in preventing workers from organizing and leaving them to negotiate in isolation against an obviously organized ownership.
I am by no means trying to make the argument that unions have not made some bad decisions. Of course they have. Nevertheless, it takes a suspension of reason to leap from this fact to the conclusion that unions should not have the right to exist. Consider that most every type of organization has made mistakes; notably, corporations have routinely made devastating financial and environmental mistakes in only the past few years. Consider also that a union can only negotiate. Thus, every bad deal struck by unions has been a deal struck by bad management. Where are the calls for outlawing corporate organization? There haven't been, because that would be irrational. If one sets aside ugly politics and stops to think, it becomes evident that the same is true for unions.
