The Ludwig von Mises institute has a good post on Unions and a NYT article.

The Mises piece begins:

The New York Times has proved once again that it is a reliable font of economic ignorance. This time, it’s through an op-ed piece titled “A More Perfect Union,” by a lady named Ruth Milkman, whose credentials in economics are that she is a “sociologist” and “director of U.C.L.A.’s Institute of Industrial Relations and a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation.”

And later on:

Whenever a union succeeds in obtaining above market wage rates for its members, it also reduces  the number of workers who can be employed in its field. This is because of the operation of one of the best established principles of economics: Namely, the higher the price of anything, including the wage of any kind of labor, the smaller is the quantity demanded of that good or labor service.

Thus, workers who could have been employed in the lines controlled by labor unions are instead displaced and forced to seek work elsewhere. The added competition of these workers in other lines then serves either to depress wage rates in those other lines, thereby resulting in an arbitrary, union-imposed inequality in wage rates, or, if those other lines are also unionized or are forced to pay union wages in order to avoid becoming unionized (which is often the case), to cause still other workers to be displaced. It should be clear that to the extent that the effect of union activity is to depress wage rates in other fields, the union slogan “Liver Better, Work Union” turns out to mean “Live Better by Forcing Other Workers to Live Worse.”

Go read it all.

July 5th, 2005 | Economics, Politics, Unions

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