The Union is Dead (Long Live the Union)?
Eric Christen, executive director of the statewide Coalition for Fair Employment in Construction, wonderful piece in the Sunday _Chronicle_ on the big walkout from the AFL-CIO, that’s now gotten even bigger, with more and more Unions choosing to split from the big national labor federation
As I’ve said before, let’s hope it spells the end of destructive “Unionism” as we’ve known it:
With the collapse of socialism and the rise of the information-and- technology age, along with the dynamic, interconnected world economy it represents, leftists like Sweeney (a card-carrying member of the American Socialist Party) have determined that the only way for unionism to survive at all is for two things to occur: force non-union workers to join unions, while making them pay for the pleasure; and encourage huge government growth, thereby creating more union jobs. To accomplish this, Sweeney has hitched his horse to the Democrat Party in no uncertain terms.
Sadly, this trend has come at the expense of the very workers the union claims to represent. For instance, despite the fact that the unions give so heavily to the Democrat Party, 43 percent of union workers themselves voted for President Bush in 2004, according to exit poll data. Though the National Labor Relations Act empowers unions to provide on-the-job representation for workers in terms of wages, benefits and working conditions, the union bosses of today prefer instead to serve as mouthpieces for an activist, radical political agenda.
It’s not a long piece, but it makes some other excellent points, so be sure to check out the whole thing.
We’ve made the point around here before — there’s nothing inherently wrong (and in fact there is quite a bit right, in principle) with workers organizing into Unions. But such organizations — like all organizations — can become corrupt and self-serving and coercive and anti-democratic and basically counterproductive. And it seems fairly clear that there is a lot wrong with the way Unions currently work in our political and economic system today.
Perhaps with the breakup of the AFL-CIO and (hopefully) the passage later this year of California’s “Paycheck Protection” Union reform measure, organized labor is (slowly, contentiously) turning a corner and evolving into a more positive, moderate force.
If organized labor doesn’t evolve, Christen says, it may not survive, “and rightly so.”
Amen.