The current political wrangling over the Employee Free Choice Act is breaking down along clear ideological lines, professed conservatives being against it – as they have consistently been against pro-union legislation, and labor unions in general, at least since the early 20th Century. Why?! Conservatism, at least in the economic sphere, is supposed to be all about freedom. Why shouldn’t workers have the right to organize and bargain collectively? That’s a form of economic freedom too, isn’t it? Shouldn’t conservatives be all for it?
Let’s say that I own a business. I take the risks, I go to the bank with my business plan, I put in long days to get it off the ground while my workers, who have no vested interest in the business, go home with their families.
The business becomes a success, and suddenly I am reaping the benefits of my hard work. However, my employees see that I am doing well and decide that they want to take away some of what I have earned out of some odd sense of “fairness”, so they organize and form a union, give me a set of demands, and tell me that I will comply or they will walk out, threatening everything that I have worked for, even though I am the person that took all the risks and provided them with jobs. So it becomes a one-way street, where the union takes and I give. Of course, when my business is in trouble later, they fight me tooth and nail about giving back what they’ve taken, making it seem like they’re doing me a favor, when the whole time they’ve done nothing but coerced it out of me by threatening my business with strikes.
That, in a nutshell, is why I am against unions. If you don’t like your salary, go somewhere where they will pay you what you think you’re worth. If you don’t like your working conditions, call OSHA, and if they sign off on it go somewhere else.
That’s why business owners are against unions. But what does that have to do with conservatism? Why should conservative principles align with the interests of business owners as against others?
You’re kidding aren’t you? All political parties are against the power of the unions and always have been. They are working on behalf of the people who have all the money, no political party cares about the working man.
Obama has appointed Paul Volcker as one of his economic advisers. Check out his record as head of the Federal Reserve in the 80s - he raised interest rates to an unprecedented 20 percent so that in 1983, the US economy plunged into the sharpest recession of the post-World War II period.
He destroyed the industrial Midwest, closing down steel mills, auto plants, coal mines whole cities like Detroit, Buffalo, Akron, Youngstown, Gary, Indiana and lots of smaller industrial towns.
The response to this was the biggest wave of strike struggles since the 1940s, beginning with the PATCO air traffic controllers strike in August 1981. But Reagan simply fired 12,000 unionized workers. No one at all amongst Democrats and Republicans objected.
Volcker famously praised Reagan for breaking the PATCO strike, calling his action the most important factor in bringing inflation under control.
After that union after union was crippled whenever anyone tried to strike -Greyhound, Phelps Dodge, Hormel, International Paper, A. T. Massey Coal, Continental Airlines, and Eastern Airlines. The working man has no allies in politics.
Protestant Work ethic. They want people to be able to earn their dollar by the sweat of their brow, not by their ability to cohere into an angry mob.
That and Unions negotiate some stupid shit where people can’t do work outside of the bounds of the contract.
It is a form of wealth redistribution. If a business owner has earned the money, it becomes his. Conservatives have a problem with wealth redistribution precisely because it is giving that which is earned to those who have not earned it.
My real-life example: After 13 years of working for my boss, he does not pay me what I think I deserve. I have the option to go somewhere else, or I have the option to stay where I’m at, which I do because I like my job. That’s it. I do not have the right to go to work, sit down, cost him money and wreck his business to get the raise that I think I deserve. Yet unions assert that they have that right. For me to do that would be nothing less than stealing from my boss, but in the context of labor unions it is perfectly legitimate. Why, exactly, do thousands of people make such an action legitimate?
You’re missing that the workers do all the actual work (hence the name) and they just ask for their share of the profits.
I’m not missing that at all. I’m discounting it. As an employee I am subject to the terms and conditions of employment, which allows me to work by the rules or get fired. It also allows me to quit whenever I like. Those terms do not allow me to put myself on par with the person who hired me. It is his business, that’s it. If I want to be the man, I can go and open my own business.
Labor is exchanged for money. I do not have the right to determine at what rate they are exchanged inasmuch as I accept the terms and conditions of employment (I am free to reject the offer if I see fit). Within the law, the employer has that right. There is no profit sharing except that when he makes a profit I get to keep working because the business hasn’t collapsed.
No, they don’t. And they don’t have any right to any of the profits. They receive a salary. If they want to share in the profits, they have to share in the risks by buying stock.
Regards,
Shodan
Personally, I’ve never understood how unions become a political issue in the first place. If a worker doesn’t like some aspect of a job, he can stop working, and if the employer doesn’t like that the worker has stopped working, he can stop paying the worker. If a lot of workers don’t like some aspect of a job, they can all stop working, again with the risk that the employer can stop paying all of them. The employer then has the choice of changing the working conditions to something the workers like better, or replacing them with less picky workers. If he can’t replace them with less picky workers, well, then, maybe those irreplacable workers are more valuable than he thought. The only way that “unions”, per se, come into this is that the workers coordinate among themselves when they are and are not going to stop working, and that’s guaranteed by the First Ammendment’s freedom of assembly. What’s the big issue here?
As an employee you have the right to negotiate for the terms of your employment. Unions let workers carry out this negotiation from a stronger position. What is wrong with that?
The big issue is that labor unions want to have the right to stop working with the proviso that they get their jobs back later.
Hey, if you want to quit, good luck in your chosen profession. But don’t come back. Oh, and by the way, get away from the door so my new employees can come in and do the job that you were too good for. Yes, you with the baseball bat, back away and let that bus through.
It is simplistic to suggest that only conservatives are against labor unions and cite the “Employee Free Choice Act” as an example. Some on the center and left have lined up against this legislation, including George McGovern:
"*Former Democratic presidential nominee Senator George McGovern broke with Democratic Party orthodoxy by opposing the EFCA in an August 2008 editorial in the Wall Street Journal:
‘To my friends supporting EFCA I say this: We cannot be a party that strips working Americans of the right to a secret-ballot election. We are the party that has always defended the rights of the working class. To fail to ensure the right to vote free of intimidation and coercion from all sides would be a betrayal of what we have always championed.’*"
Apart from supporting the deceptively named “Employee Free Choice Act”, center-left politicians have arguably been working against union causes in recent years by opposing attempts to clamp down on illegal immigration and promoting “free trade” agreements. You will see editorials in newspapers like the N.Y. Times snidely talking about jobs that “American workers don’t want to do”.
Darn those American workers, wanting a living wage. :dubious:
Overly simplistic. There are plenty of ways to have employees in profits other than through buying stock.
The most common are compensation in stock (which isn’t buying stock as the company pays you in stock, and doesn’t have to substitute for salary at the rate the stock is trading at (especially if the stock is given with some kind of vesting requirement), stock options (which isn’t buying stock at all-it’s the right to buy stock, which is often sold/offered for a very low price relative to the cost of stock, depending on the strike price) or profit-sharing through contract. (I exclude partnership, merely because that’s equivalent in many respects to “buying stock”, though I note in many partnerships, one person brings more money, and others bring expertise/special skills)
Further, profit-sharing has many benefits for employers-they encourage workers to help the company do well by giving them a direct share in its success. It lets them hire “better” workers than they can afford by offering them a share of the venture. It lets them cut down on wage costs by varying employee compensation based on how the company does.
Finally, there’s nothing at all wrong with employees saying they don’t want to work for employer X without some kind of profit-sharing, or trying to negotiate the terms of their contract of employment to include some kind of profit-sharing.
If you’re an employer, and you don’t like it, don’t hire them/don’t agree to the changes in negotiation. If no employee you want will agree to work for you without them, that’s just the free market-just as if no employee would be willing to work for the salary offered.
An employee has the “right” to anything they can negotiate out of an employer. An employer has a “right” to keep anything above that. But neither is a "right’ in the traditional sense-the division is almost entirely negotiated.
And you are free to refuse to sign a contract with organized labor. Just as the worker is not forced to work for you, you are not forced to sign a union contract. Fair is fair.
Well, I can’t speak for conservatives, but I don’t like the fact that the Act in question does not require a secret ballot. That, if I am not mistaken, is a key component to “freedom”.
As far as I understand (IANAL-just my experience getting jobs, and some commonsense), two people need to sign a contract. Both are free to propose terms and conditions of employment or salary-there’s no “right” for the employer to dictate it. At the end of the day, however, both have to agree to whatever the final terms are-or there’s no employment.
In practice, if you’re working at a low level for a monolithic corporation, the employer probably does dictate both terms and salary-but not out of right, but because it has the bargaining power-there are lots of possible employees.
If, on the other hand, you’re (say) an expert electrical engineer with huge experience, several patents to your name, and a track record of improving whatever you work on, you’d probably have all the bargaining power-companies would be beating down your door to hire you. Similarly, if you’re working for a small company, there’s probably lots of room for negotiation.
In general, it’s a mix of the two. And if you’re simply refusing to even negotiate salary/terms with your employer, you’re almost certainly leaving money on the table. That’s your prerogative-but it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Or to put it another way, an employer has no more “right” to my labor than I do to make him to hire me on my own terms if he doesn’t like them.
ETA-just like fear itself says.
Yeah, because it’s always the workers who incite violence.
:rolleyes:
It’s never that the employer is treating his workers poorly or unfairly, right Airman? It’s never that the employer has the law and the money and the guns stacked on his side, right? It’s never a case where an employer would do something like make 8 year old kids work in a coal mine, right? For 80 hours a week, for just enough to buy enough food to survive, right? No, that would never happen. :dubious:
That component was not recognized by the founding fathers, who did not think a secret ballot was integral to freedom: