On Organized Labor

Personally, I’ve always found the idea of unionization repulsive. The idea of bargaining collectively with my colleagues rather than standing out on my individual merits bothers me at my very core. What possible motivation would I have to excel at work if the result for me would be the same as for all my neighbors who are idly clipping their toenails for eight hours a day? Despite the physiological wonder that growing one’s nails that quickly might imply, one hardly believes it appropriate compensation for the fact that it leaves their hands free to do little else. Isn’t it the American dream to make good and do well for yourself rather than tugging along at the party line so that those around you can be paid the same while contributing less?

However this morning when I cracked open the March 7th edition of the New Yorker and read the lead ‘Talk of the Town’ story I couldn’t help but scowl quietly to myself. It goes on at length about the decline of the American labor union. The workforce has doubled in 50 years and yet union membership has declined. Increasingly, republicans engage in union-busting legislation that makes it harder and harder for unions to exist at all. Per the paragraph above, this doesn’t bother me overly. These people should negotiate on their own behalf and make their way as best they can. All is well and good and my mind is filled with the wine and roses of equality and self-determination until the numbers start to come out. Like any good analytic, I respond well to numbers.

Currently in this country the top 10% of the earners account for 50% of the money earned. The fact that the remaining 90% of the population is left to scrape by on the remainder makes it unsurprising that we see as much poverty as we do. How can this be deemed at all reasonable? While I by no means wish that everyone should be paid the same for what they do, they should at least be paid enough to comfortably exist without having to worry every single day about where their next meal will come from. Perhaps a program in which the bottom 10% can eat from the garbage cans of the top 10% is in order. No doubt the Republican elite would find this a fine and amicable agreement.

All this talk of social inequality brings me to the topic of taxes. Classically, the rich complain bitterly about their tax rate. They reason greedily, that if they were taxed less, then they would have more leftover to invest in industry to create new jobs for those who are jobless. Even if this were true, however, without unions the jobs created would likely pay a pittance. The rich certainly will invest extra proceeds in industry but only, of course, with the view of making themselves even richer. One does not become richer by paying a fair and equitable wage to one’s workers. One becomes rich by doing as much with as little as possible. Squeezing every last drop of productivity from a given resource is the very definition of efficiency. In the interest of efficiency we increase the wage-gap and do everything we can to make sure our worker drones remain under-paid and ignorant of their own inherent value to the company for which they slave away. The unions serve as the only mechanism by which the workers, largely oblivious to the larger economics of their relationship with the parent company, can be fairly represented and compensated.

So, like an embittered Christmas Scrooge, the top echelon of the American wealthy look down from on high and ask simply of their less fortunate cohorts, “are there no workhouses?” To them I say, there are, but not nearly enough. Perhaps a tax cut for you so you can build some more. While part of me is fiercely independent and desires to “get ahead”, another part of me wishes fervently for a society in which we all go to bed every night knowing that we need not fear for our lives, our health or our families. Clearly unions are imperfect entities, but such is the inevitable result whenever such an uneven fabric as the American workforce is ironed out into something resembling equal treatment.