By Frank J Biga III -
I knew my article the other day would stimulate a conversation so I wanted to take a minute to respond to my colleague Howard Foster. Hopefully we can debate a little bit back and forth on an issue that definitely needs it.
Mr. Foster makes the argument that unions cannot be considered beneficial in Illinois. Now I understand the view that public sector unions have been able to successfully increase wages and benefits for their members over the last 40 years and that this imposes an additional cost on the taxpayers of Illinois. But do workers not have the right to organize in a labor pool and negotiate?
And are we going to seriously contemplate the idea that public sector workers are denied this right just because they work for a government entity? Since when does government work require a sense of pathological altruism? As for the $100 Billion in pension liability, I blame the politicians of both parties who failed to husband the resources necessary to meet the State’s obligations when times were good. This amount though is still manageable in a state with assets that run in the trillions.
And do we really want to go back to the days of The Jungle when employers would pit all workers against each other as individuals and pay the lowest possible wage they could often under horrible working conditions? I remind all of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in NY where employers locked seamstresses in to their working areas to ensure better efficiency. Of course, dozens of them got incinerated when an unfortunate accident started a huge fire. Unions defend their members from such conditions, along with government. This alone is an argument for their existence and usefulness.
And is an economy without unions the way to build a middle class? Or is it a way to build an underclass? I would say that we’re building an underclass on the altar of free trade and open borders already. But without unions, whether private sector or public sector, we’d be further along in that process.
Regarding fair-share fees….. should a worker that benefits from the usually positive results of collective bargaining not have to pay a share of the costs of that negotiation? Should he/she be able to do something that conservatives generally detest – be a free rider?
As for the economics of unions and above-equilibrium wages, Mr. Foster asserts that if the unions hadn’t negotiated higher rates in his building that his law firm would have more money and that it would be spent and not sit in a bank account. Now maybe that is true in his case, but I doubt that in general terms and at this time that a business owner has a higher marginal propensity to consume than a union worker does. In fact, according to a recent piece by Adam Davidson in the New York Times, American businesses are collectively sitting on a record $1.9 Trillion in cash!
Now if the banks were lending this money out, this wouldn’t be as much of a problem. But banks are also holding near record reserves at the Fed as well - $2.45 Trillion in fact as of January 21, 2016 according the Federal Reserve’s website. So, assuming a worker is more likely to spend money than a business, I would think a worker getting that money is better for the economy from a macro perspective.
As for the politics of the issue, yes Democrats are the largest beneficiaries of the political donations of the unions. But Republicans need to see through their self-imposed theoretical cobwebs and realize that the results of what unions actually do – help their mostly middle class and working class constituents – are fundamentally conservative and therefore healthy for American society.
If we want strong families that raise educated children who are less prone to drug-abuse, out of wedlock pregnancy, and the corrosion of the mind, body and soul by post-modern culture, then the breadwinners of the household need higher wages. Unions negotiate these for them.
Are there other ways to improve wages in this country? Certainly. But unions are one such mechanism that still works for some in an economy where management seeks to outsource jobs and the government seeks to import a higher labor supply through massive immigration. If Republicans put down the Ayn Rand books and opened up their minds on this issue and reached out to union workers, I know they would find a receptive audience from much of the rank and file. Maybe they’ll win more elections this way too.
Finally, Mr. Foster also pointed out a long known and unfortunate fact that further supports my arguments - unionization in the private sector has shrunk to less than 10% of the labor force. This just so happens to dovetail with recent research that none of us could possibly consider good news - a study by the Pew Institute that shows that the absolute middle class is now less than 50% of the US population. So are these sad realities a correlation…… or merely a coincidence?
Related posts:
Biga: Time for GOP to shift its anti-union stance
Foster: Unions benefits themselves, no one else - especially taxpayers
