United Together for Unfair Wages

Labor unions serve no beneficial social purpose today. They were initially founded almost a century ago to battle low wages and poor working conditions. The reason that these are not big issues today has nothing to do with unions, and everything to do with more jobs to pick from. As long as you’re not working at a sweatshop with armed guards, you’re always free to quit. That’s not to say there won’t be costs involved, but if you ever find yourself in a Upton Sinclare-esque situation where you work 12 hours a day under life-threatening conditions and your boss rapes your wife while you’re gone, you don’t need to start a Marxist revolt to change.

The fact is that unions are nothing but a special interest now, and a huge industry as well. Through dues, unions rake in millions of dollars a year, and for what? As much as they may talk about it, the last thing unions want are fair wages. They exist to leverage huge amounts of power (including truly massive political donations) to insure that their members receive more wages and benefits then they could ever receive by negotiating in an open market.

The best way we can know the true value of something is by seeing what the market will pay for it. This is how we figure out the wages of everyone from butchers, checkout clerks, to football players. Yet, somehow we decided the government has to decide the worth of teachers and plumbers.  

It's not heartless to ask union workers to compete for wages like everyone else: it's common sense. If the wages remain too low to satisfy the workers, then they should change jobs. Steel workers in America have been suffering for a long time because American steel is manufactured more inefficient then and costs more then other steel. This should be a sign that our resources (either labor or otherwise) would be more efficient in another sector. These sectoral shifts are common and happen every few decades. To prop them up would be as foolish as subsidizing the failing buggy whip industry so it can compete against Ford and his new contraptions.  When unions press for more and more, the only result is a drain away from more productive sectors of the economy.