Posted by
Bill Crawford on Monday, September 06, 2010 9:03:51 PM
Labor Day is here, and the White House is doing their level best to play the movement like a violin. My short question is, why bother? The union membership, especially in the public sector, is already scared witless of a Republican majority and will be more than helpful in the next two months with their vote and their money. Why does Obama have to all but announce that they think they can't expand from that, like he did two short years ago?
Labor is up against it, and stronger than ever, depending on which side of the canyon you look. In the private sector, union membership is down from a peak of about a third of all workers in 1955 to less than 13% today. In the public sector, membership is 37% and climbing, and the raw numbers are bigger than the private sector for the first time (7.9 mil vs. 7.4 mil).
It won't surprise many that I don't hold much for unions. I think that they create an atmosphere that makes it difficult to deal with the unproductive. I think it tends to overprice their workers to the point of market inviability- this is what caused the manufacturing sector to automate in the 1970's. Machine investment was cheaper than continuing to pay the salaries negotiated.
In the great American expansion of 1945-73, the pie expanded fast enough to afford all this, but that all died after the first OPEC embargo. Not in the public sector, though. Salaries continue to expand at a rate unknown to the private sector, and it is being noticed by enough people to be a major political issue. The total compensation of the average federal worker is now twice the private sector average.
There were obvious and compelling reasons for the origins of unions in the twentieth century. Hell, if I were a contemporary of Sam Gompers, I might be writing as a friend of Labor here. I also understand that in the public sector, measuring performance without the black and white background of profit and loss makes it inordinately difficult sometimes, and there are consequences for that.
But there are some governing problems coming, many of them having to do with how we spend money in the public sector and what to do about it. The union answer all too often is to pose raising taxes with "the government needs that money", and in these times, that is a hell of a tin-ear approach to a public debate.
The cry right now is that Labor is suffering along with the rest of us, sacrifices have already been made and you need our services. I'd like to see you take that to a flight attendant or airline pilot and make that fly, after all they have been through.
Wake up and smell the private sector, folks. If you can't or won't, you deserve what s coming in November, and the two years that follow. You can't walk around with talking point blinders on like that and hope to see otherwise.