Comments Elsewhere

Alina:

The problem is that labor unions have just elevated a new type of management to the forefront— namely, the AFL-CIO management. I don’t think unions are doing their members any favors when they push for legislation that ties health insurance to jobs, thereby decreasing labor mobility and competition. In fact, it’s hard to say how the labor union managers really help American workers by keeping them in assembly line jobs.

Well, there’s a distinction to be made between the AFL-CIO and labor unionism as such here, just as there’s a distinction to be made between corporate capitalism and the free market. I don’t have a very rosy view of the AFL-CIO; on the other hand I don’t have a very rosy view of the GEs and GMs and Exxon-Mobiles of the world either. Both are largely the Frankenstein creations of State patronage. Pretty much every complaint you lodge against unions here is more or less directly attributable to the incentives for labor negotiators created by centralized, managed unions organized by shop floor and using collective bargaining and single-shop strikes as their main levers. But of course none of those points is the only sort of labor organizing on offer; there are lots of other ways that workers can and have organized themselves in the past other than the AFL-CIO model, and the fact that AFL-style unions are as widespread as they are is directly attributable to government patronage, from the Wagner Act onward, rather than any particular virtue of the model for ordinary workers.

Jason:

Well, I’m no expert (which needn’t be mentioned at this point, I’m sure), but isn’t the AFL-CIO just one of the only ones to survive attacks—violent and otherwise—from the business community? I’m not sure that’s the only form a union can take and possibly has taken (I’ll have to do some investigation).

It isn’t so much a matter of surviving attacks (although there were plenty of attacks). It’s more a matter of government patronage. The AFL and CIO grew rapidly at the expense of other models of organizing (e.g. unions that rejected collective bargaining, and the decentralist and syndicalist organizations favored by unions like the IWW) during the 1930s because the Roosevelt administration passed laws (especially the Wagner Act in 1935) which gave special government privileges to unions that followed the AFL and CIO models. The special privileges allowed them to extract more short-term gains from the management, at the expense of hamstringing freedom for rank-and-file workers and conceding some areas of traditional labor demands wholesale (e.g., worker self-management). But it’s perfectly reasonable for rank-and-file workers to prefer to join unions that offer short-term gains rather than those that don’t offer short-term gains; so the NLRB patronage system amounted to an unbeatable subsidy for AFL-style unionizing. Which is how we got to where we are today: a few unions with extremely conservative methods and declining membership, which mainly serve as protection rackets for already-unionized workers, and union bosses and senior workers within the unions, at the expense of non-unionized workers and rank-and-file or junior workers. It didn’t have to be this way, but as long as organized labor remains colonized by the government, it’s likely to stay that way. One can only hope that the steady decline in the influence and membership of the “official” unions will eventually bring new wildcat unions to the fore.