Hot topic where few cool heads prevail..
The attack on collective bargaining practices in the US is often justified by the supposedly coercive nature. Here is an example, published on Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analsysis:
Dear Mr. Weingarten,
I am a professor, Vietnam era Veteran and, technically a member of a “minority” who would like to express my firm and absolute conviction that collective bargaining – when it consists of forcing anyone against his or her preference to join a group of any kind – may no more be termed a “right” than forcing someone to sit in one place on the bus – calling that forced seating a “right”.
For years during and after my MM and Ph.D. studies (completed with 3.98 GPA) I lived largely debt free on incomes averaging $8,000 to $10,000 a year, on occasion less, and did so without expecting anyone to pick up my tabs.
I have been the recipient of both union members’ bullying and mobbing as a high school student while doing summer work to save for my college expenses all the way through to the present-day when as a Veteran my own situation under Alaskan law have been dismissed as some kind of exceptional irrelevancy to the union agenda.
It is the purest definition of a corrupt process to force membership in any group hired by government and then, in any way, manner, shape or form, use involuntarily collected funds of that group to influence a political process that literally picks the taxpayer’s pocket.
I am not writing this as an indictment of the great majority of fine educators. I am, however, writing this as an absolute indictment of the political, self-aggrandizing corruption and whining of those who do, indeed, disgrace the profession. We need to drop most of the pretense of bigger paychecks and benefits “for the children”.
Respectfully,
Roland Stearns, Ph.D.
Anchorage, AK
All very fine, but we’ll give you another quote, from this week’s The Economist:
But the benefits of recovery seem to have been distributed almost entirely to the owners of capital rather than workers. In America total real wages have risen by $168 billion since the recovery began, but that has been far outstripped by a $528 billion jump in profits. Dhaval Joshi of BCA Research reckons that this is the first time profits have outperformed wages in absolute terms in 50 years…
Wages still account for a much greater slice of income than profits, but labour’s share has been in decline across the OECD since 1980. The gap has been particularly marked in America: productivity rose by 83% between 1973 and 2007, but male median real wages rose by just 5%.
We now put a few simple question to those who are opposed to collective bargaining on moral grounds.
- Isn’t collective bargaining supposed to correct what is often an unequal bargaining position between firm and employee?
- Isn’t it unfair to judge a practice by its abuses?
- Isn’t the decline of collective bargaining at least partly responsible for the rather glaring inability of the median worker to share in the productivity gains, as witnessed by the two quotes from The Economist?
- Is that breakdown of the rule that underpinned the post-WOII economic growth (often referred to as the golden years), wages rising in step with productivity gains (often called ‘Fordism’), not been at least partly responsible for increasing indebtedness of households, in order to share in the increased prosperity (and helped by increasingly easier credit as a result of financial deregulation)?
- Was that post-WOII world, with relatively regulated financial market, scarcity of financial crisis, and median employees sharing in wealth creation really so much worse than today’s world, even in purely economic terms? While acknowledging there were economic problems and deficiencies during those years, but aren’t these called the golden years for a reason?
