Labor Unions: All or Nothing?

Ygle­sias:

I think the clas­sic post­war Amer­i­can dynamic of an econ­omy with a large minor­ity of the work­force union­ized is fun­da­men­tally unsta­ble. In the long-​​run the two equi­lib­ria are toward a non-​​union econ­omy or else toward the Nordic model where vir­tu­ally every­one is in a union. In the lat­ter case, I think the unions become orga­ni­za­tions of a more polit­i­cal char­ac­ter than any­thing else. In the­ory, Swedish labor unions could use their dom­i­nant labor mar­ket posi­tion to increase work­ers’ com­pen­sa­tion by mak­ing Swedish firms less prof­itable than non-​​Swedish ones, but that would be bad for every­one. What you get instead is a kind of Mir­ror Uni­verse ver­sion of the Cham­ber of Com­merce, a polit­i­cally pow­er­ful insti­tu­tion inter­ested in max­i­miz­ing the income growth of the median Swede rather than the median Swedish CEO.

Also:

[I]n the small pock­ets of the Amer­i­can econ­omy where unions still have a good deal of power, e.g. the Las Vegas gam­ing indus­try, there are all the things Andy talks about, i.e. jointly spon­sored train­ing pro­grams, a func­tion­ing, ratio­nal­ized rela­tion­ship between unions and man­age­ment. But that only hap­pened because the hotel work­ers made a huge com­mit­ment to fight for, and win, orga­niz­ing rights at 90% of the hotel rooms on the Las Vegas strip. The per­sua­sion of power comes first.

24 February 2011 – 7:55 pm | By Benjamin Daniels | Posted in Collectivism, Socialism, Communism, Economics | Tagged , , , , | Comments (797)