Eric Baldwin is an electrical engineering senior and Mustang Daily libertarian columnist.
Whatever unions may be or do, they are a fine topic for bitter arguments. If you want to divide a family, a region or an entire nation, bring up labor unions.
Unions are based on beliefs about the workings of the world that cut broad and deep. To be neutral on the topic of unions, is to be neutral on many of the greatest questions of our age: What are human rights? What is ownership? What is the proper relationship between human beings?
Historically, unions organized workers to act as a unit to pursue two primary objectives: to collectively negotiate with employers and to pursue orchestrated political activism internally as well as externally — usually of a socialist bent.
The central divisive idea behind the trade union is the idea of worker exploitation.
So how are workers exploited? History has its share of abuses, ranging from cheating the illiterate to gross safety violations to the use of debt to guarantee a captivated workforce. But now that laws have been enacted (in many cases due to unions) to address most such problems, and any holes or omissions can be easily rectified.
Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has striven tirelessly to ensure that not even the simplest task can be done without onerous and debilitating restrictions. The use of strikes and other such tools of organized labor are no longer needed to protect most workers from such exploitation.
Unions identify something else as exploitation as well — a larger and far more basic idea than disregard or deception. The idea that the free market wage is itself exploitative, the belief that an informed and consensual contract between employer and employee still contains an element of deprivation. In this belief the company holds some kind of leverage — perhaps due to its size — that allows it to impose an unjust agreement upon a desperate worker.
This belief has dire consequences for the free market.
First, it assumes that employers have a monopolistic control over the availability of job openings.
But employers are not a distant, distinct and unified entity. They are normal people like everyone else, competing against and doing business with each other, trying to make a living.
Second, it assumes that the purpose of a job is to provide the employee with livelihood. On the contrary, voluntary employment creates a mutual increase in wealth between the employer and the employee by means of mutual exchange. To force the person-who-is-the-employer to submit to a decrease in wealth on the employee’s behalf is just as much theft as the other way around. It is the responsibility of the individual to make a living, not of the employer to provide it.
Third, it assumes that the worker is a weak, ignorant and helpless entity. While this is true in some measure for all of us, the advent of mass transit and instant communication provide everyone access to more opportunities (perhaps even to found your very own evil soulless corporate empire) than have ever before existed in human history.
Unions counter this perceived exploitation by means of coercion. Some coercion is direct, such as suspending or shutting down companies by withholding labor. And some is indirect, such as creating and supporting legislation that forces companies to change their behavior. But both uses are based on a very disturbing assumption about the nature of human society — that coercion is a healthy element of a properly-functioning world.
This may come as a surprising take on the situation, but look at the problem closely; unions do not exist to promote a more consensual world, they exist to exert force. Furthermore, they exist under the assumption that business is and will always be an evil coercive entity which must be countered by the eternal and eternally good coercion of unified labor. The idea of a more cooperative world where all parties voluntarily associate for mutual benefit is not simply alien; it is not worth pursuing.
To accept the view that coercion is normal is to raise some very serious questions about the nature of humanity.
First, it is based on the assumption that the world is necessarily dichotomized into two static and distinct groups — the powerful few and the disenfranchised many. These groups are necessarily antagonistic and possess a single vehicle of interaction — exploitation. For example, if the poor do not rob the rich, the rich will rob the poor. The only alternative to bad coercion is good coercion.
While this view has some observational support (see: all history ever), it is unwise to assume that something is means that it must be. If two parties are locked in war, one side or the other must eventually conquer — but not-war is a third possibility.
Social and wealth classes are more fluid than ever before in history. More education is available for a lower cost than ever before in history. Methods of resolving conflict are more accessible and more transparent than ever before. Science and philosophy present the underlying unity of humanity with greater clarity than ever before. If the American experiment has quested for any single truth, it is that a world can exist where all persons are equal beings that can all live under the same principles. Yet, the union is based on the belief that the rich and the poor are fundamentally divergent entities who must be subjected to separate moral codes and between whom there can be no reconciliation, only strife.
Second, it assumes that individual workers themselves are subject to the control and the censure of the group. If unions resent and oppose employers, they equally oppose non-union employees — especially ones that work when the union is striking.
In many places unions are able to force companies to hire only unionized labor, rendering free workers ineligible for employment (the situation is muddled by the fact that non-unionized employees often benefit from the collective bargaining of unions, but you can’t fix a vase by smashing it twice). Internally, members are often pressured to support the many official political positions of the union and ostracized for refusing.
Third, it both feeds upon and nourishes the perception that the individual worker is necessarily a weak and defenseless being. When unions speak of empowerment it almost always refers to workers in the aggregate. The fundamental idea of a union is that individual workers can best find safety under the protection of a large and militant organization. But are we willing to accept the idea that the individual is properly a dependent creature and that true progress lies not in increased freedom but in a more comfortable dependency.
Unions have practical as well as philosophical consequences.
By dictating the terms of employment, unions create a disconnect between compensation and accountability. Employers are forced to pay employees for “working” the union’s rules, not necessarily for doing a good job.
By unionizing large segments of industries, unions force workers to participate in political agendas that they may not agree with; unions were developed for political as well as labor objectives, and their political activity often far exceeds the issues of employment — it is very difficult to discover any political issue whatsoever on which the California Teachers’ Association does not have a position.
By demonizing employers in principle, unions perpetuate a negative view of the engines of wealth. By perpetuating a perception of victimhood and vulnerability, unions teach people to view themselves as powerless and ineffectual individuals, destined to be integrated into one of two giant machines.