Blaming The Unions

From Workplace Prof Blog (an employment law blog): A recent Gallup poll has shown that for the first time in recent history, a majority of Americans expresses a negative view of unions.  The liberal Center for American Progress is expressing optimism that this is just a temporary function of the economic downturn that will reverse when economic times improve:

What happened? And what does this mean for the U.S. labor movement’s future given that membership is already at 30-year lows? The answer is largely that the public is angry about the weak economy and is blaming major economic institutions such as business, government, and organized labor. As a result, support for unions should improve when the economy gets back on track. Moreover, despite the drop in overall approval the public continues to value many of the functions unions perform—such as helping workers.

The key in the Center’s ideal world is “when the economy gets back on track.”  At best, it would be more correctly stated “if the economy gets back on track.”  But if the economy stagnates over a longer term, the political turn for the worse against unions may become entrenched.  This is because some unions — public sector unions like AFSCME and the NEA — are a prominent public face of the problem.  The longer the economic gutterball rumbles down the lane, the more unions will appear to be part of the problem.

Internationally in Greece and domestically in California, the public position of government employee unions has been to insist on business as usual — higher wages, more benefits, downright lucrative retirement benefits, and absolutely zero cutbacks — all on the backs of taxpayers who are struggling with crippling unemployment and debt.  They appear to be relatively well-off neighbors who, in a disaster, demand that you supplement their massive food stores out of your dwindling ones.  And when they are told that you may starve as a result, they insist that you’re selfish and mean and evil.

The tone-deafness of government employee unions is remarkably shameless.  For example, California is all but broke, yet its powerful unions refuse to even consider budget cuts, insisting instead that their highest-in-the-nation employment, salaries, and retirement be funded solely by massive tax increases on a collapsed California property market and on the income of California taxpayers who suffer from one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation.  What’s that about everyone else being selfish, mean, and evil?

Americans aren’t likely to applaud unions during such a time.  Back in the time when many unions served as the only available protection against physical workplace dangers and sweatshop wages, even most conservatives were prone to acknowledge that they played an important positive role in protecting workers, even in spite of rampant corruption among union leaders and their all-too-frequent coercion of their own workers in the political sphere.  But as more and more unions have become highly politicized groupings of government workers protecting massive bureaucratic turf funded by taxpayers instead of production, unions have become seen as corrupt and predatory.

And they deserve much of the blame they get for the consequences of fiscal insolvency and political paralysis.