Those Damnable Unions

As a general rule, I despise labor unions.

If you happen to be pro-union, by all means do not click away in disgust just yet, I may surprise you. Conversely, if you agree with my opening statement you too may wish to read on, rather than simply nodding in agreement and assuming that everything is jake.

The current wrangling over Boeing's 777x contract is, to my eyes, a particularly galling example of WHY I hate unions.  Boeing is a massive employer in Washington State, and where I live I scarcely go a day without meeting some new person who either works for Boeing, or has a family member who works for Boeing.  Its not just a massive employer, but a rewarding employer.  Just this week someone was telling me about a friend of theirs who got a job with Boeing some thirty or forty years ago, fresh out of the Navy and wound up becoming one of their primary electrical engineers before finally retiring, despite not having a degree when he started.

The Union is not helping the employees of Boeing, or the people of Washington by making ludicrous demands. Boeing can, and will, simply set up shop somewhere else. Pressure them hard enough, and they will move everything out of state.

Oh, maybe not this year, or the next. After all, the current political climate is pro-union to an unprecedented degree, even while the public has been souring on the concept for well over a decade. The entire debacle with the... was it South Carolina?... factory is proof of that.  No jobs were lost, or even threatened in Washington, but the new factory was in a Right to Work state where the Union had no power, can't have that!

So five thousand people wound up not getting jobs, because the government, at the behest of the Union, shut down the move. Boeing simply didn't expand. Who won?

Well... the Union won, after a fashion. A hollow victory, to be sure. They made a statement, earned a little street cred as bad motherfuckers, and that was it.  In the end all they did was delay Boeing's factory, not kill it.

So their current shenanigans are simply more of the same. Obstructionism for the sake of making a point, damn the workers, damn the business, damn the economy.

The hell of it is: in the current economic environment, the duties and purposes of a union are more necessary than they've been for a hundred years.  Not that any of our current unions are actually doing their jobs...

See: We have pushed technology to an interesting point, the point where a tiny handful of people can do the work of dozens, even hundreds.  Every few years a new job is rendered obsolete. Next on the chopping block might just be delivery men, if Amazon has its way.    Companies no longer need to employ thousands of workers, and even service work is disappearing as automation takes its place. Next up: wait staff at restaurants, replaced by the Ipad.  Movie ticket agents have already been cut in half by ticket ATMs, and I could easily see most of the rest going away as they build buildings with turnstile access and new vending machines to replace the concession stands.

Now: This is a very good thing, or rather it could be. Most people are unaware that we actually work longer and harder than our ancestors did to make our way. Our jobs are less physically demanding, perhaps, but we've created a world that seems to require a forty hour work week to just get by.  A stone age hunter spent maybe eight hours a week at his 'job', and a medieval farmer could never work, as a practical matter, longer than the sun was in the sky, where modern man can burn the midnight oil and never think twice.

There is a second aspect, a second boon to this sort of labor-free world: Anyone could, in theory, compete with established businesses. You no longer need to assembly massive infrastructures, factories or people. One guy with a vision can change the world!

Or he could.

See: while the progressive left likes to talk about the gap between rich and poor, they also like to reinforce it. They are, fundamentally, elitists who come from upper class families. They don't want to rub elbows with Joe the Plumber, they want to rule him.  There is a powerful disconnect between what they say, and what they do.

This is not, however, to say that they are entirely deliberate in placing obstacles. They have inherited a legal system that thinks putting 60 new laws on the books each and every year is far too few!

Too few?!?!?! Do me a favor, dear reader: Right now I'd like you to try and name sixty people... any sixty people you like... right now. Name sixty illegal acts, or sixty video games.  Chances are you're going to stumble and stop in the twenties. You might get to sixty, eventually. Great: You just covered...oh... 1979. Now lets try 1980 through 1999 before we move into the new millennium!

Not to belabor the point, but even one year of passing 60 new laws is too-the-fuck many laws. The primary purpose of most of these laws, or the result anyway, is protectionism for the established. They are obstacles and barriers in the path of making your own way in life. You can't start a business these days without a lawyer to guide you through the paperwork, and to protect you from litigations. And the lawyers like it that way.

So we come, at last, back to Unions.

See: You, the guy reading this, probably won't start competing with Amazon any time soon. Jeff Bezos has already paid his dues to ensure you can't afford it. Now he doesn't have to hire you to deliver his packages either, or work in his warehouses. Soon enough he won't need you to drive the trucks that bring product from the factories or boats.

I mean: He does have to hire SOME people. But since there are so very, very many of you, and so very few job openings he can pretty much make any ludicrous demands he wants of you... if you want that job. He can pay you peanuts, make you do absurd things like sing karaoke for his amusement and so forth. And he can fire you for simply not plastering a fake smile on your face every day and pretending to be grateful for the opportunity to be his personal bitch.

A little over a hundred years ago the Rockefellers (democrats and progressives from the beginning, if you like to pay attention) had all the coal mines.  And since they had all the coal mines, they decided they didn't need to pay the miners enough money to live on.

Logic fail, right there. See, in a large enough group of people you'll find some moron who is willing to work for less money than he actually needs, just so he gets SOME money... thus making sure no one can afford dinner.  The miners didn't like this, of course, so they went on strike. Now... those early, pre-union, strikers were actually wrong. Not for going on strike, but for occupying the lands and mines and preventing anyone else from getting hired, but thats a debate for another day. Anyway: Rockefeller hired the Pinkertons, who when in with guns. People died, and the government officially reckognized the rights of people to organize to negotiate against management.  How they managed to then align themselves, politically, with the very people who helped spur their creation is a story for another day.

Without a side trip down the rabbit hole of defining capitalism and the invisible hand... Unions served a useful and noble purpose when all the cards, politically and economically, fell with the moneyed elite, with big business.  It didn't take too long for them to become corrupt, self serving parasites prone to extortionistic behavior, but that is neither here nor there.

We've come full circle: with all the power once again falling into the hands of big business, with a decreasing need for people in jobs, a union is a vital counterweight against exploitive behavior on the side of management. A good union, rather. We DO need organized labor until the economy learns to adapt to this new world we've created.

The unions we got ain't it, but you play the cards you're dealt.