Undermining Unity
How unions can imperil progress
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In the First Industrial Revolution, despite huge leaps in productive output, wages barely budged while work hours increased. It seemed that, absent some kind of intervention, the fruits of industrial progress, much as it had been in agricultural societies, would remain hoarded by an elite few. The tide, however, began to turn around 1850 with the “Second” Industrial Revolution, and in the early 20th century, a new vehicle of people power emerged: the labor union. As the welfare of the masses improved, labor unions took credit, but their role was and remains controversial. There is good reason to believe that labor unions were more a consequence of, not a contributor to, rising material wealth. Today, labor unions may cause more harm than benefit by aggravating the cost disease contagion spreading in the West and making entitlement provisions less affordable.
A lot could be said of unions. Ostensibly, they are established to balance an asymmetric power distribution between a business’s leadership and its employees. As such, many view unions as figurative heroes of the “working class.” Paradoxically, however, unions do not necessarily help the people most in “need” in a society. On the contrary, they often harm them by raising the price of labor and imposing higher prices on consumers who are usually no better off. Some take an even dimmer view that unions are wealth-destroying “cartels.” I refer to Scott Lincicome’s piece on the West Coast Port debate, where he discusses how the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) harmfully extracts benefits for its members: