Brown: U.S. suffers union-itis

As much as President Barack Obama idealizes the American worker and touts the strength of unions… As much as President Barack Obama idealizes the American worker and touts the strength of unions and the possibility of living wages for everyone, it’s time to face the facts and realize that if that’s the American dream, it’s no longer going to make it out of the REM cycle.

In enduring the recession, the American people have finished with letting others skim off the top or get handouts for work worth less than the sum of its parts.

Last week, auto workers at Chrysler’s Jefferson North Assembly Plant in Detroit tipped off supervisors that their peers were drinking and getting stoned during their lunch breaks. Following a WJBK Detroit undercover investigation, 15 employees were suspended indefinitely without pay, according to Detroit’s Fox 2 News. Thirteen of those suspended were canned this week as a result, and two were sent on a month-long unpaid vacation.

However, when touring the plant where they worked in July, President Obama said he would “bet on the American worker any day of the week.”

I’m glad he would. But I wouldn’t. Although this was an isolated incident that involved just a few of the 2,500 workers, according to a Chrysler blog, it presented an ugly angle of freshly bailed-out blue-collar workers taking advantage of taxpayer dollars and exploiting just how little attentiveness or skill is needed to adequately perform jobs paying as much as $77 per hour, according to The New York Times.

During the financial meltdown, Chrysler received $10.8 billion in federal aid, as well as backing from Italian automaker Fiat, according to Hoovers.com. That aid allowed 50,000 Chrysler employees to keep working.

Through aggressive negotiations, the United Auto Workers, a body representing 390,000 American manufacturing workers, made sure its members received high pay and pensions for tasks as simple as installing door panels. New hires started at $28 an hour before benefits until 2007.

ChangingGears.info reports that after that year, contracts for new hires were renegotiated to pre-benefit earnings of $14 per hour, creating a two-tier system of employees all doing the same work with some receiving half as much pay. And that still might be too much money for too little work.

According to Vice President Joe Biden, the recession caused subsequent shedding of 431,000 automotive jobs in 2008 and we figured out that many businesses could get along with leaner, more efficient and cheaper production.

Simple lessons from good ol’ business school suggest that the primary way to create profit is to create value, i.e., to make a desirable product that costs more when it is completed than what it cost to make. You can’t do that when a leech attaches itself to your business and commands whatever price it wants for unskilled labor.

While unions have existed in the U.S. since the 1700s, their prominence in the manufacturing industry didn’t emerge until the Great Depression. The Wagner Act of 1935 solidified unions by giving collective bargaining rights to union members through the establishment of the National Labor Relations Board.

Additional laws went into effect over the next few decades that reinforced workers’ rights, and with each new bill and each relatively prosperous era, unions gained strength.

Over time, Congress passed a combination of labor-rights laws that applied to every legal worker in the U.S. With further globalization, the American union worker began losing prestige. Unions became an unnecessary anachronism from a time that once was and never will be again.

This recent trend doesn’t just apply to the manufacturing industry. Unions in many other sectors have had the same effect on our economy.

Earlier this month, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie hosted a town-hall meeting at which a schoolteacher attacked his policy that cut pay raises, forced staff cuts and displaced compensation the teacher believed she deserved. Christie responded that he had originally asked only for a 1.5 percent contribution to medical benefits and a one-year pay freeze, but the teachers’ union had opposed any sort of concession.

“The teacher’s union made a decision,” he said. “They’d rather stand by their current contracts and make no compromise despite our awful economic circumstances, and they allowed members to be laid off.

There would not have been anywhere near the amount of layoffs if a pay freeze was taken.”

Having to justify cuts to balance an $11 billion budget deficit at a town-hall meeting while facing a similarly hostile crowd last May, Christie said, “Unlike the United States of America, the State of New Jersey can’t print money,” according to Business Insider.

Our economy is based around supply and demand. Jobs that demand more money than what they’re worth have already begun declining, and they’re going to decline further.

When members of the manufacturing industry — where many nonunion workers make living wages in right-to-work states — education or any other industry promulgates union ideals, it has become necessary to review whether a union in the workplace is doing more harm than good.

Unions aren’t evil. They’ve bolstered the American worker to greater heights than he would have otherwise been lifted to during eras of corruption.

But in many subsectors of our economy, the truth is that they’re no longer necessary. And in many cases, they’ve actually become the same sort of forceful, unyielding monoliths they were originally designed to thwart.

Believe in a free-market economy? E-mail Jacob at jeb110@pitt.edu or visit his blog at thingsthatrhymewithcars.wordpress.com.