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Hernando Today

Unions Cause Jobless Rate, Some Claim

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By ADON TAFT, Life to the Fullest

Hernando Today

Published: August 30, 2008

This Labor Day is the gloomiest in years for would-be workers without jobs or workers whose regular jobs have been reduced to part time. The economy is in dire straits, unemployment at the highest rate in years and union membership near a 30-year low.
On this holiday that was initiated by a union, the Noble Order of the Knights of Labor, in 1892 to recognize the contribution of working men and women, it is a sad note that someone of the stature of Matthew Bishop, the American business editor of The Economist, puts much of the blame on unions for the deteriorated situation of today.
"Unions probably make unemployment higher than it would be without them, as collective bargaining often pushes wages above the level that would bring labor supply and demand into equilibrium," he wrote in his book, "Essential Economics."
"These higher wages increase supply and reduce demand, with the result that there are more jobless people."
That's a view shared by many economists, such as Dr. N. Gregory Mankiw, Harvard economics professor and former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors to President George W. Bush, as expressed in his book, "Macroeconomics" and by Dr. Mark D. Partridge, professor of agricultural economics at the University of Saskatchewan, writing in the Journal of Regional Science.
In case you think that's just a right-wing, capitalistic view, note what the March 14 on-line issue of the Workers Vanguard (publication of the International Communist League) has to say:
"Responsibility for the de-unionization of the American working class lies with the defeatist and treacherous policies of the labor bureaucracy … the labor lieutenants of the capitalist class."
Or Gregg Easterbrook, senior editor of The New Republic and a fellow at the liberal Brookings Institute, writing in The Atlantic, "…in recent years union workers, faced with the choice of accepting cuts in their wages or losing their jobs altogether, have voted emphatically for the latter."
Or Gerard Jackson, an Australian socialist writing for BrookesNews.Com, "First and foremost, when unions raise wage rates in excess of the value of their members' marginal productivity, unemployment emerges."
Whatever the cause, 5.7 percent of the nation's labor force of 154.6 million men and women currently are out of work. In addition to the 8.8 million workers who are unemployed, 5.7 million now have had their jobs reduced to part-time employment, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The numbers are even worse in Florida. The unemployment rate here is 6.1 percent, up 2 percent from a year ago because of the loss of an additional 96,800 jobs, as reported by the state Agency for Workforce Innovation.
Nationwide, 12.1 percent of those in the work force in 2007 were members of a union. In the private sector, only 7.5 percent of the workers were unionized. The union membership rate was 41.8 percent among government workers.
In Florida, just 5.9 percent of workers were a part of organized labor. And like those everywhere, most union members worked for federal, state or local governments. Teachers, policemen and firemen led the way with 35 to 37 percent of their ranks belonging to unions.
The ranks of union membership now are dominated by workers 55 to 64 years of age, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. One reason, in the view of Easterbrook, is that "Seniority rights are perhaps the most passionately guarded of all union benefits…" The result, he said, has been that "when layoffs occur, the young go and the old stay."
But even the oldest of today's members never saw the hay day of unions in 1954 when 34.7 percent of all workers in the United States were members of labor organizations. And they certainly never saw unions as they were when Terence Powderly, a devout Catholic mentored by a Baptist lay preacher, Uriah Stephens, led the Knights of Labor to become the first national labor union in this country.
According to Powderly, writing in 1893 on the history of the Labor Day observance, which had begun only the year before and did not become a national holiday until 1894 when President Grover Cleveland declared it to be, unions had their roots in Christianity. He quoted Jesus saying, "The laborer is worthy of his hire" and noted that "all through His stay upon earth (Christ) enunciated new doctrines on the question of labor and its relations to those who lived upon it."
Later, historian Herbert G. Gutman noted that the preamble to the Declaration of Principles of the Knights made reference to the Divine and their rules prevented Sunday meetings and banned cursing and smoking during union sessions. Many union organizers were seminarians and sons of clergymen.
The question now may be: Would Labor Day reclaim its significance and unions their numbers and relevance if the organizations returned to their roots, as Powderly proclaimed them, because "the artisan, the iron-worker, the worker in wood and stone, the laborer of the village, city and field and the poor toiling slave were all included among those for whom Christ died."

Adon Taft, who lives in Brooksville, retired after 43 years as a reporter for The Miami Herald.

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