Why Are Unions Exempt From Normal Rules?

UCLA campus security gathers outside a pro-Palestinian encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles campus in Los Angeles, Calif., on April 30, 2024. Mario Tama/Getty Images

Commentary

At the University of California, 48,000 graduate students are threatening to strike in apparent retaliation for the university’s arrests of student protesters against Israel. Their vote on the matter is expected in mid-May.

Nine thousand Canadian railway workers are threatening a strike as early as May 22, which would disrupt supply chains from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, including large parts of the United States. Affected industries would include passenger rail, coal, cars, consumer goods, fertilizer, minerals, petroleum, and grains.

On May 9, the biggest unions in Argentina staged a mass general strike that halted air, rail, subway, and bus transportation. They are against market reforms brought by the new government that could help fix Argentina’s decades-long economic problems, including skyrocketing inflation and sovereign debt defaults. The unions are essentially attempting to use their economic muscle to defeat the democratic will of the people, who rejected the previous government’s failed economic policies.

Starting on May 7, rail workers in much of the UK went on strike for higher pay despite the railways receiving $62 million in weekly taxpayer subsidies.

Medical doctors went on strike in Kenya in mid-March. They only agreed to return to work on May 8. Meanwhile, a cholera outbreak affected some parts of the country. Flooding has killed more than 250 people since March and displaced more than 290,000. How many of those dead would have lived but for the strike?

Everyone would like higher pay and better benefits. But normally, the price of labor, like much else in a well-functioning free market, is decided by supply and demand. When supply and demand are disjointed, low or high prices result. Low prices paid to doctors in Kenya, for example, signal to Kenyan undergraduates that the economy cannot support so many doctors. Students might choose business school rather than medical school as a result, improving the economy and, in the long term, resulting in higher wages paid to doctors. If wealth becomes too stratified over time, progressive taxes can correct the problem.

So it is irresponsible for workers in critical sectors such as rail and medicine to shut down entire industries in pursuit of higher wages, especially when other workers need the jobs and would work at lower pay, thus providing consumers with lower-priced goods. The unions don’t own the industries but act like they do. Through centuries of unions and left politicians becoming interdependent, they have constrained the natural growth and strength of market democracies just when we need that strength against everything from inflation and pandemics to the rise of dictators in places such as Russia and China.

Unions use their collectivist power against the freedom of entrepreneurs, workers, and customers who, by their free association, would otherwise add economic vitality to a country rather than put a drag on it by stopping the normal development of employees and businesses in competition. This competition is key to a well-functioning economy, yet like monopolists, the unions are anti-competition and thus keep prices and inflation high. They don’t allow workers to compete with each other to provide the best work at the best price, as other kinds of sellers must do. If any other seller were to price fix in the manner that unions do, they would be prosecuted.

Why is labor the only productive input allowed to price fix? Unions are better thought of as politically connected labor cartels that erode the free market and, with it, the economic efficiency of the entire economy. When industries and regions become weighed down by unions, entrepreneurs look elsewhere to invest, ultimately decreasing the number of good jobs available and constricting much-needed government revenues for social services and defense. The vulnerability of manufacturing to unions in the United States is one big reason that U.S. corporations moved production to China and Mexico, resulting in U.S. deindustrialization.

Labor unions were first legalized in the UK through a campaign in the 1860s and 1870s, just a few years after Karl Marx published “The Communist Manifesto” in 1848, and revolutions swept through France and other European countries. Unions at the time, as today, tended to be socialist in political orientation and took part in revolutionary and gang violence. Some unions in the UK, such as in Sheffield in the 1860s, expanded their membership through intimidation, violence, murder, bombings, assaults, and property destruction.

Union violence is still committed, including in the United States. From 1975 to 1996, 9,785 criminal acts were allegedly committed by unions, including 203 Americans killed and 6,634 personal injuries. In 2008, for example, union leaders in New York were charged with “stabbing a knife into the neck of a construction company president, throwing hot coffee at non-union workers, pouring sand into gas tanks and transmissions of 17 construction vehicles, and threatening sexual assault against the wife of a company representative,” according to ABC News. Many of these crimes are not prosecuted because of union political influence at local, state, and national levels.

The federal government has failed to take the necessary measures to protect businesses and non-union workers from union violence. The Supreme Court in 1973 found that union use of violence in pursuit of “legitimate” aims, such as higher wages, does not violate federal law. It still violates state law, but our government in Washington should do better, including introducing bills to close the loophole. The Freedom from Union Violence Act is one such bill. It and others have languished in Congress for half a century since the Supreme Court made its fateful decision.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.