Unionsand Other Gangs

Miss Wilke is an advertising writer.

There are thousands of gangs across the country today. You may belong to one or more of them yourself. And maybe without knowing it.

There are parent and teacher gangs. And consumer gangs. And racial gangs. Women’s gangs. Voters’ gangs. Religious gangs. Gangs of professional men. Gangs of farmers. Gangs of businessmen. The law even recognizes "one-man gangs"… individuals claiming to represent thousands of others through the device of class action suits.

Their goals are often laudable. There’s certainly nothing wrong with a higher standard of living with which so many of them are concerned. But it’s how that higher standard is attained that separates responsible citizens from gangsterism.

A gang is a bullying group of individuals that draws its strength from numbers for the purpose of pushing other people around. It operates at the expense of others. Any such group deserves to be called a gang. And when it receives legal acceptance and approval, it deserves the title of dictatorship.

The first gang that succeeds becomes the excuse and impetus for the formation of all the others. The first privilege granted to groups by law becomes the justification for all the rest, creating a gangocracy or mob society.

Among the most notorious and successful gangs today are the labor unions. Hardly a day passes that we don’t pick up a newspaper and read that "they’ve struck again."

Back in the old days, when Jesse James got his gang together, held up a train and took the payroll, it was generally considered a robbery. In fact, there was very little doubt about it. Sometimes they might have joined up with other gangs like the Daltons for greater force and surer success. And it was all very beneficial to their standard of living. But then, right during a holdup… (TRUMPETS!)… the Cavalry arrived! And they didn’t say, "We’re here to protect the right of the engineer to get into his cab and for the conductor to go down the aisle." They said "Y’all stop that!" They recovered the loot and put the bounders in jail. Never once did they toss the money bags to Jesse and wish him well. That would have been incredible.

It is just as astonishing to me that today’s union activity is protected by law and defended as a "right."

Unions are usually defended on the basis of freedom of association… the right to join together for bargaining.

Actually, unions are in violation of others’ rights to freely associate. And compulsory arbitration is no bargain.

If unions were simply groups of workers getting together for a better bargaining position with their employer on the terms of their employment, they would be within their legal if not their moral rights. They would also probably be fired. And maybe blacklisted among employers. At least, no employer in his right mind would hire someone he thought would cause trouble with his other employees and try to force demands beyond the original hiring agreement.

Unions couldn’t exist for very long without the protection of biased laws.

The Law Requires

It is the law that forces employers to bargain, to accept decisions by labor boards, to pay back-wages for time spent in idleness or striking, to make raises retroactive, to prohibit firing and regulate hiring while allowing all kinds of welfare financing of strike activities paid out of the taxpayers’ pocket and the employers’ production costs. Everyone is the ultimate victim of union extortion.

It all happens under the protection of the law. It couldn’t happen any other way. Extortionate power is monopoly power. It can only exist under government protection or establishment. The government has granted labor groups monopoly power over industry. But union activity is defended as peaceful.

So was Al Capone when he offered "protection" to some little business. But if the businessman refused, you know what happened. That’s about what happened in Kohler, Wisconsin over a period of some ten bloody years. The Kohler strike, complete with bombings, burnings and brutality, clearly demonstrated the violent gangsterism of union extortion. The law no longer tolerates such courageous refusals to capitulate to unreasonable demands. Bargaining is compulsory. Unions just can’t stand such bad publicity. It shows the essential nature of their activity.

It is argued that unions are a bulwark against communism and we’re reminded that unions are not allowed in Russia.

Russia is nothing but unions —with all the bosses in Moscow. Independent unions aren’t allowed in Russia because they represent political power and one dictator just doesn’t like another dictator in the same country any more than one mobster likes another moving in on his territory. Of course, that’s also why U.S. union bosses don’t want communism here. To an ever increasing extent, they are the ones telling the government what to do. They don’t want it the other way around.

Dubious Arguments

It is argued that union members are among the staunchest defenders of our American way of life. We all have blind spots, but anyone who thinks he has the right to join with others to use the law as a bludgeon to tell other people how to run their business has no understanding of the American concept of freedom.

There are many people who have joined unions not because they wanted to, but because they had to in order to get a job. That’s slavery. It’s certainly not freedom of association.

There are many more who will argue that unions are essential in a capitalist society to get the workingman a decent wage. To support their claims, they invariably refer to conditions during the earliest days of industrialization.

Actually, union leaders have simply taken credit for the natural and inevitable increase in wages coming from increased productivity.¹ Union demands beyond the market’s real wage level stifle the production upon which future raises depend, increase unemployment and price marginal workers out of the market altogether.

Unions further add to unemployment lines and social disruption by limiting and controlling memberships, with priority for entry going to favored friends, relatives and racial groups.

The law encourages union activity in the private sector but considers it illegal in the public sector.

Irony abounds. Along with a lot of garbage.

Such areas of industry as garbage collection and sanitation were preserved as government’s public responsibility for the reason that interruption of such services would be too dangerous or disruptive. So government monopoly of public services was tied to laws making strikes illegal. The laws are simply being disregarded and it is the monopoly position established by government that gives the public workers their striking power.

In San Francisco where illegal strikes have occurred, street cleaners are now making $19,000 a year.

We need to relegate all services other than peace-keeping, law enforcement and judicial activities to the competitive market and then enforce laws against strikes in those areas of public safety and order reserved as government responsibility.

Strikes and union activity in the private sector serve to justify and incite demands in the public sector and are in themselves disruptive and dangerous.

In the gas crisis some months back, the impact of the truckers’ strike was felt in a very short period of time, causing critical food shortages in some rural communities and giving some truckers a very heady feeling about their power.

Any nationwide strike in our interdependent society is bound to have quite an impact on every business and everybody.

While compulsory public sector bargaining gives union leaders undue and unconstitutional power over elected government leaders and thus all members of society, union activity in the private sector is equally dictatorial and deleterious.

Industry-wide union standards and dictates act to stifle and cripple the competition between private enterprises upon which efficiency, progress and continuous service depend.

Leave It to Competition

The only way outside of slavery to make sure services won’t be interrupted is open competition. That means competition in labor as well as the rest of industry. It means employment by private arrangement.

Unions need never be outlawed. All that is needed is to abolish their privileged status under the law.

Individual bargaining would end the artificial war between employers and employees created by labor bosses for their own benefit. And it is only fair and honest dealing. It means substituting individual efforts in competition on the basis of ability for the shakedown demands of group force. It is everyone getting the best bargain he can without holding up someone else. It is nothing more than honoring one’s agreements instead of going back on them.

What an opportunity was missed just recently when the post office employees threatened a nationwide strike. All offices could have been closed down immediately and permanently. Virtually overnight, new systems would have started, with competition working to bring down prices and improving services beyond anything imagined at present. We could have been rid of one of our biggest and most expensive political fiascos. Instead, the criminal action of an illegal strike was rewarded by acceptance of extortionate demands.

The only proper response to job dissatisfaction is: "I quit." Try to take that right away from anyone! And correspondingly, the response to strikes and union demands is the response only competition can give: "Okay, we’ll get someone else."

It is the response of freedom to tyranny. But it is a response that is forbidden by law in a country we still like to call free.