I have mixed feelings on unions. In general, I think a world with some way for employees to avoid being divided and conquered by a management that would clearly pay them slave wages if they can get away with it is a world less likely to spin off into extremes of wealth and poverty, class warfare, and the like. I think that’s a good thing, and unions have been helpful on these issues in the past. Getting rid of them entirely is likely to plunge us back into the Guilded Age, which might seem great, as long as you’re sure you’re on the winning side of that bet. But, almost by definition, most of us won’t be, and that’s a bad outcome to guarantee.
But that’s a long way from saying that unions always make the optimal decisions for economic growth and/or their workers, and in recent years, I agree that there are many cases where unions seem to have been holding things back more than they have been helping. Low unionization rates have also made unions less effective, but forcing people into unions against their will is also a draconian measure that really does smack of socialism.
Union leaders can get entrenched and lazy too, and unions can stifle adaptation. I’ve often felt that unions need to be looking out to make sure that their labor forces remain relevant and skilled and flexible, rather than just fight to secure their existing benefit packages in the face of a world that is changing technologically and in terms of labor arbitrage. Somehow forcing unions to break apart and then recreate themselves around more modern skill sets might make them more responsive to the current environment.
In the US, unions really got legitimized in the interwar years and gained strength after WWII. I think that unions were a good thing when the wind was at the back of the US’s economic expansion, but somehow we need a different strategy with global headwinds like these. The challenge is that unions seem to be tied to specific skill-sets, particularly those that were required in the early and mid-20th century. Many of these kinds of skill sets are especially vulnerable that can be outsourced and/or automated, but it’s hard to get a union like the teamsters to say, “Yes, we are going to evolve from driving trucks and now turn into PERL coders,” or something. Yet, something of this type is probably what needs to happen.
I am concerned that the world is turning into a place evermore where people either collect rich rents on capital provision or are left to sell their labor at a pittance. There was a time when real worker wage gains were tied to improvements in labor productivity, but this is really falling apart, leading to a situation where workers start to feel “well, we’re screwed either way, so at least we’re taking you guys with us.” At some point, capital providers may find a way to insulate themselves from that, and then the stage may be set for even nastier conflicts.
I don’t know enough about the details of the Hostess case, but part of me wonders if maybe this will stimulate some kind of last-minute agreement to accept a wage deal. Brinksmanship on both management and labor’s part.