Economic and Moral Evil

The Free Market 9, no. 12 (December 1991)

Labor unions are flexing their muscles again. Last year, a strike against the New York Daily News succeeded in inflicting such losses upon the company that it was forced to sell cheap to British tycoon Robert Maxwell, who was willing to accept union terms. Earlier, the bus drivers’ union struck Greyhound and managed to win a long and bloody strike. How were the unions able to win these strikes, even though unions have been declining in numbers and popularity since the end of World War II? The answer is simple: in both cases, management hired replacement workers and tried to keep producing. In both cases, systematic violence was employed against the product and against the replacement workers.

In the Daily News strike, the Chicago Tribune Company, which owned the News, apparently did not realize that the New York drivers’ union had traditionally been in the hands of thugs and goons; what the union apparently did was commit continuing violence against the newsstands—injuring the newsdealers and destroying their stands, until none would carry the News. The police, as is typical almost Labor unions have always had that right. What the Wagner Act did was to force employers to bargain collectively “in good faith” with any union which the federal National Labor Relations Board decides has been chosen in an NLRB election by a majority of the “bargaining unit”-a unit which is defined arbitrarily by the NLRB.

Workers in the unit who voted for another union, or for no union at all, are forced by the law to be “represented” by that union. To establish this compulsory collective bargaining, employers are prevented from firing union organisers, are forced to supply unions with organising space, and are forbidden to “discriminate” against union organisers.

In other words, we have been suffering from compulsory collective bargaining since 1935. Unions will never meet on a “fair playing field” and we will never have a free economy until the Wagner and Norris-LaGuardia Acts are scrapped as a crucial part of the statism that began to grip this country in the New Deal and has never been removed.

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