The hidden impact of Unions on its members.

While listening to talk radio, I heard a caller complain to the host about his anti-union stance. The caller was a 767 pilot working for American Airlines. His complaint was that he felt the host was painting Unions with the same brush which he felt was inaccurate and proceeded to explain why. He spoke of the financial troubles American Airlines had in the past and of how the pilot union and service workers agreed to sacrifice their incomes, ie a pay cut, to allow American Airlines to survive and the plan worked. Yet when things improved, upper mismanagement proceeded to take bonuses with no consideration towards making the union workers whole given their previous sacrifice.

Given such a scenario, anyone would agree that such a move clearly demonstrates selfishness and greed, and should be condemned from a moral standpoint.

Yet this is where Unions create their own problem by just existing. Given any non-union company, such a move would drive workers to consider work elsewhere, causing the company to suffer and possibly fail due to the loss of productivity. Meanwhile, job transfers are executed based on skills and experience. If you are a VP at one company, you aren’t pushed down in seniority to the level of a mailboy just because you decided to make a move. The same, however, is not true of union workers where any such move to another company would place that person at the bottom of the pecking order, losing pension status, seniority, and wages. So for all intents and purposes, Union jobs become a lifelong commitment to a single company or organization, where both must learn to function well together or they both go down with the ship. It also creates an atmosphere where each side adopts the suicidal attitude that the other side could not possibly survive with their cooperation, giving each a false sense of power, yet it is this very power, that when executed, can easily destroy the company altogether, as is currently occurring with American Airlines.

But the issue goes even deeper. To run a company fit to survive in a Capitalist environment, wages and benefits must determined by what the market dictates, and the hiring and firing of employees must be determined by management based on need and performance, not by the Union. This allows the company act at peak efficiency if properly managed or the company will lose qualified workers and/or its competitive edge.

When Union shops are introduced, benefits, wages, hiring and firing are determined by the Union with little to no consideration towards efficiency or to what the market can bear.
As a result, such companies are usually plagued with employing a percentage of workers who are poor performers, and benefits and wages can easily impair the company's ability to compete in the market place due to the inability to control costs or quality, which is what occurred with General Motors.

Unions tend to see themselves as necessary in order to protect the livelihood of their workers, yet in actuality, those workers would be much better off if they could function in a world free of unions, where they could seek the best pay, the best bosses, the best co-workers, staying clear of companies that don’t boast such assets, forcing those companies to fall in line with the rest of the market or fail, allowing the preferred companies and their environments to survive and be sought after as role models for other companies.