The Union Pendulum

I read an article today about how the United Auto Workers (UAW) union is making a push to get non-union auto manufacturing plants to become union shops. Here's the article, if you're interested in reading. For those of you not interested in reading the original piece, it basically says that UAW leaders are going to try to convince auto workers who work in American Volkswagen and Daimler plants to unionize.

I'm going to make a prediction that the push will fail, and that the UAW will fade into irrelevance. In fact, I think that unions in general are charging headlong into obsolescence. It's widely accepted that union bosses are corrupt, unions tend to be adversarial with management, and their strong demands erode profitability of union shop companies. Basically, unions have become their own worst enemy.

The funny thing is, unions came about, in part, because of huge disparity between rich and poor, which is happening again in our society. The divide between the rich and poor is growing, and the unions are powerless to stop it. This is partially because non-union shops are less adversarial, and non-union shops tend to hire employees who are invested in the overall well-being of the company.

Unions did, and do, serve a purpose. They help to ensure that greedy individuals and companies don't take advantage of labor. Because of globalization however, companies can simply ship jobs overseas, reducing their costs, and putting Americans out of work. I'm not railing against this reality, I'm just pointing it out.

But unions are stuck in the 1920's. What they need to do is look forward. They need to realize that times have changed, and instead of helping maximize the wages of the individual laborer, they should act as a liaison between management and workers. They should encourage union members to find ways to save the company money and increase profitability, and acknowledge that jobs can go overseas.

Furthermore, they should focus on McJobs... service-based positions that can't be shipped overseas, but require little skill, which allows an employer to pay substandard wages to employees.

But that's not what's going to happen in the near term. What will happen is that union bosses will continue to be greedy, and advocate an us vs. them mentality. Union shops will close as a result, bringing unions effectively to extinction. Then, corporations will smell an opportunity to once again take advantage of the little guy, working conditions and wages will deteriorate, while the rich get richer. Eventually, the pendulum will swing back toward unionization, but it will be in a different form than what we see now. Furthermore, I suspect that next time unionization will be on a more global level, which will undermine corporations' ability to simply ship jobs to a country with low wages.

But then again, on a long enough timeline, any prediction is bound to come true.