Big Labor Facing a Long, Dark Night

This Labor Day, prospects are looking very grim for labor unions.

They have squandered their capital and their integrity for the last thirty years. They really believed that international competition and the waning regard of the Democratic Party would keep them safe.

Yet that did not happen.

They are facing economic innovations on a radical scale, and there is very little that they can do about it.

Their push for open borders, forced wage hikes, higher regulatory burdens have undermined the very goals which they claim to fight for.

This editorial outlined how the Long Dark Night for Big Labor will only get darker, and they will have no one to thank but themselves.

Organized labor faces multi-front battle

Keith Laing, Detroit News Washington Bureau Published 12:03 a.m. ET Sept. 4, 2017

Washington — Organized labor is facing threats on multiple fronts: a majority of states now have so-called “right-to-work” laws, workers in foreign-owned auto plants continue to reject organizing efforts and robots are replacing humans.

Organized Labor is running into something called the law of supply and demand.

No matter how hard they agitate for higher wages and more benefits just for doing the same thing, and not gaining skills or providing better service, they will continue to face the grim realities of limited money and resources.

Trade, the expenses of creating jobs, the costs of abiding by regulations and ensuring proper efficiency in one's company, have placed demanding tolls on small business owners, many of whom have either closed their doors or have opted not to open up a business in the first place.

The head of the AFL-CIO vows to fight back by charging up union members in the industrial Midwest to vote for the interests of working people in the next election. And the United Auto Workers declares it will not concede defeat as it attempts to add members in untapped areas of the country.

Good luck with that.

In all, it has been a tough year for labor unions. The United Auto Workers again failed to organize workers in the South, with workers at a Nissan plant in Mississippi voting against unionizing by a nearly 2-to-1 margin in early August. The UAW’s efforts were not helped by indictments of union officials for allegedly conspiring to raid millions of dollars from training funds for blue-collar workers.

Working people in the South want to take home as much of their pay as they can. There is no reason to justify giving up a portion of their pay to an unaccountable labor union leader and supervisor who does little to nothing for the laborers, all while profiting on what they are doing.

States continue to pass right-to-work laws that weaken labor’s influence by not requiring workers to join unions or pay union dues at their workplaces. Kentucky became the 27th right-to-work state in January. Missouri became the 28th in February.

In spite of Big Labor's attempt to overturn Missouri's right-to-work statute, they will fail.

Men and women of all working backgrounds have discovered that forced unionism makes labor unions unaccountable to the members. They leadership in these government-backed syndicates are taking money from working people to benefit themselves.

There is no choice, there is no accountability, and therefore there is little reason to join a union in the first place.

Additionally, an administration seen as unfriendly to organized labor occupies the White House following a presidential campaign in which Donald Trump won several states — including Michigan — where it was believed union mobilization would carry Hillary Clinton to a win.

Exactly. If Big Labor still had relevance in many of the Rust Belt states, Crooked Hillary would be in the White HOuse today. Labor members should rejoice that Trump won, though, since he has done more to bring jobs back than the Big Labor union bosses ever did.

Let's face the facts, people: unions do not care about their members--they care about unions. Nothing more. They just care about power, not about the best interests of the voters, of the members who work every day to provide for their families.

In 2016, 10.7 percent of combined private and public sector workers belonged to unions, with 14.6 million union members in all, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That represented a loss of 240,000 workers from the previous year when 11.1 percent of workers were in unions. In 1983, the first year for which comparable data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent, and there were 17.7 million union members.

Workers don't want to join unions, as long as those same unions do not work for their workers.

But AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says reports of labor’s demise have been exaggerated. He points to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in January that showed more than 60 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of unions. And he warns against reading too much into last fall’s election.

Do they have continue to have a favorable opinion of union when the questions list the rampant attacks on individual employees, small businesses, the destruction of private property and the decimation of the free market for all at the benefit of the few?

Have labor unions come clean about their history of bigotry and racism? Labor unions began in South Africa as a means of cutting out black workers from the work place!

“Some working people, fed up with working harder for less, sick and tired of a political system that doesn’t address their basic concerns, were willing to take a chance on Donald Trump,” he said at an event last week in Washington. “But instead of a bold new direction, all workers have gotten is broken promises, outright attacks, and dangerous and divisive rhetoric.”

Richard Trumka is a national disgrace. Period. He is an overfed Union Heifer who looks as though he has never worked a day in his life.

He said union leaders are intent on reversing the trend that caused rank-and-file members to switch allegiances. He said the labor group is planning to focus its members on the 2018 elections “in the most robust member-to-member program in the history of the AFL-CIO.”

Good luck with that one, Richie. Red states from 2016 will continue to go red, and there's nothing they can do to stop the hemorrhaging. In fact, Crooked Hillary was so despicable to rank-and-file Democrats, many of the did  not vote--or they voted for the populist Donald Trump!

He said the union will hammer home the importance of voting, particularly for workers in the traditionally “blue wall” Democratic states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — a wall that failed to hold for Hillary Clinton in the last election.

Those states are no longer a blue wall! And Trump is working on another Red Wall along our Southern Border to stop the theft of American jobs and public safety.

“In most of those states that were lost,” he said, “it was probably 10- or 15,000 votes, and that’s 10- or 15,000 votes that could have changed the course of history.”

HA!

Trumka, who resigned from the president’s American Manufacturing Council before the entire council was dissolved, added: “My message is this: The change that voters tried out for in the 2016 campaign can be found by standing together in unions. Simply put, union workers empowered by the freedom to negotiate with their employers do better on every single economic benchmark.”

Another council dissolved, and Trump's agenda continues apace.

Right to work

Arthur Wheaton, a labor specialist at Cornell University’s Industrial and Labor Relations School, said Trump’s presidency could end up galvanizing union members to stick together.

“Unions are seeing the promise or hope of Trump is not there so that may change some of their political activities going forward,” he said. “They’re finding out the things politicians say is not equal to the things that politicians do.”

Wheaton said unions have to be concerned about the possibility of more states adopting right-to-work laws that prohibit agreements between employees and labor unions that mandate all workers pay union dues. He said the Trump administration could push for a similar prohibition at the federal level. Michigan passed such a measure in late 2012 that went into effect in March 2013.

“The biggest battle for unions is probably going to be to make sure that right to work doesn’t continue to expand like wildfire, and to make sure that we don’t have a national right-to-work law,” he said.

Too late!

Kristin Dziczek, director of the Industry, Labor and Economics Group at the Center for Automotive Research, said the new president has scrambled the political calculus involving union members.

“You can see a lot of union households vote Republican, and that’s reflected in the way leadership talks,” she said, noting it was highly unusual for Trumka and other union leaders to join advisory panels that were formed by a Republican president.

Trumka doesn't have a choice. The Democratic Party is in such elitist, delusional disarray. No one is listening to them anymore.

Dziczek said the outcome of the Trump administration’s efforts to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement would go a long way to determining the effectiveness of Trump’s outreach to unions.

How about that? Good trade deals will make laborers want more of Trump. Where were the labor leaders on these and other issues? They were in favor of the globalist economy, which would put at risk the independence and livelihood of American capital.

“We have very different politics in the U.S. that are shifting dramatically,” she said. “You have a Republican president who has to get a Republican Congress to approve his trade agreement when Democrats are going to be his strongest allies if he toughens trade.”

Job change

The UAW declined to comment on its plans after the union’s devastating defeat in organizing Nissan workers. The union has framed the loss at the Canton, Mississippi, plant as a temporary setback.

Of course they don't want to comment. They got beat down--again.

Gary Casteel, secretary-treasurer of the UAW and director of the international union’s transnational department, said in a Detroit News op-ed that the union would keep pushing to organize workers at plants owned by Nissan and other foreign-based manufacturers in Southern states.

They can keep pushing, but one has to wonder how much more money they will have left to keep pushing forced unionism on workers, especially new employees entering the work force, who do not want to see their hard-earned money siphoned away to retirees and political causes which they oppose.

What unions have little control over is the increasing use of robots and other mechanized processes to do the work of several people.

Why are there robots, though? Because of the forced minimum wage hikes, which have forced businesses to cut labor costs, sometimes cutting out all employees altogether.

There would be no rapid push to mechanize if labor costs were not skyrocketing in the first place. 

Dziczek said automotive factories have been automated for years. “We’ve had robotics in manufacturing for a long time,” she said. “It’s one of the most highly automated industries there is.”

And guess what? Manufacturing jobs are still plentiful and growing. We need to stop looking at the loss of some jobs as more jobs continue opening up. President Trump made manufacturing great again, and brought more Americans out of the unemployment shadows and back into the work force.

Wheaton said automation will likely change the nature of unionized jobs, but not eliminate them entirely.

They will certainly get rid of unions. The Big Labor bullying cannot keep up with the free market and necessary innovations which follow.

“It’s not necessarily a replacement, but it will cause changes to job categories,” he said. “Machines can’t feed themselves. Somebody has to stock them.”

klaing@detroitnews.com

(202) 662-8735

Twitter: @Keith_Laing