Just when it looked like employers were getting less fearful
about what President Obama might do next to worsen the business
climate, the National Labor Relations Board (now with its first
Democratic majority in a decade, thanks to Obama’s appointees)
announced on December 14 that private employers will be required to
display pro-unionizing posters in their businesses under a newly
proposed federal rule.
“The planned rule,”
reported the Associated Press, “would require businesses to
post notices in employee break rooms or other prominent locations
to explain workers’ rights to bargain collectively, distribute
union literature or engage in other union activities without
reprisal.”
The posters don’t explain that the largest reprisal
against collectivized labor and unionism comes from the public by
way of lower sales — and then fewer jobs — when prices of
products and services are hiked in order to pay for the escalating
costs of higher wages, benefits and pensions.
In the U.S. auto industry, for instance, unionized factory
workers have paid a steep price for the public’s reprisal against
over-compensated employees and subsequently over-priced cars.
During decades when both the U.S. population and the domestic car
market were significantly expanding, active membership in the
United Auto Workers (UAW) dropped from 1.5 million in the late
1970s to 390,000 in 2010.
General Motors, losing two-thirds of its U.S. market
share, falling from nearly 60 percent in 1970 to its current 20
percent, now employs 52,000 hourly workers in the United States,
down 89 percent from its 468,000 hourly employees in
1970.
Allowing the UAW “to ramp up costs ad infinitum” put GM at
“a major cost disadvantage,” states Martin
Hutchinson, contributing editor of Money Morning. “The
arrival and establishment of foreign-owned manufacturers in
America’s less-unionized states – combined with the inexorable
aging of GM’s former and current work force — shackled GM with an
impossible cost disadvantage against its competitors.”
Reports financial analyst James Quinn at seekingalpha.com, a
stock research and investment website: “The last major strike
by the UAW occurred in 1970. After that, management continually
gave in to the union demands in all future contract negotiations.
They promised tremendous pension benefits, lifetime healthcare
benefits, huge pay increases, and onerous work rules that gave
management no flexibility. GM evidently didn’t have the bean
counters who could extrapolate past a five-year horizon. If they
had, they would have seen that they would have an unsustainable
cost structure with more retirees being paid than workers on the
assembly line.”
As GM workers increasingly became unemployed, the jobless
were relocated from the assembly lines to a “jobs bank” at a cost
to GM of $130,000 a year in pay and benefits per worker — or more
precisely, per non-worker.
The exact wording of this new “rights” poster from the
federal government couldn’t be more biased: “Employees have the
right to act together to improve wages and working conditions, to
form, join, and assist a union, to bargain collectively with their
employers, and to choose not to do any of these
activities.”
They “act together” to improve things sounds so benign,
normal and sensible, like when two or three secretaries act in
concert to share their thoughts about what meats, cheeses and
condiments to order on a tray for an office luncheon meeting, and
discuss collectively if it’s best to order the pizza as just all
pepperoni or if it should be half pepperoni and half
plain.
There’s no mention by the government about how union
people, not infrequently, “act together” to cause unemployment and
inflation, to shrink work forces and destroy companies.
If anyone in the top ranks of the Obama administration had
ever started a small business, the sector that creates most of
America’s jobs, or even if someone at the top levels of this
administration had the goal of doing something more independent and
commercial than existing in a publicly subsidized bureaucracy, they
might understand that the last thing an entrepreneur or
small-business owner wants to see on the walls of his own business
is a poster that tells his workers that the boss is the problem, a
union is the answer, and that strikes, grievances, seniority and
slow-downs are the best paths to job security and upward
mobility.
What companies should do is display a set of their own
posters alongside the government’s one-sided propaganda for
unionism, for full disclosure. A large map of the United
States, for example, with big wide arrows crossing the country
would show the migration patterns reported in the 2010 Census, the
masses of people in America leaving heavily unionized and highly
taxed regions, either by the force of joblessness or simply
voting with their feet and heading off to less collectivized
locales. The headline on the poster: “Wanna move?”
Adding to the craziness, as if we don’t already have
enough red ink and over-pricing in government work, the
aforementioned pro-unionization posters are now required to be
displayed prominently in the offices of all government contractors
and subcontractors. “The directive was one of the first executive
orders Obama signed shortly after taking office,”
reported the Associated Press.
It doesn’t seem to matter to Obama that the federal debt
already has us $14 trillion in the hole — $140,000 per household.
The answer from the Harvard masterminds is to unionize the
contractors and subcontractors, to jack up the price of a mile of
road to even more inflated levels.
Where’s the “Change”? What’s new about crooked, smug
and oblivious politicians draining the lifeblood out of the
nation?
