There Ain't No Free Lunch: Union Blues

Why have unions declined?

The American Spectator has a simple answer:

What's that gag from one of Shakespeare's sonnets? The poet nods and says, "'Tis, true, 'tis true," about some wheeze or other, and then disagrees? I read John Carlisle's "Shrinking Union Labels" on our site last week and agreed with every bit of it. Yes, unions are out of touch with their workers' politics, and yes, they're corrupt, and yes, the union bosses don't really care what the workers want anymore, and all the rest.

But something far more dramatic than that caused private sector union membership to shrink from a third of the U.S. work force in the 1950s to about 12 percent today. The high-tech revolution caught unions flat-footed. They just plain got out-accelerated. I saw it happen. I worked through the whole thing.

Why did companies choose to invest in expensive equipment and training to reduce the amount of labor in their production processes? Because unions made the labor too expensive relative to the price of automation.

There ain't no free lunch, unless you're a union leader getting fat on dues pilfered from the rank-and-file.