Union Brings Down California

Let me give you a quick history lesson. Prior to the Industrial Age, labor was a simple prospect. Most people worked for themselves or in small shops. Enter industrialization, and people started to go to work in factories. The American South resisted this, drawing on their cheap slave labor and working at farming rather than manufacturing. The Civil War put an end to that approach, and soon labor was becoming the slave of the factory owners. To counter this problem, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) formed to defend the workers. Joining together as a group rather than complaining as individuals, an entire workforce could put a mine or a factory out of business by simply refusing to work. In the 1930s, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) formed to protect workers in the steel, auto, rubber, glass, maritime, and meat packing industries. The two organizations merged in 1955, forming the AFL-CIO.

Lagging behind this process, but coming up slowly, the United States formed the Department of Labor in 1913. This department was tasked with protecting workers. Their first approach was to protect labor unions. Eventually, however, the kind of power and money a labor union wielded was too much of a draw for less savory characters. The Teamsters Union was expelled from the AFL-CIO in 1957 after findings of corruption. Unions became connected with criminal acts and organized crime in the 70's and 80's. Unions were falling into disfavor in many sectors.

Fast forward to today. Laws are on the books that protect workers. There are minimum wage laws and worker safety rules and anti-discrimination edicts. There are rules about how long workers can work and how young workers can work. And there is the market place of employment which regulates companies. If you want a good worker, you'll need to treat them well. Of course, there is always the favorite American pastime -- litigation. You will have no problem finding an attorney who will represent you in whatever complaint you might have against a company. In other words, this is now, not then.

And still, we have unions. Why is that? Recently the Writer's Guild of America went on strike in Hollywood. According to sources, the strike cost the state $2.1 billion and over 37000 jobs, nearly single-handedly putting California into a recession. According to the Miliken Institute,

the 2008 statewide economic ramifications for all industries include:

* Wages and salaries are projected to decline by $2.3 billion
* Retail sales are expected to show a decline of $830 million
* Total personal income (which includes wages, salaries, self-employment, rents, dividend, interest and other income) is expected to drop by $3.0 billion

Why? There was only one reason. It wasn't poor treatment. It wasn't the long hours or the crummy wages. It was pure and simple greed. They were receiving, as an example, 0.3% of the first million dollars of reportable gross DVD sales and 0.36% after that, and they wanted more. So when a DVD on which they worked sold a million dollars worth, they received $30,000, and $36,000 for the next million. Their proposal? Double that. The most important thing to the writer's guild was the "new media". How much were they going to make on Internet downloads and TiVo'd movies? It was a matter of money. They wanted more.

Now, according to one source, in 2006 the average Hollywood writer could expect to make $55,000 a year, taking into account working and non-working writers. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median income that year was something around $48,000. So, in general, all writers were above the median income for the country. Tell me again ... why did they go on strike?

I know that there are many Americans who are still deeply enamored with labor unions. To me, they have ceased to be of any use and begun to be thugs, extorting money from companies without a real need to do so. American workers are well protected against labor abuse. Meanwhile, labor unions are putting companies out of business (see the story of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, for instance) and now putting the economy of an entire state at risk ... so they can enjoy higher income. How is this not simple extortion?