English III: "Labor Unions in a Free Market" by Ernest van den Haag

Unions also give workers a feeling, so often lacking in our life, of participation, of solidarity with fellow employees and of community. This feeling is not generated by simply working with others. It is created when unions succeed in providing fringe benefits (e.g., health services, or pensions, or life insurance) tied to the job and common leisure activities (outings, vacations, etc.) for their members.

This failure has helped unions to give workers a proprietary stake in their jobs while fostering solidarity among members and antagonism to employers.

Yet there is ambivalence and occasional conflict about how the products of the common work of employees and management, of labor and capital, are to be shared, and about who is to make decisions.

All kinds of undesirable things happen, and there either is hyperinflation—rapid devaluation of the currency (rapid price level increases) and a return to barter—or the government deflates after all, i.e., it finally reduces the volume of monetary circulation.

Even if inflation occurs, union members usually do not understand the role of unions in causing it: greedy speculators and businessmen are blamed by union leaders.

If won by the union, strikes, in addition to losses of income and production, lead to a redistribution of income from non-union to union members; this increases the inequality of incomes while not increasing the income of workers as a whole.

In the U.S. unions and their relations with employers and with the community at large are to a great extent regulated by law.

They cannot easily moderate their demands on employers, for other more militant leaders may be elected in their stead.

And although pickets legally are not allowed to intimidate or to prevent workers or others who wish to work, or to enter the plant, from doing so, in practice pickets can prevent non-strikers from working.

Unions also are allowed to boycott products and producers and to harass customers and third parties not involved in a labor conflict so as to get indirectly at their employers.

One peculiar result is that unions have driven the price of labor so high in some industries (e.g., maritime and housing) that government subsidies become necessary if the industry is to continue.

Workers volunteer to work in the public service industries. In accepting employment they should be notified that strikes are prohibited by law. Indeed there are such prohibitions in many states.

All of the above should be mandatory: neither courts, nor employers, nor public authorities, should be allowed to reduce these penalties once the existence of an illegal strike and the participation of the union and of the individual strikers involved has been established.

There remain a host of questions about which employees may wish to bargain through a union. They can do so without strike threats. Grievance and obligatory arbitration procedures may be set up and even binding arbitration may be required.

Union members should vote on authorizing strikes only after governmental mediation and nonbinding arbitration have failed.