My dislike of unions begins with personal experience. In my third semester of college, I got a job at a local Schnuck’s grocery store. Along with signing all the regular new-job paperwork, I had to join the union, and dues were automatically deducted from each paycheck. Now I thought that unions were supposed to exist to save the common working man from the greed of the evil business owner, and give me a better working environment than I would have otherwise. As it turned out, there was a minimum flat union fee that I was forced to pay even if I only worked one day in a week. If I worked two days a week, my wages were flirting with minimum wage, and on one occasion where I worked one day of a week, my wages after union dues were the equivalent of less than $5 an hour, far less than the $6/hour with which I had begun my first job at McDonald’s three years prior when minimum wage was still $5.75. Somehow I doubted that without the union “supporting” me I would have been doing worse, and it surprised me that such a supposedly progressive institution would have such a regressive structure for collecting its dues. As it was, those with the lowest income ended up paying the largest percentage of their income to the union.
Now one of the liberal responses to complaints about unions is that there is nothing illegal about them – that workers have a right to assemble and organize and engage in voluntary contracts with their employers and so forth, and that if I didn’t like the union I was free to work somewhere else. Indeed, I did – I got a job at the Apple Retail Store less than three months later, a horrid union-less company that started me at a raw rate of a couple dollars an hour more than Schnuck’s and also had the audacity to give me options for stocks and retirement contributions. I still find it striking that out of the four companies I have now worked for over the course of my life’s employment, the one that offered me the lowest take-home wages, before or after inflation, was the one with the union. The general working conditions of all the jobs have been equivalent, and the only advantage the grocer’s union offered me over the others was a weekly instead of bi-weekly paycheck, which may have been an advantage for a poor full-time father with bills to pay but for me just served to highlight the huge portion of my low wages that were being sucked away to benefit a mysterious organization.
So, big deal, I had a bad experience with unions at a period of my life when good working conditions weren’t very important to me. Somebody else may like unions because of a positive experience with years of great wages and a good pensions. Neither experience is inherently more valid than the other. But the things that I have learned of present-day unions since my experience have done nothing to improve their image to my eyes.
There was the automaker bailout where the unions got a better deal than anyone else. There’s the Post Office teetering on bankruptcy partly because labor makes up 80% of its costs and there’s no easy way to bring that down. There are the cities going bankrupt due to generous public pensions. There are the complaints about the difficulties of firing bad teachers. At every turn, there is the image of the greedy parasitic union, gobbling up more benefits for its members regardless of how much they deserve it, regardless of how much it threatens to destroy their host business, regardless of how much their protection of incompetent long-standing members hides jobs from competent newcomers and reduces the effectiveness of whatever organization they claim to represent. Whether it’s a story in the news about a union boss raising an unholy ruckus about a slight proposal in reduced benefits that might make their company a little more solvent, or a story from a friend who can’t join a local orchestra because the union protects its members until they quit or die regardless of their talent trajectory, I find little evidence that I should like unions or view them as anything other than primitively tribal organizations that protect their oldest members simply because they’re the oldest members, while seeking maximum benefits for its members with no regard of the cost to anyone who’s not a member, or the costs to the health of the business or to the health of society at large (Metaphorically violent rhetoric against the Tea Party doesn’t help, either).
Recently I have been made aware of claims that historical unions were instrumental in creating much of the standard work environment we take for granted today: 40-hour work weeks, overtime pay, and the like. Working conditions of the past were notoriously detriment and dangerous, and even if you’re not in a union at your job, without the unions of the past your job wouldn’t be as nice as it is now. I think I’m OK with admitting that this could be true. (There are some libertarians, of course, who argue that working conditions would have improved anyway without unions, but of course your theory can always beat someone else’s reality.) Yet I think it is perfectly intellectually consistent to concede the valuable results of historical unions while severely disliking the excesses of unions today.