Posted on 09/02/2017 2:59:30 PM PDT by TBP
Every Labor Day, unions repeat assertions of advancing the interests of all workers. But those claims are false. Unions harm most American workers.
Project Labor Agreements
Unions use government-delegated powers to restrict competition from other workers, extracting higher wages for their members. But higher wages mean fewer job openings because each worker is more expensive to the employer. That forces workers to move to other jobs, increasing the supply of labor services in non-union employment and reducing wages for all workers in those jobs. With far less than 10 percent of private sector workers in unions, more than 90 percent of them are injured by that exercise of union power.
Other union-backed initiatives also show how unions feather their own nests at the expense of other workers. Among the best examples are Project Labor Agreements (PLAs), such as the one recently adopted in Santa Ana (despite a staff report that estimates that it would increase construction costs by 10-20 percent).
PLAs are agreements negotiated between government bodies and unions (but excluding non-union workers and contractors), establishing in advance the terms and conditions that will be imposed on all workers for designated projects.
PLAs are rationalized as buying labor peace, “leveling the playing field” for competitors, guaranteeing projects are completed on time, holding down costs, increasing quality, and safety, etc. But they advance none of these goals. They restrict competition, raise costs, and pick taxpayers’ (i.e., other workers’) pockets. As Wharton Professor Herbert Northrup wrote in the Journal of Labor Research, PLAs “have little or no economic rationale, nor can they be defended on the grounds of labor peace, enhanced safety, or other reasonable criteria.”
PLAs supposedly buy labor peace because unions promise not to engage in disruptive activities. Of course, strikes still hit the San Francisco International Airport expansion project, the largest PLA at the time. Such PLAs punish nonunion workers and contractors, who do not threaten strikes, to buy labor peace from unions who threaten strikes--penalizing the innocent (including taxpayers) to reward the guilty. As the New York Supreme Court described it in the Albany Specialties case, it reflects “capitulation to extortion” by unions.
PLA backers assert they just impose equal labor terms on all project bidders, allowing equal competition. But those “equal” terms are anything but even-handed. As in San Francisco and Santa Ana, all workers on the concerned projects, including non-members, must pay union dues and fees, for which they will receive no benefits. Non-union workers must also contribute to union health and pension funds with nothing in return.
Restricting Competition
Virtually all new workers are forced through union hiring halls and even apprentices are union-controlled. Union wages, work rules, job classifications, and hiring and grievance procedures are mandated, raising costs, particularly for non-union bidders. In 2009, John McGowan estimated that PLAs faced employees of non-union contractors with 20 percent cuts in their take-home pay, while increasing non-union employers’ costs by about 25 percent.
PLA terms are so onerous to non-union contractors and workers that most will not even bid on PLA projects (86 percent, in a 1997 survey of non-union contractors in Washington). Bids rise as restrictions eliminate bidders (particularly lower-cost non-union contractors), raising costs for taxpayers. For instance, a 1995 study of the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in New York found that the winning bid without a PLA was 26 percent lower than the one with a PLA.
Such results reinforce the repeated failure of PLAs to demonstrate an increase in either quality or safety, and a 1998 GAO investigation that could document no cost efficiencies from PLAs.
Just as with their other exercises of their unique, government-granted power to restrict competition, PLAs harm other workers both directly and as taxpayers financing public projects.
Rather than living up to union claims, Diana Furchtgott-Roth concluded that a PLA “drives out small businesses from competing for these projects; raises their cost to the taxpayers; and funnels a larger stream of union dues from taxpayers’ pockets to union treasuries.”
So, if we want to make the workers whose contributions we claim to celebrate on Labor Day better off, we should give them more freedom, rather than subjecting them to so many harmful union impositions.
"Don't kill the job" was a popular expression.
Soon as I left that job and I was able to negotiate and work for myself, my income and opportunities broadened considerably.
Any chance Trump will suspend Davis Bacon for the wall and other federal projects?
I recently got a new job and was forced to join a union for the first time. I unfortunately do not work in a right to work State. Just boils my blood to have to pay dues to these Democrat loving idiots!
with unions wages stagnant
End Davis Bacon now!
I worked with electricians (I was HVAC) who bragged about jobs where they carried conduit back and forth to "look busy" until break time. Then resumed "looking busy" so no one would get laid off on an over manned job site.
I use to be a non-union concrete contractor. Occasionally, I would make a sales call to someone who needed some work done who was a member of a union. A lot of times you can tell from bumper stickers on their vehicles. This would be for their own home. Sometime, when I was in a smartass mood, I would ask if they are getting bids from union companies. They would look at me as if I had two heads. That would be way too expensive!
I work all across the country building shipping warehouses. In union controlled states the jobs are always behind schedule and over budget. All the warehouses are the same, the only difference is they are union constructed.
Half the unions are ok to work with, the other half are little better Mafia thugs.
This union worker tends to agree with you. However, high end unions are fantastic. When the hands police themselves, and are in it for a fair wage with regular pay raises to attempt to keep up with inflation, it works great. I am fortunate to be in a high end union like this. We take pride in that and none of us want to “kill the golden goose”. People who are slackers, tend to get fired, and 99% of us vote conservative.
Any chance congress will fund the wall? The Whitehouse has now said the will not shutdown government if they pass another continuing resolution that does not include funds for the wall. Maybe to make it easier to get disaster relief?
The German Workers Socialist Party was a union.
Bump!!!!!!!!!!
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