But “Unions” are such a wonderful boogeyman.
Practically every disagreement I get into on FR, someone brings up the Unions.
It’s true making American industry stronger will probably help the unions. I think some of these free traders would love to see American industry completely destroyed just to hurt the unions.
It’s weird, they view the unions as communist, so they’re willing to sign over all of our industry to communist China to teach those unions a lesson.
You have to understand that Free Trade is a religion taught in EVERY business school in the country.
I blame the unions because of the extremely fat cats at the head of each. With each humongous rise in wages and benefits inflation rose to meet those raises.
I also blame the CEO imbeciles who treated the unions as children and caved in each and every time to the demands.
A great example of this was the UAW and GM at the time that the communist Walter Reuther was killed in a plane crash on his way to the UAW resort in Michigan. Leonard Woodcock became his replacement. The auto contract was up for negotiations in order to renew. GM execs decided that since they’d have to deal with Woodcock they needed to make him look good, so they caved very quickly and granted everything.
So, you see both sides are to blame, but the big problem now is how to roll these excesses back.