by Brad Peck

The Moderate Voice discusses the passage of Card Check:

The repercussions could be significant. Case in point: A friend of mine is an executive for a mid-sized firm that, despite economic pressures, has maintained a manufacturing plant in the U.S. He told me there should be no question in anyone’s mind: If the Employee Free Choice Act becomes law — and the employees at my friend’s company unionize as a result — then the company would immediately shut down its U.S. plant and move operations and jobs to Mexico.

Label it "hard-nosed corporate greed" if you like, but I don’t believe that’s the case, at least not in this situation. My friend’s company is in a very competitive business, where raising prices is effectively a non-option. Thus, dramatically higher labor costs would leave his company’s managers no choice but to take the steps necessary to curtail those costs and keep the company (and its other jobs) protected. If that’s true, and if that pattern were repeated thousands of times over, the impact to U.S. employment and the larger economy would make our current woes seem laughingly non-substantial in contrast.

Now, please understand: I am not anti-union. I believe unions can play — and throughout our history have played — a valuable role. What’s more, my son will likely join a union in the not-too-distant future, in order to maintain access to a group health plan. At the same time, I know unions are as corruptible as any corporation or other large institution, and they have (at times) grossly distorted the balance between hard work and fair pay.

Our nation made a choice for change this week, but another choice is before us: Do we want to embrace the spirit of our past as a can-do nation and build a future on growth?  "Or do we rest on our laurels and continue to sink into the swamp of can’t-do, enjoying small comforts in equitable mediocrity." Will we choose competition or entitlement? From a 2001 article by the Employment Policy Foundation:

Unions are unique in our society because, under the National Labor Relations Act they are given an exclusive franchise to organize individuals in the workplace for purposes of representation and
negotiating terms and conditions of employment. No other nongovernmental organization is given such a monopoly or express procedures for establishing their exclusive representation status.
...
It may well be that that this apparent monopoly role of unions caused them for over three decades to be passive in investing in organizing the U.S. labor market. In the 1950s, the height of union workplace representation, unions devoted over 40 percent of union dues to organizing new members. By the time John Sweeney took over the helm of the AFL-CIO in the mid-1990s, just two to four percent of dues were invested in union organizing. As we enter the new century, that investment has risen but still is just a fourth of what it was in the 1950s.

And not much has changed if you look at the United Food and Commercial Workers convention this past August:

The convention made a big change earlier in the week when delegates adopted a resolution requiring all local unions to begin dedicating 10 percent of post-per capita tax dues to organizing by 2010, 15 percent by 2012, and 20 percent by 2014. In the past, locals had not been required to spend a percentage of their revenue on organizing, and only 10 percent to 20 percent of the locals were active in organizing.

In July the Chamber's Glenn Spencer presented this analogy for Big Labor:

If a widget company had a 50-year sales slump and its market share had plummeted by two-thirds, it would have two choices: either start making better widgets or spend lots of money to buy influence in Washington — and get new laws passed making it tougher to buy widgets from anyone else.

For decades Unions have chosen not to change and not to compete, with predictable results. Now with Card Check they want to force that choice on everyone else. Don't let them make it for you or our economy.