Labor Unions: Good or Evil?
There are good unions and there are bad unions. I have seen both first hand, and the difference will make or break a company. In watching Japanese union workers, I was impressed by the focus of their performance. There is a cultural aspect involved that demands pride in their work. To do a bad job would bring shame; a mortal blow. In America, we have a culture of freedom, but many abuse it by claiming it means “the right to have no discipline.” This is how we get beaten.
Here is what it is like to be hired into a union of socialist design: Instead of joining a plan for the greater good, suddenly you are lost among the undifferentiated—among the mean and small—and are then penalized for displaying anything more. You find out that the company is your enemy—that everything you thought made a good employee is now bad—that the lowest around you is now your equal, and your burden. They acknowledge seniority, not performance, disallowing effort to outpace lethargy. Their mass bares its teeth when exposed to any hint of personal accountability. Despite the thinly veiled, murderous smiles welcoming you, you can barely hide from yourself the fact that you have joined a hate group. It is the deeper brotherhood of all human beings that has been betrayed here. Unions may have begun as protection for unfairly treated workers, but with a Marxist ideology, they become a collection of us against them Spirit Murderers: malicious guardians of the Submission/ Domination Axis, and that’s all.
Marxist unions damn automation, yet propose no means to remain competitive. You rarely hear any ideas for improving efficiency; you never hear them addressing the company’s competitiveness or considering any sane reason why human beings are in business. Instead we hear their nineteenth-century reproaches against working conditions. For example, during our country’s intellectually-degraded pro-communist period, American railways were bullied into focusing on the livelihood of their workers, not on moving freight. The purpose had been lost—that of utilizing every bit of a business’s potential in the profitable pursuit of life as an abstract ideal—not the sheer naked survival of workers, and it virtually destroyed the industry.
Now, it is certainly the duty of company leaders to assure there will be work for those they hire. People depend on their income’s continuance, and count on those above to keep it growing or at least stable. But when managers strip the company of its wealth instead, leaving it unprepared for a downturn, causing mass layoffs and hardship, the employees have a right to band together and fight. This is where a proper union weighs in to protect workers. In today’s climate, we have huge hundred-year old businesses that are no longer run by their founders, but by principals having no vested interest in them. Such executives serve on each other’s boards, voting for mutual overcompensation, amounting to little more than embezzlement, and when things go south, they jump ship with golden parachutes. We must make it harder for corrupt individuals and their networks to destroy companies from the top, with jail terms and recovery of the stolen capital, which caused the business to falter. Still, no business exists solely for its workers. Workers exist in their context for the product alone. Losing a job is not the equivalent of losing one’s life, and there is no such thing as the right to a job. When a business is mismanaged or the country goes into recession, restoration of economic calm is found after a shakeout, which rids the waste of oversupply, and redistributes workers among the fields were they are actually needed.
The truth is a Marxist union brings—not craftsmen or manufacturing expertise to an industry—but violence, as it is a power organized specifically for the disruption of the enterprise. Such a union’s morale is dogmatically intended to maintain an all-time low. They are convinced that at work they deserve to sleep, to be drunk, to skip three days a week, and be totally unaccountable for their task, then to proclaim their inestimable worth and strike over compensation. That such people can live with so shameful a disregard for virtue is an abomination—almost as bad as its tolerance. A new employee with good intentions, trying to use sound administrative and moral judgment will find his efforts trounced by the very evil the system is designed to protect. He will be forced into cover-ups, strikes, walk-outs and a host of other immature or hostile activities, shamefully conspiring against goodwill, where adults embarrass themselves in a psychological predicament children should never have to see.
In an age of immense corporate graft, unions have been one of the few organizations to come forward and protect the people. If they want to survive long-term, they must break any tie to Karl Marx and his hostile propaganda. Unions need to acquire a sound operating philosophy and develop a “backbone of the nation” kind of culture we can all be proud of. They must become master craftsman once more, and restore the pride and confidence we feel when seeing MADE IN THE USA on a product. Otherwise, the only recompense Self-made businessmen have against poor conduct is the one line union membership is designed to prevent: “You’re fired!”