Do Unions Create Entitled Employees? Since their inception during the Industrial Revolution, labor unions have been controversial. The original intent was to protect workers from exploitation and unsafe working conditions. However, many today argue that unions now pose a barrier to economic growth, make it difficult to hire or fire based on merit, and limit efficiency and innovation.
We’re currently witnessing several examples of how unions operate under strike including how they impact the employee, employer, and the overall economy.
The Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild is currently in the midst of the largest Hollywood strike in over 50 years. Under union rules, during a strike, members are not allowed to perform the following work: acting, singing, dancing, stunts, TV Trailers, theatrical Trailers, voice acting, singing, narration, interviews, podcasts and several additional entertainment related services. Additionally, Hollywood is expected to lose as much as $4 billion from this strike, as there are no movies or shows being made right now.
The primary cause behind this strike is the wage gap between the highest earning actors and top executives compared with most actors, the reductions of royalties due to the streaming disruption, and the threat AI poses to actors and writers.
Prior to President Franklin D. Roosevelt implementing the New Deal, businesses had the ability to stop the formation of unions, but “Union Busting” is illegal today. An example of the impact this has is the American Auto industry. Foreign automakers entered the U.S. auto market in the 1970s and hired non-union workers to build vehicles. Due to the savings in labor costs, they could afford to sell their vehicles for less than U.S. manufacturers. This made it much harder for the unionized big three automakers to produce competitive cars at affordable prices, and they lost significant market share. This transformed cities like Detroit from a boomtown to a rundown ghetto.
Unions leaders are not always fighting for the noble cause of protecting workers, as some might believe. Most people know the name Jimmy Hoffa and how he was a corrupt union leader. But over the last several decades, there has been a consistent flow of union leaders getting caught taking bribes and working against the best interest of their members. Several of the top union presidents in the U.S. have salaries of more than half a million dollars, meanwhile they complain about CEO’s being greedy and making too much money.
The ideological nature of unions can be identified very easily if you look at the voting patterns of unions. The Democratic party consistently receives 90% of the union vote, which is why Democrats always talk about creating union jobs with government spending packages. You might ask, why do union members favor the Democratic party so heavily? it’s because the union mentality is socialist by nature, which reflects left leaning tendencies much more than right leaning tendencies.
In conclusion, it is important to ensure that workers are not being abused or taken advantage of, but the modern version of unions have flipped the problem. Now, unions have the tendency to abuse the employer and ultimately the consumer.
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