Labor Day - RIP

E. J. Dionne wrote a Labor Day piece that I meant to get to earlier but the day job kept getting in the way. In his article Dionne tries to make the case that Americans have given up on 'honoring' the worker as the real creators of wealth in the country. Dionne's premise seems to be that capital could not exist without the righteous and noble efforts of the entity called Labor. While I agree with the statement on the surface - that is that capital is reliant upon labor - one could just as easily say that capital, in a candy factory, is reliant on sugar. But oddly enough we do not celebrate Sugar Day.

This mythos surrounding the 'Labor' movement, and the levels that liberals go to canonize labor, is of course self-serving. We all know how it works. The liberals support the 'labor' (read Union) agenda and when election time comes around the Unions stuff the Democrat's campaign coffers from the dues they collect from their members.

But the point I want to make here is that for all their posturing and vitriolic language, labor will always be nothing more than a commodity. Always have been and always will. But Labor leaders have to keep up the myth that labor is something other than a commodity to keep the monetary merry-go-round funded. But lately, the mask has slipped a bit. The Unions overreached in Wisconsin, and the Boeing debacle in South Carolina rising to national attention has endeared them to no one. As the labor movement become more and more irrelevant, expect to see them self-destruct even further..

Labor Unions have waned since their heyday in the 50's and they have waned for a reason. They have, due largely to their own efforts, become irrelevant. They have gone from an advocate of their members to nothing more than extortionist. Making companies and taxpayers pay more than the market should bear for their commodity. This eventually creates a situation where they price themselves out of the market. But, rather than correcting this, they simply demand for more and more, effectively killing the company they work for (GM, Chrysler, local governments). Time after time, non-Union shops outperform Union shops. Right to work states outperform pro-Union states. The only option the Unions have left is to rely on entities like the NRLB to take up their cause, because they simply cannot compete in the marketplace anymore.