Organized Labor’s Bad Rap
“This isn’t something you often hear a columnist say,” said Nicholas Kristof, but “I was wrong.” Like many Americans, I’ve long “disdained unions as bringing corruption, nepotism, and rigid work rules to the labor market.” I’ve fumed over stagehands making $400,000 a year and union reps shielding incompetent teachers. But my outrage has been misplaced. It’s increasingly clear that organized labor was “doing a lot of good in sustaining middle-class life,” pushing for higher wages, greater workplace protections, and other programs that “create broad-based prosperity.”
We’re only now beginning to realize the costs of unions’ decline; as much as a third of the increase in economic inequality among American men in recent decades can be attributed to the dramatic fall in union membership. And while we’ve fixated on organized labor’s flaws—and it does have its flaws—we’ve overlooked the fact that “in recent years, the worst abuses by far haven’t been in the union shop but in the corporate suite.” We’d do well to remember that some of our fastest-growing decades, the 1940s and 1950s, were also the peak of union membership. If we hope to build an economy with strong foundations, we should “strengthen unions, not try to eviscerate them.”
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