NEW ISSUE: Striking Out, The Decline of Unions

(Illustration: National Review)

"In 2019 a high-school principal in New York State was discovered to have created a fraudulent system of grading to exaggerate his school's achievements," Philip K. Howard writes in "Raiders of the Delegated Treasury," the cover story of the new issue of NATIONAL REVIEW.

What was the disgraced principal's penalty?

"He lost his position, but because of public-employee protections, he will get full salary and benefits of over $265,000 annually for the next seven years." There are, Howard writes, many such examples: "An EPA employee, caught red-handed surfing porn sites in his cubicle, was paid for almost two years until he made a deal to retire."

It's easy to see how we got here, though that doesn't mean it makes any sense.

Before the 1960s, the idea of negotiating against the public interest was unthinkable. AFL-CIO president George Meany in 1955 stated bluntly that it is "impossible to bargain collectively with the Government." Negotiating against government was also considered antisocial and fraught with political dangers. Public-employee unions with bargaining power would hold vastly more power over government than private unions held over business — not only would they constitute a huge political bloc, but they would hold the authority of the state in their hands, without having to honor market realities of affordability and efficiency.

Even FDR was a skeptic of public-sector unionization, writing in 1937 that "the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service."

The deleterious effects of labor unions, however, are not universally understood by the American public — not by a long shot. Indeed, as noted by Dominic Pino, who shares the cover with Howard, that's part of the reason that the conservative movement has stood in "opposition to organized labor" and in "support for right-to-work" for its entire history.

In his essay "Unions, Who Wants Them?" Pino recounts the long battles between striking transit workers, the United Auto Workers union, and other arms of organized labor and conservatives such as Senator Robert Taft and Ronald Reagan.

Unions no longer have that level of power in American society, a fact for which we have conservatives to thank. A moment that proved government can, in fact, do something about a strike was when Ronald Reagan ordered the firing of illegally striking air-traffic controllers and their replacement with nonunion workers in 1981, and then salted the earth by decertifying the union.

And given the freedom to choose, Pino writes, "American workers . . . do not choose to join unions." Indeed, last year, the overall unionization rate fell to just 10.1 percent. (The government-workers unionization rate is 33.1 percent — which should cause taxpayers to ask a few pointed questions.)

You can read both essays and much more in the new, March 20, 2023, issue of National Review magazine.

Christine Rosen examines the first declared Republican challenger to Donald Trump in "Nikki Haley's Platitude Problem."
Madeleine Kearns in "All the News That's Fit to Debate" continues her crucial reporting on the ongoing crusade by transgender activists to enforce ideological conformity — this time in the newsroom of the New York Times.
Graham Hillard looks at the feckless state of an NCAA that is approaching true institutional collapse amid a turbulent and fast-changing college sports world in "'Madness' Is Right."
And in a trio of feature essays, John O'Sullivan, Noah Rothman, and Petr Fiala, the prime minister of the Czech Republic, take a look at the Russian invasion of Ukraine one year on. What will the war mean for the Western alliance? And does Joe Biden have a strategy?

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Very sincerely yours,

Mark Antonio Wright

Executive Editor