Labor’s ‘featherbedding’ is back

With the Labor Participation Rate near its lowest point of all time (outside of COVID) at 62.7%, too few of us work today; therefore, we should all be friends of Labor. My hat’s off to any union member, non-union worker, or sole proprietor who gets up each morning to ensure our lights work, we have food to eat and we can get where we need to be. The big question is whether unions today work in the best interests of our country or are little more than extortion rackets.

I want to tell you a story of how unions literally went off the track and never returned to sanity. With the IAL dock workers’ strike partially settled recently after agreeing to inflationary wage increases, the issue of allowing no more automation at ports was left, with a threatened strike again in January. In Rotterdam, Netherlands, one port facility is run with only 10-15 people vs. hundreds here. The hairs on my neck stood up on the union demand of no automation. Unions want to stop efforts to increase efficiency, lower costs and protect workers’ health! That reminded me of another story with a direct parallel.

The time is 1962, and steam locomotives had been an archaic relic of the past for almost 20 years. However, union rules required railroads to employ 40,000 useless “firemen” (coal stokers), costing railroads over $500 million a year back then. There was a massive strike, and people were killed or injured in the milieu that resulted, but the railroads won a new set of rules that made economic sense, and the “fireman” on trains gave us the term featherbedding. Featherbedding is defined as:

1. The hiring of more workers than necessary or the limiting of worker productivity to allow employment of more persons, usually due to a union contract with an employer.
2. The paying for services that are not actually performed, as in a union-imposed fee upon an employer.
3. The employment of more workers than is necessary because of union rules, especially upon the introduction of new technology.

Today’s dock strike has all the same hallmarks of that infamous 1962 strike, plus the application of a heaping helping of political savvy: An imminent election will likely keep a weak and pro-union Biden from protecting the country from this shakedown by not invoking Taft-Hartley to prevent imminent harm to the American people. Taft-Hartley is “a United States federal law restricting labor unions’ activities and power.”

Biden will be remembered for conducting an unprecedented attack on right-to-work states and encouraging the most significant number of strikes in decades. He was the first president to walk a picket line with the autoworkers last year. Democrats have nearly universal union leadership support, even as their members tend to vote Republican. Biden has encouraged the relatively small number of union workers (10%) to overcome his inflation by demanding they be repaid through higher wages. On the face of it, that doesn’t sound too bad. However, raising wages beyond that is highly inflationary. The dockworkers demand a 77% increase over six years, way above inflation in an industry where the average annual pay exceeds $100,000, with some making over $250,000.

Similarly, with Boeing currently on strike, workers want a 30% increase over the next four years while making an average of $93,000. Not exactly chump change when the average wage in America today is $64,000. The question we must answer is how much is enough. Marxism determines wages through the lens of how much their capitalist overseers make, seeing themselves as able to demand a share without the risks of ownership. That is the basis for how unions work in America. Pilots make $148,000 to $239,000 annually, based on an 80-hour month. Labor now accounts for a historically high 31% of costs for America’s airlines. However, unions don’t care whether their airlines can afford to pay that much; U.S. airlines are frequently unprofitable with a negative return on capital.

Unions frequently drive companies into the ground. Take 99-year-old Yellow Freight Lines as an example. Yellow shut down last year after extortionist demands by unions could not be met. Thirty-thousand good-paying Teamster jobs were lost forever. And that’s not an anomaly. Unions forced several companies into bankruptcy each year. Last year, Ford considered bankruptcy after demands by the UAW could not be met. The strike was settled, but only through a complicated deal that included billions going to Ford from the federal government through the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, ostensibly to support E.V. development, but which is used at least in part to pay higher wages.

Let’s face the reality of America’s unions today. Not a hundred years ago, but today. The head of the International Longshoreman Union is Harold Daggett. He makes over $900,000 a year, drives a Bentley (paid for by the union) and captains his own yacht. According to the New York Post, Daggett has been linked to the Mafia multiple times.

Everybody (with few exceptions) wants to be paid the most for doing their work. From unionized baristas to the guy who picks up your garbage, all of us find ourselves on a hamster-wheel trying to keep up, not with the Jones as much as what government and union workers make that sets the bar for everyone else, and that ultimately drives inflation, along with borrowing money we don’t have.

Uneducated people believe you can pay everyone a “living wage,” whatever that means. More and more, that’s being termed a right with politicians and the World Economic Forum (WEF) people pushing for guaranteed incomes. There’s a linkage, an unholy alliance between the one-worlders, unions and government. That linkage is controlled through wages and rules – unions and the government negatively enhance productivity. Only through the profit motive can our country survive and prosper.

It must be said frequently that no union, government, or global forum creates anything. They sponge off the hard work of entrepreneurs, workers and businesses we rely on to give us one of the highest standards of living in the world. Don’t screw around too much with the Golden Goose – or we may find out exactly how wrong that unholy alliance is.