Editors at National Review Online offer an interesting idea for countering misleading union propaganda.
Every Labor Day, unions claim responsibility for much of modern America’s cushy living standards. They argue that the eight-hour workday and five-day workweek wouldn’t exist without their valiant efforts against the mighty industrialists. We are supposed to thank unions for minimum wages and workplace safety laws, too, and for banning the scourge of child labor. If not for organized labor, the story goes, we would essentially still be living in the Gilded Age.
The comforts of working in today’s U.S. economy are nothing to scoff at. But to attribute these improvements to labor unions — ignoring the underlying force beneath them all — is to engage in historical revisionism. At best, organized labor ratified improvements in living standards that were already enabled by rising productivity.
It is crucial to remember that mankind’s economic baseline is universal grinding poverty, with life sustained only by subsistence. All improvements in material welfare, from the First Agricultural Revolution onward, must be forged through investment and ingenuity. The Industrial Revolution, the era that unions decry, was an extraordinary advancement in human welfare. Daily economic life has only gotten better since, as free peoples have developed new ways to arrange capital and labor to yield greater wealth for all involved. …
… Time and again, laws pushed by labor unions were enshrined only after economic growth made them feasible — and after such standards were already being adopted voluntarily. When businesses must compete for employees, they have every incentive to boost productivity and share the proceeds through higher wages and more attractive working conditions.
Most champions of organized labor are ungrateful for the very mechanism that enables the common worker to flourish. To the extent they succeed in forcibly pushing wages and benefits above fair market levels, they discourage investment by slashing its return and thereby retard growth at the companies they unionize.
