Unions: Where did the U.S.A. go wrong?

[a completely inoffensive name]

I'm actually leaning more toward what CR has been saying about poor treatment being bad business. However, I think the reasons for this incentive of poor treatment=bad business have been from reasons other then purely free market interactions. I think that nowadays companies would not be interested in attempting to reduce wages back down to the Gilded Age style of pennies for hours. The reason for that is because nowadays the media is global, fast and most importantly interactive. A YouTube video can make the news, so people do have more inherent power in creating bad PR for companies then ever before. However, that doesn't stop the companies from attempting to keep wages as close the minimum wage as possible such as with Wal Mart.

Secondly, I agree that unions are no longer useful in their original role in protecting wages and jobs for their members through acting as representative for workers. Laws have been established that have cemented those protections in our country. However, I think we do still need unions which I will explain in my next point below.

Thirdly, the problem that seems to be arising in America stems from economic recession periods, where short sighted companies do attempt to save in the short run by drastically reducing wages and benefits to unacceptable levels for our standard of living (a modern western nation's standard of living just to clarify). The media factor doesn't come into play here, because in an economic downturn we often see the general attitude of Americans to be "don't complain at least you have a job". Technically, I guess you could call this what others have claimed (and CR has acknowledged) to be the "stupidity of humans who run companies". Theoretically, once the recession is over people should remember who treated their employers badly and who treated them right during the recession, so those who were attempting to save in the short run, fail in the long run. This would make it seem as if the companies that do survive would be the ones that treated their employers right. This would be free market capitalism solving our problems for us. However, you could argue that those that save in the short term are able to outlast the recession while those that keep wages up for their employers are likely to die in the recession, so those with the bad policies would survive.

In either case, if the good companies win the long run, we still need to be realistic here and see that those working for the short sighted companies still suffer from terrible wage cuts during a bad economic period, in which case asking your congress to react quickly by raising the minimum wage would be a somewhat ridiculous hope to bet on. So unions do help when those crisis moments hit, not by holding out for more money, but by serving as a lobby group to help push the bill through congress, speeding the process up faster then normally. Now if the bad companies win in the long run because their penny pinching lasted them through the recession when others didn't, then obviously we still have a need for unions to actively counter and reverse the companies hurtful policies.

I still haven't thought all this through I admit. But I will say, that there is a definite middle here. We don't need unions to holding out as greedy ********, (asking full dental and medical for grocery baggers when the company just cant afford it), anymore since we don't live in an age of blatant Rockefeller's and Carnegie's anymore. (To say that, would honestly be hyperbole.) But, workers need some sort of lobby group as do any other group in America. So I see unions to be more of a lobby group (or should be more of a lobby group) then anything else in this modern age, just as gun owners have the NRA, animal rights have PETA, workers have their unions.

Honestly, if it was up to me I would restructure/reclassify unions as an interest group and make it so that they only interact with the government and not be involved in company to worker contracts. If the company starts putting the hurt on workers, then give more union dues to the unions, the more fervent and wealthy the interest group is, the more successful it is, just ask the NRA.