Harold Meyerson is Stealing My Stuff

And, really, I wouldn't have it any other way. 

Meyerson pens a wonderful column about the UAW and what it has meant to the body politic in America for the last 70 or so years and why the Republicans wish to destroy it -- even if it means doing untold harm to the economy.  I highly recommend reading it.

It did remind me a little bit of this, this, and this among others. 

Meyerson is fabulous.  I can't quite believe that the newspaper that brings you Krauthammer, Will, Gerson, and Broder also features him.        

Comments

[Stephen]

Meyerson obviously reads us, which is serving him well.

What I'd like to see is more of why unions are necessary now, as opposed to just having people write about what they did. The most effective argument employed against unions is that they were once useful and necessary, but now that they've won all the battles that we'll ever need to fight, we don't need them anymore.

You and I and our brilliant readership understand how stupid this argument is, but a lot of otherwise reasonable people buy into it. I'm beginning to think that this belief has more to do with anti-union sentiment than the common jokes about union breaks or even the idea that they extort extravagant salaries from helpless management.

[Sir Charles]

Stephen,

There are so many things that one can cite is support of why unions are necessary -- the fact that absent a union contract people can generally be fired for any reason whatsoever (much to their shock based on visits to my office); that without a union you basically check all of your rights at the door of the workplace; that without a union, the odds of getting a pension or employer provided health benefits are substantially lower, and so on.

The other thing that unions do is help keep wages for non-union workers from falling. Absent a viable possibility of unionization, management will frequently pay people as little as possible to fill a job.

One other thing that people should realize about union concessions is this -- and I had a conversation with an employer about this just last week -- any time union workers take a cut in pay, the non-union sector will respond swiftly and unilaterally to cut the wages of their own employees. I have been through this before in the early 1990s -- several of my clients endured pay cuts, and in each and every instance the non-union firms matched or exceeded those cuts in a giant race to the bottom. The problem is that once the recession passed, it became very difficult to attract people into the trades for several years while work was booming. Doing hard physical work outdoors for a substandard wage is not really a great selling point.

[ari]

A couple of months ago, less than 24 hours after I wrote a long post comparing John McCain to George Wallace, John Lewis, that small-time layabout, plagiarized me in his public remarks. And he got all the credit for the analogy! Life is totally unfair like that.

[Sir Charles]

ari,

I recently saw John Lewis in the Miami airport -- and -- though he is an indisputably great man and a moral giant -- I was aghast that he had on brown shoes with a black suit. Quel fashion mistake!

[ari]

indisputably great man and a moral giant

You poor, deluded fool. You've bought into the hype. The man is actually a plagiarist. I bet someone stole his shoes; such is the nature of karmic payback for petty thieves like Lewis.