Labor Unions: Progressive?

Question: Are labor unions progressive or conservative organizations?

Answer: Labor unions are deeply conservative institutions, in the worst, reactionary sense of "conservative." Labor unions have aways fought technological change, going back to the Luddite machine wreckers destroying power looms at the turn of the 18th Century, and long before that as guilds resisted changes in production methods.

Labor unions exist to preserve and protect the technological status quo. If labor unions had their way, productivity and societal wealth would have been frozen long ago, at vastly lower levels than we now enjoy. Social and technological advance has required the defeat of these organizations at every step. Those defeats occurred because, fortunately, unions are no match for the efficiency of markets.

In the 1950s, Yugoslavia introduced a system that put factories under the managerial control of their workers, an old idea known as Syndicalism. The idea of putting workers in control was to avoid the exploitation of labor by management -- in Marxist terms to insure that workers receive the actual value of their production. (Of course, this involves assuming that the Labor Theory of Value makes any kind of sense, which it doesn't. Marx himself couldn't make it work, which is why he gave up and never completed the third part of Das Kapital.)

The Yugoslav experiment was eventually abandoned as a miserable failure. It failed because worker-managers refused to introduce changes that required lay-offs, or to close outmoded, inefficient, and failing factories. Productive resources became badly misallocated, in other words, which is what always happens when you try to do without the market.

So, putting the union in charge of the plant quickly made for an outmoded, non-competitive, failing operation. The point is that given the reactionary/conservative core function of labor unions, the outcome was perfectly predictable.

Byron