Who's to Blame for Union Woes?

[Geee]

Human Events:


The labor union movement is in deep trouble. Only 6 percent of private-sector employees are union members.

Voters are beginning to realize, thanks to governors like Chris Christie of New Jersey and Scott Walker of Wisconsin, that public-sector unions have negotiated unsustainable levels of pensions and benefits -- and that public-sector unions are a mechanism for involuntary transfers of money from taxpayers to the Democratic Party.

Who's to blame for the unions' plight? I blame Frederick W. Taylor. Most readers will ask, who? And those who know the name might wonder why I pin the blame on someone who died in 1915.



But Taylor, the supposed pioneer of scientific management, was an influential man in his day and long after. He conducted time and motion studies aimed at getting workers to perform most efficiently single tasks on long assembly lines.

Workers, he said, should be regarded as dumb animals, incapable of initiative, inefficient when they are not compelled to perform the same simple task in the same single way over and over.