Labor Unions, Thugs, And Storm Troopers

[Draggingtree]

Ludwig von Mises Institute :

Labor Unions, Thugs, And Storm Troopers

Mises Daily: Friday, January 04, 2013 by George Reisman

1. New York Times Columnist Eduardo Porter on How to Raise Wages

The following three paragraphs are a quotation from the article "Unionizing the Bottom of the Pay Scale" by New York Times columnist Eduardo Porter. The article appeared on the front page of the business section in the December 5, 2012 National Edition. The subject of the article is the present attempts going on to unionize the employees of such establishments as fast-food restaurants and Walmart, whose workers are at the low end of the general wage scale in the US.

Union leaders know they are fighting long odds — hemmed in by legal decisions limiting how they can organize and protest, while trying to organize workers in industries of low skill and high turnover like fast food. But they hope to have come upon a winning strategy, applying some of the tactics that workers used before the Wagner Act created the federal legal right to unionize in 1935.

“We must go back to the strategies of nonviolent disruption of the 1930s,” suggests Stephen Lerner, a veteran organizer and strategist formerly at the Service Employees International Union, one of the unions behind the fast-food strike. “You can’t successfully organize without large-scale civil disobedience. The law will change when employers say there’s too much disruption. We need another system.”

In the 1990s and 2000s, the S.E.I.U. unionized tens of thousands of mostly Latino janitors from Los Angeles to Houston, including thousands of illegal immigrants, who were until then considered impossible to organize because of their legal status. It did so by putting pressure not only on the building maintenance contractors but also on the building owners who hired them, often resorting to bare-knuckle tactics. In 1990, the union asked members to mail their trash to Judd Malkin, the chairman of the company that owned buildings in the Century City complex in Los Angeles, printing his address on garbage bags. Mr. Malkin met Mr. Lerner soon thereafter.