Are Unions Necessary?

March 18, 1957

The testimony before a Senate committee that high union officials used union funds to engage in organized gambling, bootlegging, and vice has produced some moral indignation—but not enough to lead to any serious move in Congress for legal changes adequate to curb the immense irresponsible private power of unions, and of union officials over their own rank-and-file members.

Fortunately there is increasing evidence of a tendency in academic circles to challenge the century-old premises on which most present one-sided pro-union legislation is based. In a later article I hope to discuss at length two important new books—The Labor Policy of a Free Society, by Sylvester Petro, and Why Wages Rise, by F.A. Harper. But I should like to take up first a remarkable article which appeared in the September issue of Encounter, a monthly magazine published in London.

The title of this article is “Are Trade Unions Necessary?” Its author is Peter Wiles, a fellow of New College, Oxford. “In strict economics,” Wiles begins, “there is scarcely any case for the continued existence of trade unions in a fully employed welfare state.” He then runs through a whole series of traditional pro-union arguments, and starts knocking them down right and left. There is space to quote only a few excerpts.

SPIN OUT THE JOB

“Even in previous conditions of our society, trade unions may well have done more harm than good; modern social history is very sentimental, and handles them quite uncritically. . . .

“Shortening of the hours of work did little economic harm when the working week was 60 hours, and may even sometimes have increased actual production; it is certainly not harmless in the twentieth century when 44 hours is the standard working week.” (Forty hours here.)

“Full employment? But trade unions can only establish fixed employment, by making it more difficult for employers to sack labor—and even then they usually also make it more difficult for them to hire labor. . . .

“Again, trade unions can maintain what we may call unproductive employment, i.e., they can spread the work by resisting the introduction of labor-saving machinery or by making their members spin out the job in hand. These two measures are obviously worse than fixed employment; indeed from the economic point of view they are simply crimes. . . .

“Even if it be admitted that collective bargaining keeps down profits, or increases the general share of wages in the national income, this is not a good thing at all. For it hits investment, since a firm only desires to install machinery if it is profitable, and most of the finance for such things comes either from its own or someone else’s profits. And without investment economic growth is slowed down. . . . A really severe cut in profits would stop progress altogether. . . .”

CLOSED-SHOP RESULTS

“Of course, collective bargaining is a potent source of injustice in the distribution of income. It is truly amazing that anyone should suppose this crude, selfish, violent, and piecemeal process to contribute to social justice. . . . All that collective bargaining can ensure is that some workers do better than others. . . .

“The closed shop is about the worst threat to liberty in modern Britain. . . . It is a terrifying example of the moral blindness of this post-Christian, post-Liberal age that men have been driven to suicide because a union sent them to Coventry. . . . What grosser tyranny is there than that?. . . .

“It is not only a question of persuading the trade unions to be reasonable over this or that. Economic reasonableness contradicts their very nature, their history, and their deepest inclinations. . . . The question is trade-union abolition.”

The final sentence does more honor to Wiles’s courage than to his judgment. It is an infringement of individual freedom for government to abridge the right of voluntary association. But it is surely the government’s duty to protect the individual worker against compulsory association, and it should certainly stop forcing employers exclusively to “recognize” and “bargain with” any particular union, no matter how unreasonable its demands or conduct may be.