The Truth about Labor Unions | Thomas Sowell - YouTube

The biggest myth about labor unions is that  unions are for the workers. Unions are for unions,  

just as corporations are for corporations and  politicians are for politicians. Nothing shows the  

utter cynicism of the unions and the politicians  who do their bidding like the so-called “Employee  

Free Choice Act” that the Obama administration  tried to push through Congress. Workers’ free  

choice as to whether or not to join a union is  precisely what that legislation would destroy.  

Workers already have a free choice in  secret-ballot elections conducted under  

existing laws. As more and more workers in the  private sector have voted to reject having a  

union represent them, the unions’ answer has  been to take away secret-ballot elections.  

Under the “Employee Free Choice Act” unions  would not have to win in secret ballot elections  

in order to represent the workers. Instead, union  representatives could simply collect signatures  

from the workers until they had a majority. Why  do we have secret ballots in the first place,  

whether in elections for unions or elections for  government officials? To prevent intimidation and  

allow people to vote how they want to, without  fear of retaliation. This is a crucial right  

that unions want to take away from workers.  The actions of union mobs in Wisconsin, Ohio  

and elsewhere give us a free home demonstration  of how little they respect the rights of those  

who disagree with them and how much they rely  on harassment and threats to get what they want.  

It takes world-class chutzpa to call circumventing  secret ballots the “Employee Free Choice Act.”  

To unions, workers are just the raw material used  to create union power, just as iron ore is the raw  

material used by U.S. Steel and bauxite is the raw  material used by the Aluminum Company of America.  

The most fundamental fact about  labor unions is that they do not  

create any wealth. The are one of a growing  number of institutions which specialize in  

siphoning off wealth created by others, whether  those others are businesses or the taxpayers.  

There are limits to how long unions can siphon  off money from businesses, without facing serious  

economic repercussions. The most famous labor  union leader, the legendary John L. Lewis,  

head of the United Mine Workers from 1920 to 1960,  secured rising wages and job benefits for the coal  

miners, far beyond what they could have gotten  out of a free market based on supply and demand.  

But there is no free lunch. An economist  at the University of Chicago called John L.  

Lewis “the world’s greatest oil salesman.” His  strikes that interrupted the supply of coal,  

as well as the resulting wage increases that  raised its price, caused many individuals  

and businesses to switch from using coal to using  oil, leading to reduced employment of coal miners.  

The higher wage rates also led coal companies  to replace many miners with machines.  

The net result was a huge decline in  employment in the coal mining industry,  

leaving many mining towns virtually ghost towns by  the 1960s. There is no free lunch. Similar things  

happened in the unionized steel industry and in  the unionized automobile industry. At one time,  

U.S. Steel was the largest steel producer  in the world and General Motors the largest  

automobile manufacturer. No more. Their unions  were riding high in their heyday, but they too  

discovered that there is no free lunch, as their  members lost jobs by the hundreds of thousands.  

Workers have also learned that there is  no free lunch, which is why they have,  

over the years, increasingly voted against being  represented by unions in secret ballot elections.  

One set of workers, however, remained  largely immune to such repercussions.  

These are government workers  represented by public sector unions.  

While oil could replace coal, while U.S.  Steel dropped from number one in the world  

to number ten, and Toyota could replace General  Motors as the world’s leading producer of cars,  

government is a monopoly. Nobody is likely to  replace the federal or state bureaucracies,  

no matter how much money the unions drain from  the taxpayers. That is why government unions