Ramesh Ponnuru has an interesting piece titled, Real Union Enemy Isn’t Boeing, It’s Competition, on Bloomberg.com. Ponnuru contends that competition alone is killing private sector unionism and nothing the NLRB does will change that, nor should we wish upon ourselves the kind of less competitive more restrictive economy needed to support higher union density. According to the author, the steepest declines in private sector unionism have been within industries where less competitive unionized employers lost workers while more competitive non-union employers gained them. Death by competition also explains the exponential growth of unions in the public sector where no competition exists short of privatization. And historically, when the government discouraged competition, as it did during the Great Depression and WWII, unions flourish. “If we want to reverse the unions’ decline, the kind of labor-law changes that the Obama administration’s appointees to the NLRB have in mind — such as speeding up elections — are unlikely to do the trick. We would have to reduce competition among companies, too, domestically and internationally. The economy would have to be far more regulated than anyone in the mainstream of American politics has advocated. And we would almost certainly have to be willing to be a poorer country. We shouldn’t want any of that. Our country has plenty of economic problems. But we also have blessings, and the continued decline of labor unions is one of them.”
