Detroit was a one-industry company town run by executives
who forgot how to make cars people wanted to buy.
There I was, sitting
at my desk and looking out of the window — you know, writing — when my wife
came in and plopped down a newspaper article in front of me.
“Read that,” she said
with a cruel twinkle in her eye.
It was an article on
Detroit by George Will, one of my least favorite columnists. I find his smug
arrogance insufferable.
His article on Detroit was no exception. It began with a quotation from Darwin, followed by a biology lecture.
Eventually he got to
the subject of Detroit. It seems he had come to Detroit, looked around, and
discovered the source of its considerable misery.
Unions. That’s what
did Detroit in, Will said — unions and their handmaiden, democracy.
And public unions were
supposedly the worst. They were able to help elect the corrupt politicians who
granted them fat paychecks and fatter pensions, all while private companies
were complicit.
“Auto industry
executives, who often were invertebrate mediocrities, continually bought labors
peace by mortgaging their companies’ futures in surrenders to union demands,”
he wrote.
That’s why they pay
Will the big bucks. He can parachute into a place and within a few hours figure
things out. Union members are greedy. End of story.
If he had asked me
about it, I could have saved him the trip. Of course unions are greedy. A
hundred years ago, they asked Samuel Gompers, the most powerful labor leader of
his day, what labor wanted and he answered: “More.”
They did then and they
do now. So does everybody else. If I’m not mistaken, Will gets upwards of
$20,000 for delivering a speech to fat cats who want to hear their prejudices
festooned with high-class quotations. But that’s not greed — apparently, it’s
the free-market system.
We live in an economic
environment where it’s not at all unusual for an executive of a struggling
corporation to rake in a million dollars or more in annual compensation.
And if a CEO should be
fired for incompetence, he or she gets a gold-plated severance package that
makes no sense.
Then there are those
financiers paid to move piles of money from one place to another — often for no
useful purpose. They always take the trouble to keep a tidy sum for themselves,
then claim the right to be taxed at a lower rate than the rest of us.
And take those
“entrepreneurs,” like Mitt Romney, who will buy up a healthy company, scoop out
its value for their own profit, then leave the shell to the workers, bereft of
jobs, pensions, or benefits.
In that atmosphere, do
you really expect union workers to sit back and say “Oh, please don’t pay us anymore.
It might hurt the long-term health of the community.”
Get real.
Yes, Detroit’s public
unions were shortsighted, but had they been less so it wouldn’t have made much
difference.
Detroit was a
one-industry company town run by executives who forgot what that industry was —
making cars that people wanted to buy. When the companies began to fail and the
jobs began to leave town, the city’s obituary was written on the walls of its
ruined factories, unions or no.
Labor unions are among
our most vilified institutions these days, their influence disappearing. The
last session of the Michigan legislature passed a so-called “right-to-work” law
that gutted labor rights, for crying out loud.
Unions deserve some of
the criticism they get, certainly, but the answer to the problems they cause is
not extermination, but reform. Unlike hedge fund managers, they owe their
origins to need as well as greed.
Unions brought a
degree of social justice to the workplace. They gave the average working stiff
a sense of dignity that laissez faire capitalism denied him or her.
You want a country
without unions? Try China, where workers have virtually no rights and workers
endure appalling conditions. Or perhaps you’d prefer Russia? I understand
Siberia is nice this time of year.
Workers of the
world…aw, forget it.
OtherWords columnist
Donald Kaul grew up in Detroit and now lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
OtherWords.org