Amerika

Back in the 1980s, American carmakers found themselves in trouble: the union wages they paid made American cars cost twice as much to manufacture as the Japanese cars, which as it turned out seem to run longer and better anyway. The industry was headed toward extinction.

Enter Lee Iacocca. He figured out that if you broke out the different parts of a car and manufactured those worldwide, you could assemble the final product in the USA and use far fewer workers. This broke the unions, who were also given a seat on the board, at which point the illusions about free money went out the window anyway.

However, the bigger problem remained. Thanks to American law, unions are legally protected; if your workers unionize, you cannot simply fire them and replace them like you would do with any other workplace problems. Instead, you have to negotiate and let them sabotage your businesses with strikes and shutdowns.

Since that era, American business has been wary of unions. Most of them moved manufacturing offshore not simply because it was less expensive but because there was less risk of union-based shutdowns. Many more started making most of their parts overseas since that way, unions had less power and costs were kept lower.

The great Boomer boom of the 1990s came about because all of the manufacturing shifted to China and all the money that was going into the hands of the unions went instead into the markets themselves. The country could breathe again without the union boot on its chest.

Now however unions have returned because government action has driven the price of — well, just about everything — to the point of unaffordability for most Americans. If you have a government or corporate job where you are vested, you will do fine; everyone else is patching, gluing, and bolting stuff together to stay solvent.

Consider the massive power that international organizations supporting unions have over our governments:

The Trades Union Congress has lodged a complaint with the UN’s labour standards body claiming the UK government flouted the watchdog’s orders over its newly enforced “undemocratic” anti-strike law.

Paul Nowak, the general secretary of the organising body for trade unions in England and Wales, said it had taken its case to the International Labour Organization (ILO) because the strike act was in breach of international law.

The bill requires staff to ensure minimum service levels during strikes by key sectors including emergency services, education and rail.

How dare they demand that ordinary people be able to get to work, the hospital, or schools? The unions are self-serving parasites like viruses, long having become detached from their original purpose, and now operate simply to take money out of the system, much of which the workers never see.

Like all forms of socialism, they operate on the principle of redistribution of income, which is the individualist idea that if there is money out there, it must be shared evenly. This guarantees that its value will decline because the new zero baseline is whatever everyone gets and there is no investment force to produce more income over time.

Where full Communism plunges straight into misery, state socialism tends to follow the pattern of penalizing the productive to fund the rest, which ends up creating a population of disinterested, amotivated, and oblivious people living lives of quiet misery. This eventually crashes whatever society chooses this path.

Unions in fact may decide the next presidential election as they threaten to completely crash the auto industry:

The UAW wants to ensure that workers who make electric batteries and other components in the new EVs get union benefits.

This is in some ways a life-or-death battle for the union. The EV transition is already predicted to significantly lower the number of jobs in the automotive sector in the short term, since you simply don’t need the same number of components and thus workers on an assembly line as you do to manufacture cars with internal combustion engines. Ford chief executive Jim Farley told the Financial Times back in 2022 that the EV transition might require 40 per cent fewer workers.

Union membership has declined hugely in the US over the past several decades, but it still represents a key part of the Democratic voting coalition. One of the reasons Donald Trump was elected in 2016 was because union labour in swing states such as Pennsylvania voted for him.

Before any of that comes home to rest, it is likely that unions will simply impoverish everyone not through “inflation” but what is properly described as a loss of currency value. When there is too much currency around or it is given out automatically, people spend less carefully and you end up with a consumerist bonanza followed by stagnation.

As they do so, they will continue to drive us toward diversity. Unions — like regulations, taxes, lawsuits, and affirmative action — pass on costs to businesses that drive zero return-on-investment, so the businesses pass those costs directly on to the consumer.

When that drives prices up to the point where their products become less competitive, those companies move offshore, outsource parts production, automate, and do anything else they can to reduce jobs. Fewer jobs means less risk of union activity. Production outsourced to China means very few union problems.

We are already seeing the destructive effects of unions on our industries, which are crippled by costs and shutdowns while other nations get ahead:

The United Auto Workers union’s walkout at three factories comes as American workers are striking at a pace not seen in nearly a quarter-century.

Last month, large stoppages from strikes resulted in 4.1 million missed days of work, according to the Labor Department. That preliminary estimate was the biggest monthly total since August 2000.

Over the past 30 years, the United Auto Workers has been involved in more than 60 work stoppages including 1,000 workers or more. The union represents employees in industries other than auto manufacturing.

Since conservatives have no idea what they are, many of them praise unions, seemingly not noticing that unions are in fact the very thing that has caused the rise of diversity, globalism, and socialism.

Tags: diversity, socialism, unions