If Jimmy Hoffa really did believe his claim that he had many faults, but that being wrong wasn’t one of them, his ghost would have smiled on the picketers who installed themselves outside of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation last Monday. The protest, which originated from WARF’s decision to hire non-unionized workers in the two food establishments in its soon-to-open building, drew 70 people in a show of solidarity with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees’ Madison Chapter, and a threat to protest at the house of WARF Managing Director Carl Gulbrandson.
Bizarre threats to harass someone’s private residence aside, the union’s tantrum also merited a column from Sam Stevenson (“Chancellor, WARF threaten unionized labor at WID” September 21), who elaborated on the numerous benefits a unionized society bestows, such as “affirming collective bargaining, the right to a living, family-supporting wage,” after characterizing Chancellor Martin as a corporate lackey.
Unions, in some form, do exactly what Stevenson argues. By restricting a supply of labor, they reap a greater share of rewards for those they designate suitable to provide it. Food has been put on many an American table in such a manner, and it would be irresponsible to blatantly mischaracterize any striving for a better existence via agitation as a somehow insidious plot to steal from an ever-more elusive pie.
But equally irresponsible is the crassly oversimplified presentation of unions as a source of unequivocal good – a nostalgic reincarnation of Robin Hood for a student body that lost its sense of mission as memories of the Nixon era faded. Since their inception, unions have been at the forefront of the push for better working conditions and the abolition of, among other crimes, child labor. They have also contributed, in no shortage of abysmal ways, to the endemic stagnation of the country’s workforce.
Stevenson owed to himself, if not his readership, a look at the empirical literature for a nuanced picture. And examples refuting his point abound. There’s the National Bureau of Economic Research study which concluded that the unionization and subsequent striking power of nurses increased in-hospital mortality by 19.4 percent. Or the now-famous tale of GM’s Job Bank – in which workers were paid to sit around while the company went bankrupt. Then again, it is readily apparent to anybody willing to listen that unions do not exist in the utopian vacuum Stevenson so ably conjured for his column. But bad axioms don’t die easy, and class warfare would be much more difficult if we admitted that not everyone fits into the monolithic groupings we designed for them at the outset of the Industrial Revolution.
Fact will always get a bad rap in editorial sections. Such is the nature of a medium whose audience finds serious discussion less desirable than the heads of those in opposition. But equating this university’s chancellor with the previous century’s robber barons because of two non-union restaurants is not only antiquated, it lowers the discourse for everyone. Including those of us who have better things to do than paint Hitler mustaches on those we disagree with. WARF is right to have critically examined the validity of unions in its budget, however shrill the response. Further, given that state support for higher education will inevitably decline, Martin would be well-advised to ask if the savings from de-unionizing other parts of campus would find a better home in the pockets of her most debt-ridden students. That is, if she can stand the dumb insistence among campus leftists that she is really just the love child of Big Brother and Big Money.
Stevenson, after an admittedly well-written tribute to organized labor’s role in an industrialized society, goes on to pave his success over with clich?, claiming “it doesn’t take a graduate student to identify the underdogs” in this ultimately childish conflict over the American worker’s dubiously helpful intermediary. He’s right. However WARF’s strange, inflammatory run-in with labor concludes itself, both ends of the spectrum will have missed yet another opportunity to treat each other honestly.
Sam Clegg ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in economics.
