Are Unions Still Important?

Unions are dying, and that is a measureable fact. Today, only 7% of the American workforce is a member of a union, down from 35% just a few decades ago. But it this good, or bad?

The strict capitalist will say it is good, because unions disrupt the free market. Because of unions, they say, the market cannot set the true price of labor, and thus, the owner-class has to artificially inflate the cost of goods. The moderate capitalist will respond by saying that unions prevent a downward spiral. The owner class wants to pay the worker the lowest wage possible. Thus, the worker will work more and more cheaply, in more and more dangerous working conditions, until finally there is no middle class left that can afford any goods and services. In the end, then, everyone, including those in the owner class, ends up poor.

I believe that the second argument is correct. I think that there is good evidence that the existence of collective bargaining saved capitalism from itself during much of the 20th century.

However, it does not follow that because unions were important in the past that they will always be important. I don’t have studies or statistics, but I do have my own experience to share. In between undergrad and grad school, I worked for a small business that manufactured and sold chemical cleaning products. There were about 75 full time employees, and no one thought about unionizing – we just didn’t need to. The owners of the company were extremely concerned about employee safety, and we were given a decent wage, medical benefits, educational opportunities, and a 401K.

I think that this is because the owners of that business knew that if they didn’t offer those things, the talented employees would simply go work somewhere else. But this opportunity has not always existed for people (and in some cases and in some areas of the country and the world, it still doesn’t exist). For example, 50 years ago, it probably would have been too complicated (socially, economically, and otherwise) for the metal worker unhappy with his compensation package simply to pick up and move to a different area of the country.

Today, however, the world is mobile. People change jobs and even careers all the time because they are unhappy with their current job. This forces the owner class to provide safe, comfortable working conditions and decent wages. So, while I disagree strongly with the strict capitalists that unions undermine capitalism, I don’t know if we still need them.

Any liberals more educated on the subject than I want to educate me about why I'm wrong here?

Explaining Religious Belief, Part Four

[Editor’s Note: I ran out of steam on this one, due to a newborn and a dissertation due date. This blog will be my last in this series before moving on to the global warming controversy (hint: both sides really annoy me) and then tax policy].

There have been several attempts by the skeptic to explain religious belief - two that I have addressed in some detail (seeking comfort, regulating ethical behavior) and some I haven’t (evolutionary by-product, seeking meaning in life, seeking power, etc). I have only a final observation: we may observe that it is unlikely that all of those theories could be true. For example, if religious belief were a by-product of evolutionary development as some claim, that would seem to undermine that claim that religion was invented as a way to regulate ethical behavior. Or if religion was invented merely as an attempt to gain power and control people’s minds (think Gary Oldman’s character in The Book of Eli), then it doesn’t seem possible that religion was invented for the sake of comfort.

I say this because atheists and agnostics seem to think that they are on the same page, and congratulate each other on ‘exposing’ religion. You may over-hear this sentence in coffee shops: “Well, I just think religion is….” And then everyone at the table fills in the blank differently: “…an attempt to control people’s minds, ….an evolutionary development, ….a futile quest for meaning in a meaningless world.” I’m all for dialogue and disagreement, of course, but in this case, those in the dialogue seem to be content to know that they have the same opinion (i.e. that religion belief is misguided). But they simply seem to gloss over the fact that their various justifications for their common opinion are incompatible.

And I’m not just thinking of the undereducated agnostics in coffee shops, but also of highly educated anthropologists and sociologists who write important books on the subject. What we have to keep in mind is that scholarship on the origin of religion is constantly contradicting previous scholarship. I think that this should make us skeptical of any attempt to ‘sum it up,’ – that is, to present some grand narrative that claims to explain the origins of religious belief in general. It seems that every direction I turn, I hear someone offering a new and better theory about the origin of religion, which in turn is undermined by a newer and even better theory. Perhaps this tells us something about this ubiquitous human phenomenon.