THE SLIGHTLY MORE ALL POWERFUL LABOR UNIONS

It is well known throughout the public school houses and roadside massage parlors of this great America that within any business, or grossly similar entity, there will be found a conflict between ownership and labor. This conflict mostly arises from a divergence of goals. Labor wants a just and fair compensation for a just and fair effort. Ownership just wants to eat their children.

Given these irreconcilable dissimilarities there is not much wonder involved when labor withstands the demands of the all powerful owners by turning to the slightly more all powerful labor unions. Labor unions are not really all powerful, but they are awesome. They are awesome like Santa Claus. They are awesome like Santa Claus . . . only better. Santa Claus visits but once a year and even that is contingent upon the receipt of good behavior. Labor unions don’t care if you’re good. They don’t care if you eat all your vegetables or drink all your milk. You will never wake up one morning to discover that they are your parents . . . even if that is just the sort of relationship that any dealings with them eventually leads to. Labor unions will never leave coal in your stocking.

Or so it once was. Change has come. Now the unions, in some places and perhaps soon to be others, are the owners. This divergence with the past does nothing to rectify those divergences of the past. And therein lies the vapor rub. Unions will now have to act like owners. They will have to do the things that owners do. They will have to do these things or they will fail. And while they are doing that we must put on our serious faces for just a bit. After the unions helped to destroy the production industries in this nation they are now being given charge over them. So do they continue those practices? Do they move forward with their established and maintained view that business exists to serve as a conduit . . . a corridor of transit for property and wealth created by the business to the labor that served in concert with innumerable other devices producing product and service and is already compensated in salary? Or do they now aspire to the view that their actions will be actions that create a successful company and the ancillary benefits of working for a successful company will have to be enough to satisfy their spoiled, and often unskilled, laborers. Of course they will do the latter. The union is an entity apart from its plebe contributors and it acts best and always in its own interest. The trick now will be to convince those workers that what they’ve cited as ills and errors in the past are now the virtues and the valors of the present. Given what wools and wolves have so far, and so easily, been pulled over the coma peeps eyes I don’t think that trick will have to be so very impressive at all.

PS- All that nice stuff I said about unions at the beginning of this article . . . well I did not mean any of it!!!