WASHINGTON – For all the fury and fistfights outside the Lansing Capitol, what
happened in Michigan this week was a simple accommodation to reality. The most
famously unionized state, birthplace of the United Auto Workers, royalty of the
American working class, became right-to-work.
It’s shocking, except that
it was inevitable. Indiana went that way earlier this year. The entire Rust Belt
will eventually follow because the heyday of the sovereign private-sector union
is gone. Globalization has made splendid isolation impossible.
The
nostalgics look back to the immediate postwar years when the UAW was
all-powerful, the auto companies were highly profitable and the world was
flooded with American cars. In that Golden Age, the UAW won wages, benefits and
protections that were the envy of the world.
Today’s angry protesters
demand a return to that norm.
Except that it was not a norm but a
historical anomaly.
America, alone among the great industrial powers,
emerged unscathed from World War II. Japan was a cinder, Germany rubble, and the
allies – beginning with Britain and France – an exhausted shell of their former
imperial selves.
For a generation, America had the run of the
world.
Then the others recovered. Soon global competition – from
Volkswagen to Samsung – began to overtake American industry that was saddled
with protected, inflated, relatively uncompetitive wages, benefits and work
rules.
There’s a reason Detroit went bankrupt while the southern auto
transplants did not. This is not to exonerate incompetent overpaid management
that contributed to the fall. But clearly the wage, benefit and work-rule gap
between the unionized North and the right-to-work South was a major
factor.
President Obama railed against the Michigan legislation, calling
right-to-work “giving you the right to work for less money.”
Well, there
is a principle at stake here: A free country should allow its workers to choose
whether or not to join a union. Moreover, it is more than slightly ironic that
Democrats, the fiercely pro-choice party, reserve free choice for aborting a
fetus, while denying it for such matters as choosing your child’s school or
joining a union.
Principle and hypocrisy aside, however, the president’s
statement has some validity. Let’s be honest: Right-to-work laws do weaken
unions. And de-unionization can lead to lower wages.
But there is another
factor at play: having a job in the first place. In right-to-work states, the
average wage is about 10 percent lower. But in right-to-work states,
unemployment also is about 10 percent lower.
Higher wages or lower
unemployment? It is a wrenching choice. Although, you would think that liberals
would be more inclined to spread the wealth – i.e., the jobs – around,
preferring somewhat lower pay in order to leave fewer fellow workers mired in
unemployment.
Think of the moral calculus. Lower wages cause an
incremental decline in one’s well-being. No doubt. But for the unemployed, the
decline is categorical, sometimes catastrophic – a loss not just of income but
of independence and dignity.
Nor does protectionism offer escape from
this dilemma.
Shutting out China and the others deprives less well-off
Americans of access to the kinds of goods once reserved for the upper classes:
quality clothing, furnishings, electronics, durable goods – from the
Taiwanese-manufactured smartphone to the affordable, highly functional
Kia.
Globalization taketh away. But it giveth more. The net benefit of
free trade has been known since, oh, 1817. (See David Ricardo and the Law of
Comparative Advantage.) There is no easy parachute from reality.
Obama
calls this a race to the bottom. No, it’s a race to a new equilibrium that tries
to maintain employment levels, albeit at the price of some modest wage decline.
It is a choice not to be despised.
I have great admiration for the
dignity and protections trade unionism has brought to American workers. I have
no great desire to see the private-sector unions defenestrated. (Like
FDR, Fiorello La Guardia and George Meany, however, I don’t extend that sympathy
to public-sector unions.) But rigidity and nostalgia have a price. The
industrial Midwest is littered with the resulting wreckage. Michigan most
notably, where its formerly great metropolis of Detroit is reduced to boarded-up
bankruptcy by its inability and unwillingness to adapt to global
change.
It’s easy to understand why a state such as Michigan would seek
to recover its competitiveness by emulating the success of neighboring Indiana.
One can sympathize with those who pine for the union glory days, while at the
same time welcoming the new realism that promises not an impossible restoration,
but desperately needed – and doable – recalibration and recovery.
Charles
Krauthammer’s email address is [email protected]
(c) 2012,
The Washington Post Writers Group
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