Fault Lines

I think that Reason magazine's evident conviction that a Democratic president making fairly bland pro-labor statements and his political party seeking to curry favor with one of their larger single voting blocs in the run-up to a presidential election year are characteristics of the imperial presidency, right up there with the presidential right of assassination and the long global war on everyone everywhere all the time, is both partially true and faintly, hilariously hysterical, like the notion that Christina Aguilera's botched Superbowl anthem signals irreversibly an America in decline--true, but not true. And I think that the Reason magazine staff's understanding of unions, collective bargaining, and labor negotiations occupies a mental rung just barely, barely up-ladder from the Matthew Yglesias contribution to the field of economics: it has, in particular, that spectacular internal consistency that is inevitably born of being persistently and insistently wrong.

Unlike most Reason writers, I have had the occasion to negotiate union contracts, always on the side of management, and as I must--persistently and insistently--remind my colleagues, some of whom were also on the goddamned negotiating team, we agreed to the terms and conditions that we love to bitch about. CBAs are not imposed by powerful union goon squads on helpless managers, although hapless managers can be out-negotiated by the stubborn dummies who make up most union leadership. It isn't a wholly unfair point that public employee unions benefit from negotiating with political factions they helped to elect, but anyone involved in a large enterprise with a union shop (or several) finds this point, pulled out like a real Trump in the linked Welch post, likewise faintly laughable, because it is always, always, always the case that mutual interests muddy the adversarial nature of labor negotiations and drive both sides to make disadvantageous concessions in the name of the collective scam.

Management in any case has all the real advantages in a negotiation if management is willing to use them. But most of the time, managers are lazy negotiators and fail to do their work in advance. An unconquerable belief that unions are irrational combined with a childlike wonderment in the face of a bargaining unit that does not acquiesce to management demands with the supine, college-educated spinelessness of the at-will staff in the upstairs offices, leads managers to enter negotiations with functionally final proposals. A few union officials willing to start off asking for the sun, moon, and stars then move toward a more agreeable (for them) middle, which is still far from what management wants. But management just sat dumbly reiterating the points that it thought every rational person would naturally agree to. And in the end, managers are pissed that they got what they consider a bad deal, because it was not the shining deal they wanted, and they act like they had nothing to do with it, even though they were at the table the whole time.

You could of course try to do a better job negotiating next time, or you could try to make unions illegal as punishment for your or your predecessors' terrible tactics, absent strategy, and lack of acumen at the bargaining table. This is the lens through which you have to view various state efforts to make collective bargaining illegal and to decertify labor unions: management is trying to punish labor for management's own failures.