TA groups guiding hand of free democracy

Thursday, January 14, 1999

TA groups guiding hand of free democracy

UNIONS: Labor organizations help workers maintain rights, keep
authorities in check

By Jeff Smith

With the continuing labor dispute between the university and its
teaching assistants (TAs), Daily Bruin readers have been exposed to
many arguments on whether teaching assistants should unionize. But
as often happens, the immediate controversy obscures more basic
issues – such as what unions fundamentally are and what role they
play in a free society. a

I don’t know what students already know on these matters, but
it’s no secret that our schools don’t teach history (including
labor history) very well. Worse, the pressure students are under to
put jobs and careers uppermost in their thinking encourages them to
not question the authority of employers and managers. After all,
those are the people whose favor they will shortly be going out to
seek.

Unions arise when people question that authority. They are an
effort to put "checks and balances" in the way of employers who
otherwise, as history shows, are prone to becoming tyrants. And,
like other systems of checks and balances, unions have played a key
role in creating and maintaining democratic freedom.

To people who have never doubted that corporate executives
should rule the world – who believe that, somehow, employers and
managers are the one class of human beings who can be trusted to
behave in everyone’s best interest, not just their own – checks and
balances will seem, at best, pointless. It may even seem wrong: an
illegitimate interference in the "natural" workings of the free
market.

Views such as these were expressed, for instance, by David
Miller in his Dec. 7 Viewpoint article ("’Invisible Hand’
determines value of TA labor"). Miller argued that unions interfere
with the free market’s "invisible hand," which otherwise functions
in an entirely rational way to set the cost of labor. By virtue of
the invisible hand, the "right" wage for a job will emerge as
employers and employees bargain over pay, with employers making
offers and workers either accepting them or looking for better
ones.

Let’s think about that for a moment.

The "invisible hand" theory was originally put forward as a
rationale for keeping government from over-regulating the market.
But what if government is itself the employer? The TA case is a
good example.

The University of California’s management is an arm of the state
of California; it is the TAs’ group which is the private entity
here (a relationship Miller got precisely backwards). One could say
that if a TA union does materialize, it will be because of, not in
spite of, the invisible hand.

Even where the employer is private – Ford Motor Co., say – union
action still is not the same as government regulation. The union,
too, is a private group. Its job is indeed to limit the company’s
freedom to act however it wishes, but that’s because otherwise the
bargaining between employer and worker is too one-sided; the
employer has all the advantages of size, organization and
funding.

At base, unions are simply associations of private individuals
who agree to link their own job decisions to their fellow
workers’.

Unions "pool" people’s labor, just as corporations pool
capital.

Their main tools – collective bargaining and strikes – are
assertions of the same right all individuals have to offer or
withhold their work as they see fit. Unionized workers merely
assert that right as a group, not one-by-one.

This is no more an interference with the invisible hand than is
any other form of voluntary association. Like churches, clubs,
community groups and political parties, unions are agencies of what
political theorists call civil society, that layer of "mediating"
institutions on which freedom depends.

That’s why the First Amendment guarantees our freedom of
association, and why, conversely, totalitarian states and dictators
outlaw unions or put them under the government’s control – just as
they control churches, parties and private groups of all kinds.

Ask the leaders of the old Soviet empire, for whom a union,
Solidarity, and an unauthorized strike in a Polish shipyard proved
to be the beginning of the end.

Our country, too, once experimented with outlawing unions and
strikes. Partly in consequence, even conventional factories were
what we would now call sweatshops. Young children often were forced
to work. Days were long, and wages were low enough to keep
employees in a lifetime of servitude. Vacations? Pensions? Health
benefits? Forget it.

It was union demands and collective action that changed this,
creating the eight-hour day and other aspects of working life we
now take for granted. Perhaps, of most importance, unions helped
win ordinary people the right to vote. Absent their efforts, there
would be no real democracy in the modern sense at all.

Today, democratic governments protect the rights of unions
(though not always well). Does that cramp the invisible hand? Well,
similar government protection also makes business corporations
possible – for instance, by granting them limited liability.
Neither unions nor corporations are more or less natural; both
exist as a result of decisions we’ve made as a society, and because
they are the best means yet found to meet certain kinds of human
needs.

Unions, like businesses and governments, can be wrong. Some
strikes are a bad idea; maybe the TAs’ was, though I doubt it. But
as Abraham Lincoln said, "Thank God that we have a system of labor
where there can be a strike." Opposing unionism as such is neither
logical nor well informed.

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