I remember when I was young, I got into a lot of discussions with family members who were union guys. Cops and firemen and iron workers and other trades. And they always said that the Republicans were bad for America because they were on the side of big business. Now this was while the Big Three automakers were taking it on the chin from Toyota and Honda and I was claiming that the UAW was the problem. I said the union workers were getting paid three times what auto workers made in Japan and because of that Ford couldn’t sell cars in America at a profit.
And maybe I was right about that. At least maybe partially. Maybe partially the Ford and GM engineers weren’t as good at making cars as their Japanese colleagues. But whatever the case, American autoworkers priced themselves right out of a lucrative industry and Toyota ate Detroit’s lunch.
I guess American industry’s takeaway from this lesson was if you can’t beat’em, join’em. And so, they decided not only to get rid of all those pesky union workers in America but also the engineers, the management and even the plant too and just have everything made in East Asia. Whether it’s China or Vietnam or Thailand, the correct play was to make it over there at a fraction of the manufacturing cost via third world labor rates. Well, you can’t say that our business leaders aren’t innovative.
Forty years of watching American corporate policy has cured me of cheering for the captains and the kings of industry. I can see now that coordination between government, industry and labor is the correct way to maintain a healthy balance that benefits consumers, workers and capital. In the post World War II era I think Japan is the model that I would point to as a workable model. Of course, American government, culture and business practices differ substantially from Japan but I think that the American government’s handling of industrial policy has been demonstratively deficient in providing the American workers with gainful employment and has also failed to maintain a satisfactory minimum base of manufacturing capacity to assure independence in the case hostile governments withholding commerce in strategic materials.
So, over the course of these many years I have had a chance to reconsider my stand on labor/management relations. What I’ve decided is that the government’s role is critical. There must be balance that involves preventing a monopoly from existing on either the business or the labor side. Competition should exist both between individual corporations and individual unions. A union monopoly is just as detrimental to business as a corporate monopoly is to consumer concerns. And one other union problem I see is that government workers shouldn’t be unionized at all.
Another government concern is that manufacturers of products required for national defense and other critical applications should be made domestically. All of this requires minds that can think strategically and without prejudice for either side of the labor/management divide. But we have nothing like that going on in Washington.
When I look at the situation as it currently stands for such critical manufacturing as high-end computer microprocessors and battle field munitions and our current dependence on foreign manufacturers, it makes me wonder if our political leaders are idiots or traitors. We have allowed most of our industrial manufacturing capacity to be disassembled and sent offshore to China. This disregard for the lack of gainful employment of their countrymen has to be discouraged in the only way these corporations understand; their bottom line. It must be legislated that if their products are built by foreign workers then they will be tariffed and taxed the same as any foreign products brought into this country.
So, forty some-odd years later here I am saying where’s the “Made in USA” label on that MAGA hat?
