After Years of Lobbying for Job Killing Policies Unions Favorability Ratings Remain Low
The latest installation of Gallup’s long running polling data regarding Americans preferences towards labor unions reveals that Americans approval of unions remains near an all-time low—52 percent of Americans approve of labor unions, 48 percent disapprove. Peaking in the 1950s, union popularity amongst Americans has steadily declined over the past half century with labor’s approval ratings dropping off a cliff in recent years.
Gallup’s graph helps illustrate this point:
Gallup’s polling data illustrates Americans disenchantment with organized labor and its job killing, protectionist policies. With unemployment hovering around 10 percent and workers taking pay cuts and furloughs just to keep their jobs, Americans are making sacrifices. These same Americans grow resentful when they look at organized labor who has been coddled by the current Administration, often at the expense of the rest of the nation.
Armand Thieblot highlights a number of union handouts dolled out since President Obama took office:
“(The) rescinding of four Bush anti-union executive orders and issuing two pro-union ones; the Lilly Ledbetter law; the 35 percent tariff on tires imported from China; the scrapping of the Mexican-truck experiment; the buy-American provisions in the $787 billion bailout package; the dropped plans for free-trade agreements with Panama, Colombia, and South Korea; the preferential treatment of unions in the GM and Chrysler bailout deals; the changes in voting rules under the Railway Labor Act elections favoring unions; the rescinding of the more vigorous reporting requirement under LMRDA implemented in 2004; the muzzling of employer free speech during union elections and contract negotiations; the appointment of dozens of vocal union activists to putatively neutral jobs, commissions, and boards; and the fact that Andy Stern (SEIU), Richard Trumka (AFL-CIO) and John Sweeney (AFL-CIO) have been among the most frequently entertained guests at the White House.”
All of these policies negatively affect non-union members by raising prices for goods, increasing government spending, and unnecessarily increasing competition in workers in other industries. The high-wage doctrine implemented by unions reduces the number of workers that can be employed in a unionized shop.
An overly simplistic example:
A unionized coal mine is forced to pay the union wage of $25 per hour. The non-union coal company pays its workers $20 per hour. For every four workers the unionized coal mine hires the non-unionized mine can hire five workers, reducing overall unemployment.
This puts additional pressure on the rest of the non-union labor market as now more people are competing for jobs, thus, driving up the unemployment rate and depressing wages for every non-union member, a vast majority of the workforce. Americans are feeling this pressure more than ever and have begun to rebel against these policies and the Democratic majority which enables them.
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