Tag Archives: jobs

In Which Rubio is Mistaken

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The Senate passed a bill mandating a labor agreement agreed by railroad companies, management teams of a dozen rail unions, and the rank-and-file of most of those unions be imposed on all of those unions and railroad companies. The bill also barred a rail union strike.

In a separate vote, the Senate failed to pass a bill imposing a number of paid sick leave days for union employees on the rail companies.

Senator Marco Rubio (R, FL) is dismayed.

When workers are treated as little more than line items on a spreadsheet, they become indistinguishable from the freight cars they service….

And

…the measure only granted rail workers one day of paid sick leave all year—a stipulation that Rubio said “underwhelmed and alienated the men and women doing the hard work.”

And

Congress…told rail workers to suck it up and be grateful. We should have worked to meet the demands of the workers instead of appeasing labor leaders and companies.

Most, if not all, of that likely is true.

However.

It doesn’t matter how much any of that might seem like a good idea, or might even be a good idea, over the duration of a contract. It’s not government’s job to set the work compensation parameters for employers and their employees. Most especially, it is not government’s job to meet the demands of the workers. It’s government’s job to set the market conditions within which employers and employees can negotiate those parameters freely.

Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT) wasn’t far off with his dig at Rubio: I always knew you were a socialist.

Government is a system of men and women, not an entity in itself. What those men and women might think is a good idea will vary over time for those men and women and certainly will vary as different men and women come into government from time to time. We need only see how government “good ideas” vary as Republicans or Progressive-Democrats are in ascendance from one Congress or administration to another.

At most—at most—where a national risk is in play (for instance, a steel worker industry-wide strike or lockout, or a nation-wide rail strike or lockout), government might require the two sides to settle through binding arbitration a disagreement they can’t settle through negotiation. With the arbiters chosen by the two disputants, not by government.

He Can’t Be Serious

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Can he?

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said in a speech last Wednesday that the overheated labor market needs to cool more for the Fed to be confident inflation could decrease toward its 2% goal. He said the biggest remaining barrier to taming inflation is a worker shortage, which is driving up wages and, in turn, the cost of goods and services.
“The labor market … shows only tentative signs of rebalancing, and wage growth remains well above levels that would be consistent with 2% inflation,” Powell said. “We want wages to go up strongly, but they’ve got to go up at a level that is consistent with 2% inflation over time.”

How is it business’ fault the Federal government insists, via monetary policy, on paying able-bodied workers not to work with its wealth of welfare payments?

How is it business’ fault the Fed initiated the present high inflation with its own profligate fiscal policy of injecting trillions of dollars into our economy with its artificially suppressed interest rates and its heavy Federal debt funding?

How is it business’ fault that the Federal government and the Fed insist on working at cross purposes in “managing” our economy and fighting inflation instead of letting our erstwhile free market economy—an intrinsically self-correcting economic system—run free and bring that Fed-government-caused inflation under control?

How is it business’ fault that they keep raising wages within their other inflation-caused rising costs so their employees can at least lose inflation-caused value on their wages more slowly?

But What is the Or Else?

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President Joe Biden (D) is right, this time, and so are Congressional politicians (assuming they actually can get anything done on this), to move to block the coming railroad strike.

But. But, but, but.

What is the or else here? What enforcement mechanism can the government use to enforce its no-strike diktat against the railroad workers? Not against the unions, but against the rail workers?

It isn’t union leadership, after all, who have rejected the just-negotiated agreements, it’s the rank-and-file, the folks who actually do the work, who’ve rejected the agreement.

How would the government deal with the rail worker equivalent of the Blue Flu?

How would the government deal with another standard union tactic: working explicitly and exactly to the letter of the relevant regulations and the letter of the law about to be imposed on the railroad businesses and labor unions, with the result of a drastic slowdown in work performance?

How would the government deal with an overt strike, where the workers of one or more of the four unions explicitly walk off the job (and the workers of the other unions walk out in solidarity or at the least refuse to cross the picket lines)?

Mass arrests in the latter case? Where would the government find the replacement workers? The rail lines still would be shut down until those replacement workers could be found and hired, assuming anyone qualified actually would be interested.

Certainly, civil action with civil—financial—penalties could be taken, but how much will those matter if the union workers themselves have already determined they have nothing to lose? Their beef, after all, isn’t about higher wages, it’s about the quality of the work environment and work benefits, canonized by the number of sick days allowed.

I’ve seen no evidence that anyone in the Federal government is thinking about a response to the possibility the workers call government’s…bluff(?).

Anti-Democratic

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Progressive-Democratic President Joe Biden claims he’s worried about anti-democratic forces in play in today’s American politics.

We must vote knowing who we have been and what we’re at risk of becoming. We must vote knowing what’s at stake and not just the policy of the moment—but institutions that have held us together, as we’ve sought a more perfect union, are also at stake.

Here’s one of those democratic institutions that’s at risk even after the just-completed elections—from Biden and his National Labor Relations Board:

[The] National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) announced it would start the process rescind a 2020 rule implemented to protect workers’ right to vote on removing union representation.

The institution of company employees isn’t to be allowed to exercise—by voting in particular—their right to not join a union or their right to vote to decertify an existing union.

Never mind two central facts.

According to NLRB data, among petitions filed to hold elections to install or remove a union, a unionized private-sector worker was more than twice as likely to attempt to decertify union representation than a nonunion worker was to unionize….

And

[A] pro-union group, The Worker Power Coalition, argues the “surge in worker organizing is the largest in more than 50 years,” and the data shows a 53% increase in union representation petitions….

That’s democracy in the workplace in action. That’s democracy that the Hero of Democracy in the White House wants to destroy.

Rationalization

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Congresswoman Katie Porter (D, CA) is on Leave Without Pay from her job teaching law at the University of California, Irvine, and has been for the last four years while she serves in Congress. The concept isn’t particularly unusual; what draws attention is that the normal California (or at least UC Irvine) LWOP period is two years, and the school has just approved (after the fact) extending Porter’s status for the period January 2021 through December 2022.

What drew my attention, though, is the rationalization used by the UCI Dean, L Song Richardson, in arguing successfully for the decision to extend Porter’s status, especially after a senior Academic Personnel analyst at UCI had formally recommended against the extension.

…from the university’s perspective, it would not shed a good light on UCI for a member of the US House of Representatives to be told to either resign from a democratically-elected position or resign from UCI.
Moreover, this seems inconsistent with the aspiration for members of UCI’s faculty to serve at the highest levels of national public service. Finally, to have an elected member of the United States Congress who can advocate on behalf of Orange County, including UCI, surely has significant benefits for the campus.
I am also certain that when news of our decision to not grant her a leave of absence through the end of her second term in office goes public, it would surely reflect very badly on UCI[.]

[I]t would not shed a good light on UCI…. Here’s the school being more interested in its public image than it is in the rightness or wrongness of this highly unusual extension. There’s also nothing wrong with telling a (sort-of) employee to choose between her job at the school and the job she’s currently working instead. Porter’s job as a Congresswoman doesn’t alter that in the slightest. There’s no reason an employee of a collection of people in a district should be treated differently from any other employee of a local business who’s on leave to work an alternate job.

[I]nconsistent with the aspiration for members of UCI’s faculty…. Not at all. Nothing stops other faculty members from pursuing their aspirations for national service, at any level. They just would have to choose between jobs, the same as any other employee of a business.

[Having a] member of the United States Congress who can advocate on behalf of Orange County, including UCI…. No doubt, and that’s part of the duties of any Congressman. But they don’t have to be on leave from this or that organization in order to advocate for that organization while in office, or to advocate from any other platform. The well-known lobbyist revolving door is one of the more unsavory illustrations of that capability.

Finally, when news of our decision to not grant her a leave of absence…goes public, it would surely reflect very badly on UCI…. There’s that preference for public image over what’s right, bookending Richardson’s first rationale.

There’s that “rationale” term. It’s not entirely accurate. Richardson’s case is pure rationalization, and nothing more, for giving special treatment to a member of the Progressive-Democratic Party. Even an Emeritus Professor, or a Senior Judge, shows up for duty on occasion.