Trade unions

“Standardization of wage rates implies that worker skill levels will be negatively related to the desire for a union job.”

“States and public-sector unions may no longer extract agency fees from nonconsenting employees.”

“Unions do not reduce wage inequality among women.”

“There may be here and there a worker who for certain reasons unexplainable to us does not join a union of labor. That is his right. It is his legal right, no matter how morally wrong he may be. It is his legal right, and no one can or dare question his exercise of that legal right.”

“We will stand by our friends and administer a stinging rebuke to men or parties who are either indifferent, negligent, or hostile, and, wherever opportunity affords, to secure the election of intelligent, honest, earnest trade unionists, with clear, unblemished, paid-up union cards in their possession.”

“Don't waste any time mourning — organize!”

“Before everything else, the trades unions are necessary as building stones for the future economic parliament, which will be made up of chambers representing the various professions and occupations.”

“It is probably true that business corrupts everything it touches. It corrupts politics, sports, literature, art, labor unions and so on. But business also corrupts and undermines monolithic totalitarianism.”

“Under the Supreme Court’s 1973 Enmons decision, vandalism, assault, even murder by union officials are exempt from federal anti-extortion law. As long as the violence is aimed at obtaining property for which the union can assert a “lawful claim”—for example, wage or benefit increases— the violence is deemed to be in furtherance of “legitimate” union objectives. By the Court’s peculiar logic, such violence does not count as extortion.”

“It ill behooves one who has supped at labor's table and who has been sheltered in labor's house to curse with equal fervor and fine impartiality both labor and its adversaries when they become locked in deadly embrace.”

“The United Mine Workers and the CIO have paid cash on the barrel for every piece of legislation that we have gotten. We have the Wagner Act. The Wagner Act cost us many dollars in contributions which the United Mine Workers have made to the Roosevelt administration with the explicit understanding of a quid pro quo for labor. These contributions far exceed the notions held by the general public or the press.”

“Trade unions up to a certain point have been recognised now as organs for good. They are the only means by which workmen can protect themselves from the tyranny of those who employ them. But the moment that trade unions become tyrants in their turn, they are engines for evil: they have no right to prevent people from working on any terms that they choose.”

“Controlling for industry sector, firm size, and firm age, the author finds that within the manufacturing sector, union firms grew 3.7% more slowly per year than nonunion firms, and within the nonmanufacturing sector, union firms grew 3.9% more slowly than nonunion firms.”

“The Texas chapter of one of the nation's most powerful unions filed for bankruptcy after losing a multi-million dollar lawsuit for its smear campaign against a Houston janitorial company.A jury ordered Service Employees International Union Texas, also known as SEIU District Five, to pay Professional Janitorial Service of Houston $7.8 million in September for making false claims about the company during a campaign to rally support from workers and local activists.”

“Union pressure is exerted on the whole tenure profile of wages. The explicit linking of wage levels to seniority reduces incentives for worker investment in general (transferable) training.”

“Labor unions are politically in\xadfluential. In large measure they get increased federal activity on projects they sponsor. Their coerced and uneconomic wage hikes cause unemployment. Then they use their pressure for gov\xadernment guaranteed full employ\xadment which adds billions to the costs of government. It is pre\xadcisely this successful pressure on government that is the effective subcause of inflation. This is how labor unions cause inflation!”

“By outlawing Solidarity, a free trade organization to which an overwhelming majority of Polish workers and farmers belong, they have made it clear that they never had any intention of restoring one of the most elemental human rights—the right to belong to a free trade union.”

““There was no real taxpayer representation in that room,” Seeling, now retired and living in a Dallas suburb, said in a recent interview. “It was all union people. The greed was overwhelming.””

“The Conservative Party is the parent of trade unionism, just as it is the author of the Factory Acts. At every stage in the history of the nineteenth century it is to Toryism that trade unionism has looked for help and support against the oppressions of the Manchester School of liberalism, which cared nothing for the interests of the state, and regarded men as brute beasts whose labour could be bought and sold at the cheapest price, irrespective of all other considerations.”

“The biggest myth about labor unions is that unions are for the workers. Unions are for unions, just as corporations are for corporations and politicians are for politicians.”

“In the '20s and particularly when the Depression got underway, black construction companies in the south using black non-union labor would come up to the north and underbid on government contracts, taking them away [from white unionized workers]. And so this was very common, to the point where they passed the Davis-Bacon Act which said that on government contracts you must pay the prevailing wage. Which was translated almost invariably into the union wage.”

“By the way, I hope you all know about the worldwide boycott of Coca Cola company for things like murdering union organizers in Colombia. See the site killercoke.org.”

“To remember the loneliness, the fear and the insecurity of men who once had to walk alone in huge factories, beside huge machines—to realize that labor unions have meant new dignity and pride to millions of our countrymen—human companionship on the job, and music in the home—to be able to see what larger pay checks mean, not to a man as an employee, but as a husband and as a father—to know these things is to understand what American labor means.”

“When the factory came into existence... work became an indignity rather than a matter for pride. ... Organized labor has always consented to this entirely uncreative subjection.”

“Two of Chicago’s four city pension funds will be bankrupt within a few years, according to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. You’d think that’s a scenario unions – the supposed champions for public-employee retirements – would want to avoid.But not in Chicago. Unions are fighting to block any kind of pension reform, effectively locking in bankruptcy for city-employee pension systems.”