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Labor Union Debate in Iowa Reminds of Commonwealth v. Hunt (1842) and the Legalization of Labor Unions

By Andis Kaulins

Following short-sighted short-term goals and thereby to damage long-standing long-term rights has always been a bad strategy, and the State of Iowa in the United States is right in the middle of that scenario.

As Jason Clayworth writes at the Des Moines Register Staff Blogs:

"House File 525, the bill being debated, would allow public employees to act as ?free agents? to sidestep union representation. It additionally would prohibit unions from having any say regarding layoffs....

Republicans say it is a step to helping Iowa maintain budgetary equilibrium."

It all reminds us a bit of Commonwealth v. Hunt, 45 Mass. 111 (1842).

The idea that budgets or the economy can be improved by rolling the clock back by decades or by centuries is just simple legislative idiocy.

The problem in America is not that the unions have been so successful that they have injured the economy or have made it difficult to meet government budgets.

Rather, and quite the contrary, American unions have been much too weak in allowing half the economy and the nation's know-how to be transferred offshore to foreign masters paying dirt wages to non-unionized workers, and in the process also contributing thereby to the sins of child labor and abysmal working conditions in developing countries, sins that generations of Americans fought valiantly against.

Going after American unions at this stage in the game is a rather typical move for politicians by which the blame for things is shoved off on innocent scapegoats who have had little to do with the present economic malaise in America, the responsibility for which is to be sought among those who run the economy, not those who work for it.

The solution in Iowa as in the rest of the United States is not to go BACKWARD, but rather to gather strength and to go FORWARD, as hard as that may be.

Nostalgia is not a good way to run a government or an economy.

Full post as published by LawPundit on March 10, 2011 (boomark / email).