Editorial: Penalty flags on the unions

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s survival in Tuesday’s recall election is being billed as a big blow to unions. No matter how you interpret that vote, it’s clear that American unions face an uphill struggle — one largely of their own creation.

Until union supporters understand that the American dream is to compete on a level playing field so the most ambitious, hardest working and brightest can reach their full potential, pro-union pleas will fall on many a deaf ear. The practice of forcibly taking from the wealthy and giving it to those who simply believe they’re equally deserving of being wealthy is counter to that American dream.

We offer for consideration two items published the day after Wisconsin’s intriguing vote.

The first is a column that was broadly distributed by The Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit, independent think tank that “researches the economic trends and policies on working people in the United States.”

Titled “As unions decline, inequality rises,” the piece, authored by University of Iowa history professor Colin Gordon, describes the golden era for labor ignited by the 1935 National Labor Relations Act. In Gordon’s words, the act “sparked a wave of unionization that led to three decades of shared prosperity and what some call the Great Compression: when the share of national income taken by the very rich was cut by one-third.”

Gordon extols the virtues of labor unions’ “countervailing power,” which culminated in both labor and median compensation roughly doubling in the early 1970s.

“However,” Gordon writes, “over the next 30 years — an era highlighted by the filibuster of labor law reform in 1978, the Reagan administration’s crushing of the PATCO strike, and the passage of anti-worker trade deals with Mexico and China — labor’s bargaining power collapsed.”

Result: As union density declined, the richest 10 percent got richer, he argued.

Fair enough. In a very general sense, that’s one side of the story. But unaddressed is this question: Why have unions lost power and prestige in many Americans’ eyes? We don’t believe it’s because of the government. Instead, we offer an example from a story in Wednesday’s Press sports section.

The story details an argument between the National Football League’s unionized officials’ group and the league itself. After months of talks, mediation on a collective bargaining agreement broke down after just two days. The big bone of contention for union officials? Their pay raises wouldn’t be as big as the ones they received in their 2006 collective bargaining agreement.

Before that statement pulls on your heartstrings too powerfully, understand that the league was offering raises of 5 percent to 11 percent every year for the next seven years. That wasn’t good enough for officials because the raises weren’t as much as they’d gotten when the economy was at a historic high.

For those who wonder why unions are in decline, the games of politics and professional football offer interesting answers.