Collective Bargaining: A One Way Street

The Big Three auto makers and their Union counterparts are in the news two-tiered wages – within a union. Older employees are essentially grandfathered under the old pay and benefit schedule, while younger employees begin working under a different schedule. Daniel Gibson, a Delphi employee voices these concerns thusly:

We’re worried about the second-tier people…

They pay dues, but they don’t get the benefits that full-time workers have. They need cost-of-living adjustments. They need better health-care benefits. They need a pension.

They “need” these things? Need implies that there is no price you’d be unwilling to pay, in order to have them. No. They want these things – so that they’ll never have to work any harder, or any smarter than they do right now; so that they’ll never have to shoulder any more responsibility, bear any additional burden, or ever be in jeopardy – and they want others to provide them. But the big three are no longer price setters, and they can no longer pass these costs on to the consumers.

According to the Free Press article,

[M]ost say the two-tier system, such as the one already in place at Delphi Corp., is a way to divide and weaken the union in less than a generation and ensure that middle-age union members won’t have secure pension and health-care benefits when they retire.

…At Chrysler, the union allowed the hiring of temporary workers at its Belvidere, Ill., plant. Those workers earn $18 an hour, can be fired at any time and are not eligible for the jobs bank.

Cry me a river. I know a lot of people working for a lot less than $18 an hour who can be fired at any time – and who have no job bank from which to draw an income. Welcome to “at will” employment. The idea that anybody deserves absolute lifetime job security is explicitly anti-freedom, and the inflexibility of a system which has endeavored to keep such a promise is the root cause of Detroit’s agonizing demise.