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Labor unions,
like the United Nations, are all too often judged by what they are
envisioned as being – not by what they actually are or what they
actually do.

Many people,
who do not look beyond the vision or the rhetoric to the reality,
still think of labor unions as protectors of working people from
their employers. And union bosses still employ that kind of rhetoric.
However, someone once said, “When I speak I put on a mask, but when
I act I must take it off.”

That mask has
been coming off, more and more, especially during the Obama administration,
and what is revealed underneath is very ugly, very cynical and very
dangerous.

First there
was the grossly misnamed “Employee Free Choice Act” that the administration
tried to push through Congress. What it would have destroyed was
precisely what it claimed to be promoting – a free choice by workers
as to whether or not they wanted to join a labor union.

Ever since
the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, workers have been able
to express their free choice of joining or not joining a labor union
in a federally conducted election with a secret ballot.

As workers
in the private sector have, over the years, increasingly voted to
reject joining labor unions, union bosses have sought to replace
secret ballots with signed documents – signed in the presence of
union organizers and under the pressures, harassments or implicit
threats of those organizers.

Now that the
Obama administration has appointed a majority of the members of
the National Labor Relations Board, the NLRB leadership has imposed
new requirements that employers supply union organizers with the
names and home addresses of every employee. Nor do employees have
a right to decline to have this personal information given out to
union organizers, under NLRB rules.

In other words,
union organizers will now have the legal right to pressure, harass
or intimidate workers on the job or in their own homes, in order
to get them to sign up with the union. Among the consequences of
not signing up is union reprisal on the job if the union wins the
election. But physical threats and actions are by no means off the
table, as many people who get in the way of unions have learned.

Workers who
do not want to join a union will now have to decide how much harassment
of themselves and their family they are going to have to put up
with, if they don’t knuckle under.

In the past,
unions had to make the case to workers that it was in their best
interests to join. Meanwhile, employers would make their case to
the same workers that it was in their best interest to vote against
joining.

When the unions
began losing those elections, they decided to change the rules.
And after Barack Obama was elected President of the United States,
with large financial support from labor unions, the rules were in
fact changed by Obama’s NLRB.

As if to make
the outcome of workers’ “choices” more of a foregone conclusion,
the time period between the announcement of an election and the
election itself has been shortened by the NLRB.

In other words,
the union can spend months, or whatever amount of time it takes,
for them to prepare and implement an organizing campaign beforehand
– and then suddenly announce a deadline date for the decision on
having or not having a union. The union organizers can launch their
full-court press before the employers have time to organize a comparable
counter-argument or the workers have time to weigh their decision,
while being pressured.

The last thing
this process is concerned about is a free choice for workers. The
first thing it is concerned about is getting a captive group of
union members, whose compulsory dues provide a large sum of money
to be spent at the discretion of union bosses, to provide those
bosses with both personal perks and political power to wield, on
the basis of their ability to pick and choose where to make campaign
contributions from the union members’ dues.

Union elections
do not recur like other elections. They are like some Third World
elections: “One man, one vote – one time.” And getting a recognized
union unrecognized is an uphill struggle.

But, so long
as many people refuse to see the union for what it is, or the Obama
administration for what it is, this cynical and corrupt process
can continue.

A Cynical Process:
Part II

A small headline
in the 2nd section of the Wall Street Journal last week told a bigger
story than a lot of front page banner headlines. It said, “U.S.
Firms Add Jobs, but Mostly Overseas.”

Just as there
is no free lunch, there is no free class warfare. Some people may
be inspired by President Obama’s talk about making “the rich” pay
their undefined “fair share” of taxes, or taking away corporations’
“tax breaks.” But talk is not always cheap. It can be very costly
to those working people who are looking for jobs that the Obama
administration’s anti-business policies are driving overseas.

According to
the Wall Street Journal, “Thirty-five big U.S.-based multinational
companies added jobs much faster than other U.S. employers in the
past two years, but nearly three-fourths of those jobs were overseas.”
All these companies have at least 50,000 employees, so we are talking
about a lot of jobs for foreigners with American companies overseas.

If the Wall
Street Journal can figure this out, it seems certain that the President
of the United States has economic advisers who can figure out the
same thing. But that does not mean that the president is interested
in the same thing.

In this, as
in so much else, Barack Obama is interested in Barack Obama. Whatever
bad effects his policies may have for others, those policies have
had a track record of political success for many politicians in
many places.

To put it bluntly,
killing the goose that lays the golden egg is a viable political
strategy, provided the goose doesn’t die before the next election.
In this case, the goose simply lays its golden eggs somewhere else,
so there is no political danger to President Obama.

Unemployment
may remain a problem to many Americans, but that only provides another
occasion for the Obama administration to show its “compassion” with
extended unemployment benefits, more food stamps and various interventions
to save home buyers from mortgage foreclosure. This can easily be
a winning political strategy.

Franklin D.
Roosevelt won his biggest landslide victory after his first term
in office, during which the unemployment rate was never less than
twice what it has been under Barack Obama.

The “smart
money” inside the Beltway says that a high unemployment rate spells
doom at the polls for a president. But history says that people
who are getting government handouts tend to vote for whoever is
doing the handing out.

The Obama administration
has turned this into a handout state that breaks all previous records.
Lofty rhetoric about “stimulus,” “shovel-ready projects,” “green
jobs” or “investment” in “the industries of the future” all give
political cover to what is plain old handouts to people who are
likely to vote to re-elect Obama.

At the local
level as well, history shows that some of the most successful politicians
have been people who ruined the local economy and chased job-creating
businesses away. Mayor Coleman Young of Detroit in the 1970s and
1980s was not worried when affluent whites began moving out of the
city in response to his policies, because they were people who were
likely to vote against him if they stayed.

Of course they
took their taxes, their investment money and the jobs they created
with them. But that was Detroit’s problem, not Coleman Young’s problem.
Barack Obama may win re-election by turning the United States into
Detroit writ large.

Something
similar happened in earlier times, when James Michael Curley served
4 terms as mayor of Boston, and 2 terms in prison. As the non-Irish
left the city, in response to Curley’s policies, that increased
Curley’s likelihood of being re-elected.

This kind of
cynical politics is even more likely to succeed when political opponents
fail to articulate their case to the public. And Republicans are
notorious for neglecting articulation.

The phrase
“tax cuts for the rich” has been repeated endlessly by Democrats
without one Republican that I know of saying, “Folks, I don’t lie
awake at night worrying about millionaires’ tax problems. Millionaires
have lawyers and accountants who get paid to do that. But I do worry
about jobs being lost to millions of American workers because we
make the business climate here worse than in other countries. That’s
a high price to pay for rhetoric.”

The case can
be made. But somebody has to make the case.

May
1, 2012

Thomas
Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford
University. His Web site is www.tsowell.com.
To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other
Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators
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