New labor move is anti-biz, jobs – Chicago Sun-Times

New labor move is anti-biz, jobs – Chicago Sun-Times.

STEVE HUNTLEY

In another job, with another employer, at another time many years ago, I was a union activist. I edited a union newspaper, recruited new members and promoted the union whenever I could. Then I became its grievance chairman.

For 2½ years I spent 95 percent of my union-work time defending the incompetents, the lazy, the malingers and the malcontents. And they got paid the same as my fellow workers who showed up every day and gave their all to the job. What’s more, I saw how union rules frustrated management innovations to improve our journalistic product.

A few years later I moved on to another journalistic enterprise without a union. I saw merit pay raises given to the hard workers, no salary hikes to those who didn’t or couldn’t do the job, and eventual dismissal of anyone who couldn’t measure up to the demands of the magazine. Thus began my journey from liberal to conservative.

That’s not the story you’d expect to hear as we approach the day designated to celebrate the labor movement. And labor does have a great history of men and women risking their jobs and their lives to redress deplorable working conditions, capricious and arbitrary pay scales, and exploitative employers.

For the most part, that belongs to another era. A legacy of past union victories and the reasonable government work rules they inspired is that today’s bosses generally understand that fair pay and working conditions make for better employees, more productivity and a superior bottom line. This change in attitude is part of the reason — though not the only one — that the percentage of private sector employees in unions fell to 6.9 percent last year, the lowest in more than a century, according to the New York Times.