Governments, Corporations and Unions

The following is based on the premise developed by philosophers of The Enlightenment and embraced by the Founders of the United States of America that every individual holds equal inalienable rights – rights that cannot be taken away or transferred to another person or entity.  Inalienable rights might be violated, but they cannot be morally eliminated.  A criminal person or despotic government might imprison an individual or even kill the person, but that does not diminish the person’s right to freedom or to life, even if death renders that right to the past tense.  The individual’s rights have been violated, but not eliminated. Inalienable rights cannot even be given up voluntarily; one has the right to submit, but retains the right to withdraw from submission.

From this first premise it follows that no group of individuals has greater rights than a single individual.  Each individual holds his or her rights inalienably, but rights do not add as a group grows.  If this were not true then any group would have more rights than any individual, thus rendering the individual’s rights as alienable rather than inalienable, and a majority would have the power to take away the rights of an individual or a minority.  We may see a majority violate the rights of a minority, but it does not have the moral power to do so, or to eliminate them.  In the natural order of things, organized groups of people do not have rights, only individual members do.  An organization assuming “rights” that it does not possess can be done only by force or fraud, or when granted immorally by a government (a form of force).

Softball teams, men’s clubs, and sororities are examples of organizations that do not have rights.  Two types of organizations that have artificially been given rights by government are corporations and labor unions.

Individual businessmen have the proper right to join with their fellows in a business venture.  They may choose to incorporate under a legally binding contract in order to define the venture and to record ownership, & etc, but the corporation should not have rights or responsibilities under the law beyond the rights and responsibilities of each individual involved.  Corporations can be very powerful business tools allowing individuals to pool capitol for far greater ventures than any single one could attempt, but a corporation should not be treated as an individual shielding the actual individuals from liability or taxation (nor should it be taxed as an individual).  No corporation should enjoy more government benefit than any other corporation or individual, and certainly no corporation should be considered by government to be “too big to fail”.

Similarly, while no individual has the inalienable right to the fruits of labor without laboring, each has the right to work or not work at any given job pursuant to agreeable terms with the employer, and each has the right to band together with his fellows and agree as a group to work or not work, and to negotiate collectively with an employer.  They may do so with the strength of contract if each so chooses, but no group of them has the right to compel any individual to work or not to work, or to enter into such a contract against his will.  Certainly many workers banded together for purposes of negotiating wages and working conditions have more negotiating power than any one individual, but the union of workers should have no rights under the law beyond the rights of the individuals.

The United States government began giving certain groups artificial rights and powers very early in its history.  The ink was barely dry on The Constitution before the first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, began trying to help corporations by various means including manipulating tariffs.  His motivation was a tremendous desire to see the United States prosper in the budding industrial revolution, but motives notwithstanding, it was a mistake and a dangerous precedent to grant groups of citizens, in this case corporations of manufacturers, privileges beyond any individual citizen.

As the country grew up in the nineteenth century politicians with motives much less pure than Hamilton’s continued to manipulate the law to the benefit of corporations – often at the detriment of the fledgling labor movement.  But eventually the pendulum swung and government began manipulating the law to give unions more power and corporations less.  In this environment it became necessary for every politician to choose sides – Big Business or Big Labor.

Lost in the shuffle was the fact that business and labor are both honorable parts of the capitalistic system of free enterprise that made the United States an industrial giant far beyond Hamilton’s greatest dreams, and made the American worker the most productive and best compensated in the world under the best working conditions.  In general capitalism was not given credit for these achievements; the achievements of big business were chocked up to greed and deemed evil, while the ever improving lot of workers was credited to the unions.

What’s not well understood is that unions - the banding together of workers in order to multiply negotiating power - cannot create wealth.  The workers can create, not the union, but a worker’s ability to create in the industrialized world is dependent on the existence of a massive infrastructure of innovation.  Prehistoric men, women, and children had to toil at hunting, gathering and other related tasks virtually all waking hours in order to survive.  Modern society not only survives but thrives in luxury by the efforts of only part of the population working a small percentage of the time.  One cannot negotiate with the laws of physics and physiology; negotiation did not create this huge improvement in human life, innovation did.

The industrial revolution has been an exponential rush of innovation accomplishing in 200 years more advancement than all of previous history, and throughout this time most innovation has been financed by corporations or individuals destined to profit from incorporating.  Unions should be given their historical due; they have helped workers negotiate with often faceless corporations whose members were too often insulated by immoral laws from the responsibility of providing a safe work environment and honest negotiation, but when unions are given credit for the forty hour work week and our high standard of living, their importance is being inflated.  Unions may have been the negotiating force that helped workers obtain a share of the benefits resulting from centuries of innovation, but it was the innovation that made the benefits possible, and it’s the innovators and those that financed them that deserve the credit – and the lion’s share of the profits.

But in relatively recent history a union/employer relationship has come to exist that does not involve profit.  This is the case of public employees being represented by unions that have been made very powerful by government.  Assuming this takes place in a republic it’s a philosophically unique situation where the employer which represents the people has given artificial rights to a group of employees who are a subset of the people and are paid by the people.  If a majority of the people wants public employees to be well paid and fairly treated then there’s no need for a union.  If this isn’t the case then why do the people’s representatives give undue power to the public employee unions against the will of a majority of their constituents?  This makes political sense only when public employees make up a very large voting bloc and/or a very large donating bloc.

Generally a group of people that have only their profession in common would be expected to be diverse in other areas including their political views, but public employee unions often do not allow this divergence of political opinion among their members.  This writer has interviewed teachers who are forced by their unions on a regular basis to donate to the campaigns of politicians that the teacher does not willingly support.  Somehow the union has acquired the power to have money withdrawn from the teachers’ paychecks and donated.  This means public employee unions use their government granted artificial powers to create artificial political blocs to support candidates that reinforce and enhance the union’s artificial powers.

In any given community the percentage of teachers is relatively small and even as a bloc would not wield excessive political clout.  Neither would the fire fighters, the road crew, police force, postal workers, or other specific groups of public employees.  But when all of these workers are unionized in artificially powerful unions and those unions form an effective union of unions, all with the same political agenda of further empowering public employee unions, and when all members are forced to support the same political candidates, if not with their votes then certainly with their dollars, a huge political machine is created that many politicians woo with an ever ascending spiral of compensation and entitlements that has brought many American States to the verge of insolvency.

The political machines created by the unions of public employee unions are not actually big enough to have the power they seem to enjoy.  The power they wield is because they are incredibly active and focused.  The practical remedy is for the rest of us to become equally active and focused on politically combating the candidates that cater to the unions and refuse to see the obvious unsustainability of the current trend.  This practical remedy is in fact a means of pushing our government toward the proper remedy which is an adherence to the principles of our Declaration of Independence and Constitution giving rights only to individuals and not to organizations.