Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 2, 1993 TAG: 9304020451
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
LABOR UNIONS ARE NOT FACING REALITY
IN HIS March 21 commentary entitled "The right to strike must be restored," Gerald Meadows did something I found most remarkable. However, it was not the historical revisionism (reversing Reaganism). I have become quite used to that since it is being vigorously promulgated by our wind-up Vice President Al Gore.No, what Meadows did in his effort to bolster a position of organized labor was to demonstrate, more effectively than anyone else could have done on purpose, the terminal myopia that is a hallmark of organized labor in America. Comparing organized labor in the United States to the Solidarity movement is no more ridiculous than comparing a trauma patient in need of a blood transfusion to Dracula!
For many years, organized labor reigned supreme, using strikes to extort lucrative careers and outrageous wages and benefits - for occupying a spot on an assembly line, tightening the same bolt on every car - from companies that lacked the courage to deny them due to the unsated appetite of American consumers.
Now, however, reality and the global economy have caught up with them and they do not like it. To justify the wages and benefits, union workers had to be more productive than their global counterparts to allow the business equation to work. Now that many other industrialized nations are beginning to match U.S. productivity, organized labor, as well as all labor, has discovered that for each of them there are four or five global workers that gladly will work for less. It is simple economics, and they cannot change that unless a liberal administration allows them to hold the U.S. consumer hostage.
Meadows characterizes striking workers as "workers who simply were trying to maintain their health-care coverage for themselves and their families - rather than shifting these costs onto an already overburdened public system and the U.S. taxpayers."
That is absurd! What about shifting it onto themselves? He does not mention that option which the rest of us deal with. Organized labor had better wake up and smell the coffee. It seems hellbent on making itself even more of a liability to business in a very unforgiving and Darwinistic world economy.
The bottom line is that their organizing, in and of itself, does not magically make them any more qualified or useful than the rest of us, and the U.S. consumer will refuse to be held hostage so they can maintain their position at the teat of rich living along with the politicians. JOHN P. KEMP ROANOKE