Michael Barone: Who’s to Blame for Union Woes?
[Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner.]
The labor-union movement is in deep trouble. Only 6 percent of private-sector employees are union members.
Voters are beginning to realize, thanks to governors like Chris Christie of New Jersey and Scott Walker of Wisconsin, that public-sector unions have negotiated unsustainable levels of pensions and benefits — and that public-sector unions are a mechanism for involuntary transfers of money from taxpayers to the Democratic party.
Who’s to blame for the unions’ plight? I blame Frederick W. Taylor. Most readers will ask: Who? And those who know the name might wonder why I pin the blame on someone who died in 1915.
But Taylor, the supposed pioneer of scientific management, was an influential man in his day and long after. He conducted time and motion studies aimed at getting workers to perform single tasks on long assembly lines most efficiently....
Today, many liberals look back with nostalgia to the days when a young man fresh from high school and military service could get a unionized job on the assembly line and be guaranteed a lifetime job.
Well, I grew up in Detroit, and I know that these workers hated those jobs. Taylorism, even modified by union representation, was a miserable way to make a living.
That’s why the UAW in 1970 got the Big Three automakers to agree to “30 and out” — retirement after 30 years on the line with a generous pension. And that’s why the UAW had to bargain for retiree medical benefits, because workers retiring at 50 were 15 years short of Medicare....
Countering Taylorism is an obsolete and unsustainable strategy. Union leaders need to realize that Frederick W. Taylor is dead.
Read entire article at National Review
The labor-union movement is in deep trouble. Only 6 percent of private-sector employees are union members.
Voters are beginning to realize, thanks to governors like Chris Christie of New Jersey and Scott Walker of Wisconsin, that public-sector unions have negotiated unsustainable levels of pensions and benefits — and that public-sector unions are a mechanism for involuntary transfers of money from taxpayers to the Democratic party.
Who’s to blame for the unions’ plight? I blame Frederick W. Taylor. Most readers will ask: Who? And those who know the name might wonder why I pin the blame on someone who died in 1915.
But Taylor, the supposed pioneer of scientific management, was an influential man in his day and long after. He conducted time and motion studies aimed at getting workers to perform single tasks on long assembly lines most efficiently....
Today, many liberals look back with nostalgia to the days when a young man fresh from high school and military service could get a unionized job on the assembly line and be guaranteed a lifetime job.
Well, I grew up in Detroit, and I know that these workers hated those jobs. Taylorism, even modified by union representation, was a miserable way to make a living.
That’s why the UAW in 1970 got the Big Three automakers to agree to “30 and out” — retirement after 30 years on the line with a generous pension. And that’s why the UAW had to bargain for retiree medical benefits, because workers retiring at 50 were 15 years short of Medicare....
Countering Taylorism is an obsolete and unsustainable strategy. Union leaders need to realize that Frederick W. Taylor is dead.