Friday, November 27, 2009

Why Your Packages May Soon Cost Twice As Much


For the past several months, FedEx and United Parcel Service (UPS) have been in an intense legal battle that could shake the entire shipping industry. FedEx, because it ships the majority of its packages via air, is governed under different unionization rules than UPS, which ships the majority of its packages via trucking. As a result, FedEx's labor must have a majority of all its employees voting in favor of organizing in order to unionize, while UPS' labor need only get a majority of the employees who actually vote.

UPS' costs in worker compensation are now over twice those of FedEx.

UPS and the Teamsters are now lobbying Congress to reorganize federal labor laws in a way that will bring more of FedEx's workers into the same designation as UPS' workers and therefore, bring all of FedEx under new labor regulations.

The exorbitant costs that the unionization in UPS has brought are no surprise; for decades unions have exerted enormous power over business and government, lobbying for power, more power. Yet some misunderstand the unions' problems as problems of existence. "If we could just get rid of the unions," they reason, "we could get back down to business again." This, however, ignores the basic reason of why the unions have gained so much power in recent years. In the Industrial Revolution, when unions were just starting to pick up steam, businesses used their political clout to gain benefits from the Federal Government in the area of labor management (case in point: when President Hayes sent federal troops in to put the kibosh on the workers participating in the Great Railroad Strike of 1877). The situation between labor, government, and business was like this:

LABOR --- GOVERNMENT == BUSINESS

In response to the overwhelming power of the alliance between business and government, labor unions began to realize the power of lobbying for themselves and soon, various groups of both labor and big business were vying for government handouts and favorable regulations.

LABOR == GOVERNMENT == BUSINESS

In time, particularly as the Progressive Era of Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and later FDR gained power, business still received favorable government action such as subsidies and competition-squashing regulations, but lost much of its power in the area of organized labor. Meanwhile, unions gained more and more political power as the Great Depression provided a pretext for the increasing of labor power. This situation has continued to the present day, with this relationship between labor, government, and business:

LABOR == GOVERNMENT --- BUSINESS

Unions can now use the coercive authority of government to force employers into deals that hurt business, consumers, and indeed, non-union workers. As a result, products and services cost far more than they should and these costs are either passed on to consumers or kept within the company until the company fails. Now the economy is in no better a situation than it was when employers held the power to take away workers' rights by using the government as a weapon.

The appropriate solution is one in which government stays out of the dealings between businesses and their workers. Freedom of association is the ideal situation, in which workers can stay in their job if they wish, but also have the liberty to leave if their employer is giving them unfavorable conditions.

LABOR == BUSINESS

Simply abolishing unions and other forms of organized labor will not solve the problems currently faced by employees and their workers. Doing so would simply be a return to the old days in which businesses held complete control over their employees and the working class suffered. Instead, one should look to the root of the problems in modern industry, which is an overbearing, intervening government that has given itself the role of mediator between business and workers, a mediator that nobody wants.

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Things to be thankful for...

It's all too easy to be caught up in the gloom and doom of the state of American politics--and indeed world politics--these days. Stories of wars, corruption, economic turmoil, and party divisions dominate the news media today, but often we ignore the bright spots that appear in the cloudy sky. Here are just a few thanks-worthy bits of recent (and not-so-recent) news, info, and thoughts:

  • 222 years, 70 days ago, the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia ratified the Constitution.
  • On January 23, 2009, President Barack Obama signed an executive order for the closing of Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp.
  • In 1841, thanks largely to the efforts of President Andrew Jackson, the Second Bank of the United States went bankrupt.
  • On November 19, 2009, Congressmen Ron Paul (R-TX) and Alan Grayson (D-FL) successfully added amendments to House Resolution 3996 to allow for increased audit authority over the Federal Reserve.
  • On December 2, 1823, the United States adopted the Monroe Doctrine
  • In New York's special election for the 23rd congressional district, third-party candidate Doug Hoffman gained 45% of the vote, losing but gaining significant support.
I'm sure you, the reader, can come up with many other things to be thankful for as the year 2009 starts to wind down. Never lose hope, and never, ever give up!

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Civilization and its Governments


Philosophers generally hold two clashing views of humanity: one optimistic, the other pessimistic. Each of these viewpoints is often held as an argument to increase the authority of government, whether in economic policies, personal lives, or civil liberties.

The optimistic view of humanity holds that people are inherently good, and indeed are perfectible creatures. All that is needed for a utopian existence is more time for mankind to iron out its faults and get its act together. This view is commonly held by modern liberals, who see government as the ideal "ironing board" to stretch people over and get rid of their problems. The only problem with this is that if people are inherently good, why do they need government to solve all of their problems? People could live in peace with each other without state regulations and taxes and other government functions; they wouldn't need any motivation to help out their fellow man on the street and they would most certainly not attack each other, either personally or militarily.

Clearly, however, this has not happened. Poverty still strikes many. Militaries and insurgents still clash. World peace has not been achieved, world hunger has not been solved. So this philosophy of humanity strikes out. This leaves the pessimistic view of humanity, which states that people are fallen, corrupt creatures with a near-infinite capacity for wrongdoing. This, of course, may be true, as it is the only logical conclusion remaining after the discarding of the optimistic view of humanity; however, this truth is often twisted to provide a false and fallacious view of government's role in society. If humanity is corrupted, one may reason, then it needs a master to keep it in line, right? This view is commonly held by conservatives, who say that mankind's original sin means that government needs to step in and make people do the right things, whatever "right" may be.

However, this view fails to realize that there is no distinction between the corrupt humans of the citizenry and the corrupt humans of the government. If humans are inherently wicked, and governments are comprised of humans, then governments also are wicked. It does not matter whether or not those at the head of the government were democratically elected or seized power in a violent coup; they are just as fallible and prone to mistakes as those they rule.

Both the views lead to an incorrect view of the people; they view people as clay to be molded by a government that is always correct and never falters in its careful control over the citizenry. They both ignore the fact that humans, regardless of election, birth, or status, are all equally prone to evil. The solution to this is to have each man in control of as little of another man's rights and property as possible. Private property must be protected, as must rights and civil liberties, for if any of these things becomes subject to the rule of a privileged few, the only thing that can result is tyranny, oppression, and civilization-wide collapse.

Saturday, November 14, 2009

Physics and the Fry Guy

My house, though upwards of forty years old, is a sturdy old place. I could walk out back, do some stretching, maybe a quick warmup, then push with all my might against its walls, but it wouldn't do a thing, no matter how hard or how long I pushed. I could come back inside at the end of the day having pressed against the house's walls from sunup to sundown, but have nothing to show for it except blistered hands and a sore back.

But I don't do this pointless exercise. Why? Well, aside from the fact that I have no interest in demolishing my childhood home, I also happen to know a bit of elementary physics.

The equation Work = Force x Distance explains why all my blood, sweat, and tears won't budge make the slightest difference in my house's end position. Force can be broken down into two separate components, mass and acceleration. Therefore, force represents the mass of the object I am trying to move (my house--several thousand kilograms) multiplied by the amount I want the object to accelerate. Now, I can put as many Newtons (units of force) into the wall as I want, but if the distance doesn't change, no work has been done and the walls of my house thankfully stay put.

Now, let's apply this principle to labor and income.

"Why does my manager get paid so much more than I do? I work just as hard as he does but he gets paid ten times more than I do! And he just sits in an office all day!"

The entry-level employee may put just as much, or even more, work into his job every day, but what is the difference between the results he gets and the results his manager gets? Take a fast-food restaurant as an example. The fry guy probably works as hard or harder than the manager. He stands in a hot kitchen for several hours a day. He deals with irritable fellow employees and downright stupid customers. He probably has a few burns on his hands from handling grease. The manager, on the other hand, deals with paperwork, gets to talk with people who are actually polite, and rarely suffers anything more than a papercut. So the fry guy should get a higher salary, right?

Wrong.

If the fresh-out-of-high-school fry guy is removed from the scene, the restaurant can still function, and will only suffer a slight loss in performance. Training a new employee of his skill level will only take a short amount of time and a small amount of money. If the manager, however, with years of experience and expertise, is taken out of the picture, the restaurant will not be able to function coherently. In all likelihood, the place will not be able to compete with the opposition anymore and will therefore fold like a house of cards.

So who, in the end, achieved more work? The fry guy puts a lot of force into his job, but will likely never create greater profits for the company than the manager does. The manager has earned his position from having patiently gone through many of the same trials of the kitchen when he was just starting out on his new job. While increased effort will likely increase one's salary, results are what employees are paid for in the end.