The Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece on the history of labor law, and how the unions were exempted from antitrust laws almost a century ago. Look where that’s gotten us.
Labor unions like to portray collective bargaining as a basic civil liberty, akin to the freedoms of speech, press, assembly and religion. For a teachers union, collective bargaining means that suppliers of teacher services to all public school systems in a state—or even across states—can collude with regard to acceptable wages, benefits and working conditions. An analogy for business would be for all providers of airline transportation to assemble to fix ticket prices, capacity and so on. From this perspective, collective bargaining on a broad scale is more similar to an antitrust violation than to a civil liberty.
In fact, labor unions were subject to U.S. antitrust laws in the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which was first applied in 1894 to the American Railway Union. However, organized labor managed to obtain exemption from federal antitrust laws in subsequent legislation, notably the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 and the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.
Read the whole thing, as it gets into Right to Work laws and the states that could possibly enact them in the near future.
Update: Memeorandum has a thread and linked!
[...] foster a sense of entitlement that leads to criminality.” How true. Then again, unions are exempt from antitrust laws, so what should we expect? Apparently, they believe they’re exempt from all [...]
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