It will come as no surprise to readers of this page that Los Angeles is preparing to adopt a ridiculously high $15 minimum wage, at the behest of local labor unions. It might come as an amusing addendum that those labor unions, in turn, want to exempt from this requirement all businesses that force their employees to accept union representation and pay dues to unions.
This may be the most nakedly self-serving instance of regulatory activism in America today. As they drive nonunion businesses to flee their city, the unionists seek to protect themselves at the expense of whatever workers are unfortunate enough to lack transportation to wherever the jobs end up.
Rusty Hicks of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor tells the Los Angeles Times that union-controlled businesses should have the flexibility to negotiate a lower wage than $15 if the agreement works out between a union and the employer in question. If we pretend for a moment that this rule is being proposed in any sort of public-spirited manner, his comments raise an important issue: Why shouldn’t all other individual workers have the same freedom to negotiate? Imagine, for example, a worker who needs a job but lacks the skills to convince any employer that he is worth hiring for $15 per hour. Does he have no such freedom or flexibility? Does a corporation — because that’s what a labor union is — have more rights than any individual person in Los Angeles who prefers a low-wage job to the unemployment line?
The unions might argue — in theory anyway — that this cynical political strategy has a rationale aside from pure self-interest. A higher minimum wage, they might say, is less necessary for their members, because their bargaining power guarantees them higher wages — $148 higher per week in the private sector on average, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
But the union wage advantage for workers is inflated through statistical illusion. Much of it disappears when you factor in that union workers are disproportionately older (more than 50 percent are over age 45), disproportionately male, and clustered in a handful of states with high costs of living. Once these differences are factored in, union dues erode the average union worker’s wage advantage still further.
But setting aside these minutiae, if the Los Angeles unions’ argument is that collective bargaining obviates the need for minimum wage laws, the converse is an even better argument: In a world where government fixes a minimum wage and enforces decent working conditions, unions serve no purpose and should be stripped of all their coercive privileges.
Union political advocates still justify their existence based on Dickensian tales of workers who once slaved away in dangerous environments for 50 cents an hour. But now that government has all but abolished such arrangements through laws and regulations — including the minimum wage laws — the usefulness of unions has finally and completely expired.
This is one major reason why young workers aren’t joining unions, and why unions are so afraid of the right-to-work movement. Los Angelenos can ponder this as the jobs leave their city.
