A war story

Yesterday I jumped into the murky fields of labor economics and price theory as they pertain to unions. So–what the heck?–I’ve got enough gray hairs and scars to consider myself a veteran of commerce, and, like all old bores, I’ll pester you with a war story.

I was a middle management type with a company that hired a lot of semi-skilled workers in a small town in the states. The specter of unionization boiled up, and the skirmish between labor and management was as ugly as it was comical.

One of my unrewarding little jobs was to keep my ear to the rail and keep abreast of what the proles were up to. I had a few friends amongst their ranks, and, come to think of it, none among the ranks of my executive peers there, who were panty-waist yuppies and the biggest bores on earth.

I was, in fact, more kindly disposed to the workers’ point of view than management believed. At least at the beginning of the event. What I quickly found out, though, was that the biggest threat to the workers was: the workers.

Individually, they were generally good guys. But collectively, they were as dumb as cattle. It shocked me. They had absolutely, positively, no capacity for abstract reasoning. Once they had been shaken up and, frankly, manipulated by the union boyz, they became zombies, led around by the nose by slick-talking salesmen.

Finally, some cold, hard numbers found their way to me, so I ran some calculations and it looked to me like the union’s ideas would actually be a financial loss for a lot of the guys. It wasn’t my job to offer them any advice, nor did I, but more out of curiosity than anything else I asked a few probing questions. I figured I had probably misunderstood some of the figures, and out of academic interest I wanted to re-crunch the data.

I soon realized, though, that a lot of these guys didn’t even understand what a percentage is, and that nobody could comprehend stuff that we’d expect your average fourth-grader to grasp. Well, fair enough, not everyone likes math even at its rawest level. But this was no place for an economist, what was needed was a psychiatrist, who could delve into a matter in which even basic quantification had been entirely supplanted by emotion.

I eventually concluded that what these guys really craved was a glorified babysitter.

I kept my mouth shut and my opinions to myself. The battle raged on and I just tended my chores in my little trench of an office while the bullets zinged overhead. Maybe those guys would have been better off with a union. Maybe not. I don’t know. And they sure as heck didn’t know either.

I knew what management was up to–I was management, after all, but I didn’t tell my pals in the prole ranks anything of substance. And I knew largely what the laborers were up to, but I didn’t tell anyone in the management circles anything of substance either. All the powers arrayed on both sides of that battle seemed to be pathological liars, and I quietly wished a pox on both houses.

Like all war stories, mine is largely pointless (hey, at least I admit it). Unions are now a big issue in Guam, and whenever I think about the battle I experienced in the states, I have to admit the entire event still has me scratching my head in utter dismay.