The ILA remains a threat because it has ‘sectoral bargaining’ power — the ability for one union to negotiate for workers across an entire industry.
The ILA remains a threat because it has 'sectoral bargaining' power — the ability for one union to negotiate for workers across an entire industry.
T he strike launched by officials of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) across America’s East and Gulf Coast ports reminded Americans just how much destruction union bosses are willing to cause to get what they want.
ILA officials ludicrously demanded a halt on automation at U.S. ports, including the automated gates that allow vehicles to enter and exit port facilities.
A temporary agreement has ended the strike for now, but the ILA remains a threat because it has “sectoral bargaining” power — the ability for one union to negotiate for workers across an entire industry.
Though the U.S. does not have sectoral bargaining officially, some industries approximate its effects — and they are among the country’s worst-performing. In the education sector, the two major teachers’ unions that control a majority of the nation’s government schoolteachers have opposed improvements to curriculum, protected underperforming teachers, and pushed for medically unwarranted Covid-19 school lockdowns.
In the United States, it costs three times as much to install an elevator as it does in Europe and Asia, owing in large part to one union’s control over the entire sector.
A New York Times article on the elevator industry explained how much of the inflated costs are the result of deliberate waste demanded by the International Union of Elevator Constructors:
The elevator union’s contract forbids even basic forms of pre-assembly and prefabrication that have become standard in elevators in the rest of the world. The union and manufacturers bicker over which holes can be drilled in a factory and which must be drilled (or redrilled) on site. Manufacturers even let elevator and escalator mechanics take some components apart and put them back together on site to preserve work for union members, since it’s easier than making separate, less-assembled versions just for the United States.
This kind of waste wouldn’t last in a competitive market, but as the Times article explains, the market for elevator labor is not competitive. The only reliable way to hire someone who is both qualified and licensed by the government to install an elevator is to go through the International Union of Elevator Constructors, which tightly controls entry into the field.
Union bosses have long sought legislation to make this type of arrangement more common. Kamala Harris argued that unions should be organized “sector by sector” on the 2019 campaign trail, and pro-union academics at Harvard proposed a scheme that would give control of a sector to a union if it demonstrated support from just 10 percent of the sector’s workforce.
Under current laws, the government will only give unions control of one workplace at a time, but sectoral bargaining can be established in heavily regulated industries where the supply of labor is tightly controlled, as with dockworkers, teachers, and elevator mechanics.
Oren Cass of American Compass — a self-styled “conservative” group that has received significant funding from the Hewlett Foundation, which also helped fund the Harvard proposal mentioned above — said the elevator industry “presents one of the rare successful examples of sectoral bargaining in American industrial-labor relations.”
Cass praised the elevator monopoly because it means manufacturers can’t “squeeze workers” to cut costs.
But Cass ignores the workers who are “squeezed” by not being hired because the elevator union restricts entry to protect its monopoly position. He also ignores the non-elevator workers on construction projects who are “squeezed” because the money that would have covered their paychecks is diverted to the elevator cartel.
When employers are forced to pay for needless work on parts that could easily have been assembled in a factory, everyone else is deprived of the real goods and productive jobs that could have been funded by the money that was wasted on elevator make-work.
Similarly, when our ports don’t have modern technology, goods must take a more expensive route to reach American producers and consumers.
When our schools can’t use modern teaching methods, are bogged down by administrators, and cannot reward high-performing teachers due to rigid union contracts, Americans are deprived of the benefits of a better educated population.
Union bosses may find it profitable to prop up inefficiencies in the sectors they control and then demand dues payment for this “service,” but the rest of us should not seek, as Oren Cass and Kamala Harris do, to expand sectoral union monopolies to more and more industries.