The reason the airline unions have budged is because if they didn't they would end up putting their members out of work, and then if those members are out of work, there are no dues coming in from those members. If those members are not airline employees, guess what? They are no longer members and now your union is much less powerful, and rich, than before. And now the egg is on the union's face with regard to the fact that the union caused x hundred or thousand people at broke airline A to loose their jobs. What is more important; that 1000 people have work that does allow them to put food on the table and pay the mortgage and be productive in society, or is it more important to have 500 people employed at full wages and benefits and another 500 out in the market looking for work. Hmmm. That seems pretty straight forward to me.

The same applies for the UAW and the domestic auto manufacturers. They have to make some hard choices. But then again, I think that Ford and GM are making some of those hard choices for the UAW and its members as we speak. The air lines did shed some employees, but they got the unions to reduce compensation expectations and as such were able to keep people employed and on the books. Ford and GM are both going to eliminate jobs. That is a done deal. The unions can only prepare their membership for it, they cannot actually prevent this from happening.

The long and the short of it is that the UAW is a dinosaur and an inflexible institution which has saddled the domestic manufacturers with expenses and costs which it cannot operate under. The total cost of labor in these organizations is artifically high due to the programs, benefits and general overhead created by the union.

It's funny, 70+ years ago Ford was not a union shop. For manufacturing jobs, they had some of the best pay and the working conditions weren't awful. Somebody with nearly no education could go to work for Ford and do ok, live a middle class lifestyle of the time. History shows that Ford was the last of the domestics to be unionized. And the reason was that for the longest period of time Ford was a competitive organization with regard to compensation. However pressure from union organizers and some moderately bloody incidents surrounding the lack union presence at Ford caused them to become unionized. I suppose it makes sense considering the time and place, however now unions and unionization do not work. Employers really do play the market for employees today, and a person with good job skills can move from employer to employer if they have something valuable for that organization. Like all things, the market makes demands and those that can fill it are the winners.

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