Free To Choose: a personal Statement

Who Protects the Worker?
235
More recent studies indicate that this remains roughly the order
of magnitude of the effect of unions.' Higher wages for high-paid
workers, lower wages for low-paid workers.
All of us, including the highly unionized, have indirectly been
harmed as consumers by the effect of high union wages on the
prices of consumer goods. Houses are unnecessarily expensive
for everyone, including the carpenters. Workers have been pre-
vented by unions from using their skills to produce the most
highly valued items; they have been forced to resort to activities
where their productivity is less. The total basket of goods avail-
able to all of us is smaller than it would have been.
The Source of Union Power
How can unions raise the wages of their members? What is the
basic source of their power? The answer is: the ability to keep
down the number of jobs available, or equivalently, to keep down
the number of persons available for a class of jobs. Unions have
been able to keep down the number of jobs by enforcing a high
wage rate, generally with assistance from government. They have
been able to keep down the number of persons available, pri-
marily through licensure, again with government aid. They have
occasionally gained power by colluding with employers to enforce
a monopoly of the product their members help to produce.
Enforcing a high wage rate. If, somehow or other, a union can
assure that no contractor will pay less than, say, $15 an hour for
a plumber or a carpenter, that will reduce the number of jobs that
will be offered. Of course, it will also increase the number of
persons who would like to get jobs.
Suppose for the moment that the high wage rate can be en-
forced. There must then be some way to ration the limited num-
ber of lucrative jobs among the persons seeking them. Numerous
devices have been adopted: nepotism—to keep the jobs in the
family; seniority and apprenticeship rules; featherbedding—to
spread the work around; and simple corruption. The stakes are
high, so the devices used are a sensitive matter in union affairs.
Some unions will not permit seniority provisions to be discussed
in open meetings because that always leads to fistfights. Kick-

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FREE TO CHOOSE: A Personal Statement
backs to union officials to secure preference for jobs are a com-
mon form of corruption. The heavily criticized racial discrimina-
tion by unions is still another device for rationing jobs. If there
is a surplus of applicants for a limited number of jobs to be
rationed, any device to select the ones who get the jobs is bound
to be arbitrary. Appeals to prejudice and similar irrational con-
siderations often have great support among the "ins" as a way
of deciding whom to keep out. Racial and religious discrimina-
tion have entered also into admissions to medical schools and for
the same reason: a surplus of acceptable applicants and the need
to ration places among them.
To return to the wage rate, how can a union enforce a high
wage rate? One way is violence or the threat of violence: threat-
ening to destroy the property of employers, or to beat them up
if they employ nonunion workers or if they pay union members
less than the union-specified rate; or to beat up workers, or
destroy their property, if they agree to work for a lower wage.
That is the reason union wage arrangements and negotiations
have so often been accompanied by violence.
An easier way is to get the government to help. That is the
reason union headquarters are clustered around Capitol Hill in
Washington, why they devote so much money and attention to
politics. In his study of the airline pilots' union, Hopkins notes that
"the union secured enough federal protective legislation to make
the professional airline pilots practically a ward of the state."
4
A major form of government assistance to construction unions
is the Davis-Bacon Act, a federal law that requires all contractors
who work on a contract in excess of $2,000 to which the U.S.
government or the District of Columbia is a party to pay wage
rates no less than those "prevailing for the corresponding classes
of laborers and mechanics" in the neighborhood in question, as
"determined by the Secretary of Labor." In practice the "pre-
vailing" rates have been ruled to be union wage rates in "an
overwhelming proportion of wage determinations . . . regard-
less of area or type of construction."
5
The reach of the act has
been extended by the incorporation of its prevailing wage require-
ment in numerous other laws for federally assisted projects, and
by similar laws in thirty-five states (as of 1971) covering state

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