Flexibility, Bane of Workers

Mickey Kaus is killin’ on these bailout talks.

Today he links to a 25 year-old article which points out that inflexible companies are what the UAW wanted:

Rigid work rules are not a mere by-product of unionism. They are central to the collective bargaining system and in fact have been praised by labor scholars as one of its great strengths. During the postwar era of prosperity, they were thought to dovetail nicely with the form of business organization that seemed destined to rule the world, the large corporate bureaucracy.

He’s got the whole thing wrapped up quite well (RTWT), but let me reiterate that a key point from this whole ordeal: command-and-control economies seem very appealing if you presume an entirely commanded-and-controlled society. It’s a simple fact, however, that when there are multiple arrangements of power and regulation, capital will nearly always flow towards the more flexible, less taxed, and overall freer arrangement.

The migration of capital happens, people. Ya might not like it, but to believe that a heavily regulated company can compete with an unregulated company, whether domestically or internationally, is ostrich-like in its ignorance. Every time you feel a little doubt in the efficacy of the “less regulation” crowd, simply look at unionized labor-heavy industries, where union heads have, through legalized thuggery, been able to browbeat corporations into stiff, inefficient pay structures with asinine work laws and schedules. And what happens? Non-unionized forces end up outperforming their more burdened competitors.