How about the unions do what airline workers did a few yrs ago, and agree to take a paycut to keep the company going. Or GM could build cars that people are interested in buying.
Last time I checked they wanted a piece of the bailout plan. Which is going to be funded by the tax payers in the long run. Either way they will be right back in the same situation in 6 months if they do not drastically change things. This is the only way the unions will go away. I say let them fail.
Checkout how costly unions are:
While there are no doubt many individual members of labor unions who feel they have benefited from collective bargaining, the overall evidence is overwhelming that labor unions in contemporary America have had harmful aggregate effects on the economy.
- The economic cost of unions (determined by combining lost income and output over the period 1947 to 2000) exceeds $50 trillion, according to estimates by economists Richard K. Vedder and Lowell E. Gallaway.
- Unionization lowers incomes for all, albeit more in the relatively higher income states that on average have higher levels of unionization.
- A state with a 10 percent unionized work force can expect a 0.7 percent increase in its unemployment rate.
In the final years of the 1990s, the decline in union density in the private sector has been sharp, adding to the vitality of the economy at the beginning of the new century. As a result, there has been renewed economic growth and a rising proportion of the working age population that actually works.
- For each four additional workers who become unionized, one less person works.
If unions succeed in wage hikes, and employers raise the prices they charge consumers to maintain their own profit margins, and the supply of money remains the same, then something else has to "give." Either the prices of goods and services in nonunion sectors have to fall and offset the union sector hikes, or people's cash balances need to fall, in terms of their purchasing power.
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