Unionised they fall
I have grown to like the fact that I live in a country where unions are weak. In the past I have complained about not being unionised, but I have since witnessed some stuff that has made me think twice.
Too often unions fuck up the trades they are professing to want to preserve. The latest example is the newspaper industry. Here is how.
Newspapers are not doing well. Circulation is down, advertising in print is down, and online advertising is not growing as fast as it should. Many newspapers are still turning profits, but not of the size their shareholders would like to see. Barring a few bright examples, all are struggling to move online. (It turned out that it is not as simple as replicating the print copy in digital format.)
What businesses in a similar situation will try to do is cut costs. The easiest way is through job cuts. (Whether it is the best is another issue.) But simply laying off people is not an option — that is what trade unions are there to prevent. So far so good: greedy corporate sharks keen to drink the blood of overworked staff, their plans thwarted by the united power of the employees. But let’s look closer.
Instead of getting rid of the least productive, least skilled and laziest employees, giving everybody else a better chance of survival, companies find themselves forced to offer redundancy packages to whoever would take them. Often, the people who do go that road voluntarily are the newspaper’s best journalists and editors – the people who have enough confidence that they could pull it off on their own. And it does not end there. Those talented staff who remain at the company are demoralised by seeing so much talent leave and by having to continue working with people who owe their employment almost entirely to the fact they are unionised. In turn, those latter guys are adamant in their belief that unions are their saviour (which they are), so they will do anything in their power to keep the status quo. It is a vicious circle.
I am not suggesting that the companies are the good guys in this situation. They are, after all, only too happy to take the easy way of job cuts. But companies are not people. They have no feelings and they do not hurt. Unions can twist their arms as much as they want, companies will not feel anything.
Their employees do.
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- Image: patrick h. lauke
