The UAW's Awakening

Yours truly was on vacation toward the end of last week, but even in the far reaches of the desert, we received this column in Saturday's Wall Street Journal. The Journal hails the new agreement between the UAW and GM as another step forward in bringing union contract negotiations more in line with what is economically possible in a competitive global economy. The editorial writers also point out the same flaws in the modern labor movement we noted during our posts on the mistitled Employee Free Choice Act,

Our friends in the AFL-CIO often think we're too critical, but we're not responsible for taking union membership down to 7.4% of the non-government American labor force last year. (See nearby chart.) The reality of a dynamic world economy did that, assisted by the failure to adapt by union leaders and corporate managers. These columns support collective bargaining, and our belief has long been that if a company's workers vote to join a union, they and the company deserve what they get.

The problem with unions is not all that dissimilar to that posed by entrenched management: Once they win comfortable contracts, they often become impediments to the kind of innovation and flexibility essential to success in today's economy. So in the name of "job security," they undermine a company's--or a nation's--competitiveness. The result, over time, is less job security for everyone, especially the union workforce. There's no better example of this than GM, where the UAW now represents about 74,000 hourly workers, compared to 246,000 in 1994. Some security.