Books, Arts & Manners: Unions Against Prosperity

Union Power and the Public Interest By Emerson P. Schmidt

Nash, 204 pp., $10 In one of the most carefully documented and fact-packed books ever devoted to the subject, Emerson Schmidt analyzes the realities of union power and “collective bargaining,” and the tremendously harmful role they have played in obstructing and reducing production, causing unemployment, and instigating inflation. “Trade unionism, as it presently operates in the United States,” he concludes, “has made workers as a whole poorer than they would otherwise have been.” Mr. Schmidt begins by defining the union problem. He contends that the central aim of the unions is to take labor out of competition. One of the myths he disposes of is that, especially in an inflation period, wage increases persistently lag behind increases in the cost of living. Between 1960 and 1970, for example, the consumer price index increased by 31 per cent; in the same period, gross average hourly wages in manufacturing increased from $2.26 to $3.36, or 49 per cent.

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Henry Hazlitt

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Union Power and the Public Interest By Emerson P. Schmidt

Nash, 204 pp., $10 In one of the most carefully documented and fact-packed books ever devoted to the subject, Emerson Schmidt analyzes the realities of union power and “collective bargaining,” and the tremendously harmful role they have played in obstructing and reducing production, causing unemployment, and instigating inflation. “Trade unionism, as it presently operates in the United States,” he concludes, “has made workers as a whole poorer than they would otherwise have been.” Mr. Schmidt begins by defining the union problem. He contends that the central aim of the unions is to take labor out of competition. One of the myths he disposes of is that, especially in an inflation period, wage increases persistently lag behind increases in the cost of living. Between 1960 and 1970, for example, the consumer price index increased by 31 per cent; in the same period, gross average hourly wages in manufacturing increased from $2.26 to $3.36, or 49 per cent.