The "Blame the Unions" con

I've now had at least ten members of the public tell me that the reason that blue collar jobs got shipped overseas is that the unions created outrageous wage and benefit structures. "If only the unions hadn't gotten greedy," these gullible folks insist, "the jobs would still be here."

This is always followed by some variation on this line of thought: "Why should the companies pay union members $17 an hour, when they can get the same work done for less overseas?"

I guess that makes superficial sense if you don't know any details about the wages being paid in the countries to which these jobs were shipped. But if you actually think, rather than parroting what Rush Limppaw, or Shill O'Reilly, or Sean Vannity say...

The illogic of this theory can be demonstrated by asking a simply and very obvious question: If union wages caused jobs to be shipped overseas to cheaper labor, how low would wages have to be in the U.S. to convince employers to keep the jobs here?

The people who spout this theory to me seem to assume that if only the unions would have accepted a "more reasonable" wage like $10 an hour, the jobs would still be here. Which is, of course, nonsense.

If the overseas labor cost is $.50 an hour, it wouldn't take a genius employer long to realize that this is only 1/20 of a $10 per hour rate here. Even if you lowered wages to $5 per hour here, that would still be ten times higher than they would have to pay overseas.

The whole theory is crap. If employers can get their labor overseas for $.50 an hour, American workers would have to accept something very close to that...say $.75 per hour...to prevent the jobs from fleeing overseas.

And I wonder how many of my misinformed friends have tried living in the U.S. on $.75 per hour. Let's see, $.75 per hour, times 40 hours, equals $30 per week. Yeah, that could work if you walked everywhere, went naked, lived in a cardboard box on public land, never, ever got sick.....