Democrats

George Will on the UPS/Teamsters Campaign against FedEx

by Ivan Osorio on July 16, 2009 · 2 comments

in Bailout Watch, Economy, Labor

Kurt Vonnegut’s short story, “Harrison Bergeron,” describes a world in which the utopian dream of equality has been achieved beyond anyone’s wildest imaginings: “Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else.” This strict equality is enforced by the U.S. Handicapper General through a regimen of artificial “handicaps,” like disruptive ear transmitters for the highly intelligent and weights for the athletic.

Equality taken to that extreme strikes nearly everyone as absurd. Unfortunately, when it comes to business, such across-the-board kneecapping enjoys some undeserved acceptability. Consider the ongoing controversy between shipping giants UPS and FedEx over their differential labor law status. As George Will notes in his Washington Post column today, organized labor helped Democrats considerably in taking control of Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008, so now, “Congress might change labor law to assist UPS, a Teamsters stronghold, by hindering its principal competitor, FedEx.” Here’s how:

The growth of railroads had put America’s increasingly integrated economy at the mercy of local strikes. “Brakemen in Altoona, signalmen in Wichita,” says Fred Smith, could cripple the transportation network [no relation to CEI President Fred Smith]. Smith, FedEx’s founder and chief executive, says that in 1926, to protect the arteries of commerce, Congress passed the Railway Labor Act (RLA). It ensured that any bargaining unit for workers must be systemwide so that no local unit could hold the railroads hostage.

In 1935, the National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act), which covered everyone except railway workers, allowed organizing and bargaining based on localities. The path to unionization is steeper under the RLA, which requires a nationwide vote by all workers.

In 1936, airlines were brought under the RLA. FedEx, which began as an air freight company and created the modern express business, is precisely the sort of integrated system for which the RLA was written. This matters: 53 percent of all U.S. exports by value travel by air, and virtually all priority and express U.S. mail is carried by FedEx.

In 1981, UPS began air services, and in the 1990s it tried, legislatively and judicially, to be put under the RLA. In 1993 UPS said all of its operations, “including ground operations,” are properly subject to the RLA “because the ground operations are part of the air service.” FedEx supported UPS’s efforts, even though the vast majority of UPS parcels never go on an airplane, whereas FedEx’s trucking operations exist to feed its air fleet and distribute what it carries.

FedEx characterizes itself as the “world’s most effective airline” and UPS as “a 100-year-old trucking company.” FedEx, Smith insists, is not anti-union; its pilots are unionized. He says that the pay and benefits for its drivers are, on average, higher than those of UPS drivers and that new FedEx drivers must wait only three months to be eligible for benefits whereas UPS drivers must wait a year. Nevertheless, today’s Democratic majority in Congress, with UPS now aligned with the Teamsters, wants to put FedEx’s ground pickup and delivery operations under the NLRA, thereby making FedEx’s entire integrated system susceptible to disruption by local disputes.

UPS is right to decry the fact that its workforce is treated differently from that of FedEx in terms of the law. But the solution it is pursing is the wrong one. Rather than try to weigh FedEx down, UPS should strive to see itself as the ballerina in Vonnegut’s story who sheds her “handicap” weights and then dances free. And other firms, including FedEx, should help UPS and others extricate themselves from this unfair burden.

Greider: Democrats Not Stalinist Enough

by Marc Scribner on June 8, 2009

in Culture, Odds & Ends, Sanctimony, Zeitgeist

If you’re searching for a good piece of bizarre, whacked-out political “analysis,” look no further than William Greider’s latest column in the Nation. Greider, a veteran journalist, is known for coining the term “Nader’s Raiders” in the late ’60s, and for authoring a book on globalization, One World, Ready or Not, which even the progressive economist Paul Krugman described as “a thoroughly silly book.” Greider’s column is really just another bad sales pitch for his latest train-wreck tome, Come Home, America, but it should at least be interesting to see how many more times Nation editors are able to recycle and repackage it before their readers notice. I’ll let Greider speak for himself:

The party’s ideological intentions are being defined with greater clarity in these new circumstances, and so are the President’s. It’s still early, but the implications are ominous for other issues. If Democrats are reluctant to disturb the power of other major interests, it seems improbable that fundamental change will occur on healthcare, energy conversion or the restoration of work and wages. The problem now is the Democrats, not the Republicans. The party aids and protects its free-roaming entrepreneurial politicians and does not punish those who undermine the party’s larger promises. When Republicans were in charge, they enforced party loyalty with Stalinist discipline. Democrats are the party of safe incumbents, weak convictions.

Greider holds up the poorly-named “Credit Cardholders’ Bill of Rights” as an example of where Democrats have been too easy on industry and too light on anti-commerce ideology. Moreover, his real quest, as he describes it, is “to force a moral awakening on the narrow thinking of the status quo.” Huh? But none of this should be surprising coming from someone who once described economics as “not really a science so much as a value-laden form of prophecy.”

“Sanity is not statistical”

by Ivan Osorio on March 2, 2009 · 1 comment

in Culture, Economy, Politics as Usual, Stimulus to Nowhere

There are few things more fascinating to watch than liberals hyperventilate to the point that they lose the basic ability to construct even a rudimentary argument. It’s not pretty, but like a car wreck, it’s hard to turn oneself away. Consider this letter in the current issue of The Economist:

SIR – Sadly, the Republicans have rediscovered the joys of opposition. Nothing as slight as a national crisis is going to make them shift from ground that seems so politically advantageous. Yet despite its considerable flaws, the stimulus bill does have substantial broad support—among voters. Perhaps, in time, the Republican rump will come around, but I would not count on it any time soon, especially when newspapers such as yours are prepared to treat their claims of high-mindedness with such undeserved respect. [Emphasis added]

The writer is essentially arguing that Congress should pass the stimulus, even though, admittedly, it has “considerable flaws”– because it’s popular. (Notice the lack of any discussion of its effects.)

And that’s not all. In the same letter, the writer accuses Republicans of engaging in “politically advantageous” pandering by opposing that same allegedly popular program.

With President Obama’s approval ratings still at healthy levels, we may yet see more similar defenses of policies he supports to be based on popularity — couched in more diginfied terms, such as “mandate,” of course.

It’s always good to keep in mind Winston Smith‘s greatest discovery: “Sanity is not statistical.”

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