Labor Activists Explore New Ways to Show They Are Always Right

by | Jun 16, 2011 | Labor Relations Ink

Its been said that a sure sign of insanity is to do the same thing in the same way over and over again, assuming that this time the end result will be different.  Two hundred delusional labor activists and academics gathered at Georgetown University last week to brainstorm new innovative ways for unions to regain lost political and economic power.  And they based their exploration on the same old whiney “poor us” polemic that has dragged down organized labor for decades.  We know the drill – the Republicans and corporations are solely responsible for declining union membership.  Got it.  And Labor has no intrinsic weaknesses beyond its struggles to convince us all that they will always know what’s best for us. According to Jefferson Cowie, history professor at Cornell University, it’s not what unions do, it’s how unions communicate what they do that’s the only problem.  Unions only need to refine and repackage their core (socialist) message so we simple common folk can get it. Cowie added that conservatives are better at framing their ideas in terms that appeal to peoples’ values and emotions.  (I know I’m just a slow libertarian, but it seems to me the one thing you can’t criticize unions for is their ability to appeal to values and emotions… but logic is a different story). By week’s end the gathering’s participants had accomplished nothing beyond wasting the dues dollars that sent them there on but another mission to collectively bury their grotesquely over-inflated heads in the sand and feel uniquely enlightened while doing so.  And that might be the best place to start the next discussion on the decline of organized labor.  

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