Actually it takes a lot of work to beat up scabs and key their cars.

I wish we didn’t have weekends, 40 hour work weeks, overtime, workplace safety laws, child labor laws, pensions, or healthcare.

Yes, after all working conditions and standards of living had been steadily worsening since the start of the industrial age just like Marx predicted. No, wait, they weren’t. All the improvements that unions claim sole responsibility for where actually long term trends well underway long before unions gained power. At best, unions only accelerated improvements by a few years.

Claiming credit for improvements wrought by the free-market is a fairly standard trick of the left. They accomplish this by tricking people into comparing the point in time when leftist policies where implemented against present day conditions. In reality, they should be comparing conditions at the time of implementation with conditions a few decades prior to that.

To celebrate the failed Chicago Boyz is insane, Milton Friedman and his hell spawn have destroyed the middle class in every country they touched, much to the delight of their elite masters.

Right, that is why the middle-class in say Michigan is so much better off than than the middle-class in say Texas. And of course, that is why heavily unionized urban areas are attracting middle-class families away from the suburbs. Meanwhile, back on earth…

I have worked for the company in UAW and Teamster companies, and the union guys are usually right about more than the company, and they contribute greatly when allowed.

Well, then why don’t the unions just run their own companies then? If they’re so damn smart and always right, why bother with the incompetents of managers and investors? Nope, that is to hard. Instead, it’s much easy to sit in the backseat and bitch, bitch, bitch. The jerk in the backseat telling you how to drive always imagines themselves right because they never have to accept responsibility for their decsions.

Of course, unions already do run companies by enforcing minimum staffing and work rules that dictate how companies have to organize the work they carry out. Unions block technology that would improve productivity but that would “cost jobs.” Do you ever see unions stepping up and accepting responsibility for the effect that union decisions have on the long term health of the companies they control?

No, instead, investors and consumers are expected to just keep coughing up unlimited money to union monopolies while management is stuck with all the blame. It’s a sweet gig if you can get it but you can see how the rest of us who compete in the free-market for our livelihood would be more than a little resentful of union privilege.

It would be so much better if we could all compete in a race to the bottom against the poorest people in the world!

To celebrate the failed Chicago Boyz is insane, Milton Friedman and his hell spawn have destroyed the middle class in every country they touched, much to the delight of their elite masters.

I have worked for the company in UAW and Teamster companies, and the union guys are usually right about more than the company, and they contribute greatly when allowed.

Mutalism is simply covering up the reality of union violence with pleasant phrases. It doesn’t matter what you intend you actions to be or what you wish your actions to be. It merely matters what your actions actually are. Just because you use the words, “Peaceful” and “free” doesn’t mean that you actions are peaceful and lead to increased freedom.

I find the Mutalist description you link to especially vapid. It doesn’t actually say what mutalist should or should not do in any particular detail. It basically just says, “we’ll always be the good guys.”

In reality, unions cannot function without the ability to use violence to prevent other workers from competing economically with the union workers. Otherwise, you can’t extort from consumers a price above the free-market without being able to establish a monopoly for that product. As long as consumers can choose to buy from non-union workers, union workers will have to be content with the wages they can negotiate without the threat of violence.

The mythology of unions and other forms of violence based economics arises from the need to rationalize why one group of humans has the right to take away by force the resources of another. Those rationalizations can be based in religion such as in Hinduism, classist as in medieval cultures, racism as in fascism or the socialist idea that people of who perform particular economic functions are actually unproductive parasites. In all these rationalizations, the targeted group is always composed of evil cheaters who deserve to be hurt in order to balance the cosmic scales of justice. At different times and places, these rationalizations seemed perfectly obvious to all right thinking people.

So, instead of looking at rationalizations, I look at actions. The actions of unions are centered around destruction and killing. They destroy physical resources they can’t control and kill people who try to compete with them. You can’t cover that reality up with words.

I don’t think anyone has done a systematic study of this because the people who do such research are overwhelmingly leftists academics who support unions. However, it’s very easy to piece together a rough estimate.

The Jim Crow era lasted from 1876 to 1865 and and estimated 3,000 blacks and around 1,000 whites were lynched during that time. That comes to a rate of murder Africa-Americans of two a month. Up until WWII, roughly 2/3 of the “scabs” were African-American. Scabs and the security protecting them were the primary targets of union violence. You can leaf though histories of strikes and read between the lines of the hagiography to the mentions of scabs being killed (they are always nameless and faceless, just numbers cast up as stage props in the drama of the union protagonist.) From that you can easily reach an African-American death rate from union violence of 2 per months over the Jim Crow period.In the post WWI, period you can start to add in deaths caused union affiliated mobs and even machine controlled police. Read up on the history of the south side of Chicago during the African-American migrations of the 1920′s.

Like I said, you won’t find a concise description because the people who create such descriptions do not want such a story told. You have to piece it together yourself.

However, it is not a stretch to say that union members killed as many African Americans during this period as were lynched in the Jim Crow South.

I’ve heard about the racist exclusionary origins of the AFL before, but never any claim quite as sensational as this. Got any citations? (Other than the general fact that the era of lynchings largely preceded the era of unionization, in which case you should probably be a little more specific about the period…)

Q: How many union members does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: 8. You got a problem with that?!?

For a time in the parts of the northeast the difference between union and non-union was major. Unions for skilled trades worked like medieval guilds with a monopoly on work in a region as well as the authority to decide who could join the union, and thus work, and who could not. Some unions were “father-brother” unions in which a union member, usually family, had to sponsor a new union member. I believe the sandhogs still work that way. Then you get to add in union control of local politics and the always present problem of mob corruption. You end up with a very restrictive system in which a minority of privileged workers have the legal power to prevent others from competing with them.