I have been saying for years now that collective bargaining violates antitrust law. My theory was greeted quietly yet thoughtfully at first in 2007 at ALEC but I've stood by it.
On Friday, I created a pop culture cartoon on the anti-collective bargaining bill to explain my theory.
Now, finally, in today's Wall Street Journal a Professor of Economics at Harvard University is stating the very same thing; that collective bargaining is a violation of Antitrust.
"For a teachers union, collective bargaining means that suppliers of teacher services to all public school systems in a state—or even across states—can collude with regard to acceptable wages, benefits and working conditions. An analogy for business would be for all providers of airline transportation to assemble to fix ticket prices, capacity and so on. From this perspective, collective bargaining on a broad scale is more similar to an antitrust violation than to a civil liberty."
I hope the logic of this thinking will quickly spread - it is about time...
Susan Lynn
NOTE: When the law is unjust we see ill effects. That is why laws get changed. Special treatment; excluding the activities of particular special interest groups from the law does not make it just. Why did they need to be excluded in the first place? What have the effects been? Others comment "what about all the good for which unions have worked?" If the law is changed unions can and always will still exist. In fact, many associations (guilds, industry groups, special interest groups, whatever you want to call them) successfully work for the passage of very good laws (and some bad ones) all the time and they don't need collective bargaining to do so.
