Bloviating versus Thoughtful Commentary

Tonight in rapid succession NPR had Robert Reich, the once always available pundit with lots of words but little to say and Fred Smith - the genuine American innovator who started Federal Express. I wonder why anyone ever listens to Reich; I was a captive in a car. He gives a bad name to the word glib. His commentary tonight was that if we only went back to the era of the 1950s when a third of private workers were in unions, the economy would be humming along soon. Indeed, if we went back to the 1950s more people would die of cancer too.

The time for industrial unions may have been in the decades that Reich would like to recreate, but our economy is different today. He argues that if we just extended unions to the service sector that we would be in better shape. That is just plain silly. Many service industries have consistently rejected attempts to organize them. Reich and his crowd say it is intimidation by the "bosses", in reality times are different and many workers understood what I did when I was first working. My first job was as a dishwasher. I found a job at a fast food place that was unionized and thought wow my wage will increase from $1 an hour to $1.25. At the end of the summer the net cost of joining the union cost me 27¢ per hour. In my senior year in high school I tried a union gig for a bluegrass band I was working in. While their scale was higher than I was being paid it had two defects - a representation fee and a "drumstick man" who was some out of work musician who went out on our gig and collected a fifth of our pay for picking up our drumsticks (we were a bluegrass band so that was a bit odd). Unions have done some good for some workers but they have also clogged up the wheels of commerce. Going back to a third of the workforce in unions is not a solution. If the efficacy of unions were really true then the wages of public workers would be coming up and the public economy would be more efficient. Neither is true.

Then the program presented Fred Smith. He discussed FedEx's current situation. Business for them is down. He made some thoughtful comments about the Stimulus package just adopted (it could have been shaped better into more productive investments and less blatant spending) but he thinks we might be coming out of this downturn in the summer. He looked at the downturn from a number of views including that the spike in gas prices led to some decline in the mortgage market (with some homeowners choosing between mortgage and gas payments). That is not all of it, but it could have been a precipitating event.

Reich is at Berkeley now after stints at a number of universities, at least one of which where he was denied tenure. I wonder why he is sought out for his opinions. On the other hand Smith was worth listening to - I would have liked to hear more.