“Made in America” used to be the imprimatur of pride and perfection. American industry set the pace — and the tone — for state-of-the-art manufacturing worldwide because, as one American manufacturer use to say (before it moved offshore): “The quality goes in before the name goes on.”
But, no more. Regardless of one’s position on the propriety of companies moving their operations to Latin America and elsewhere, one fact remains largely indisputable: union work rules have made it tough, if not impossible, for U.S. workers to compete. As the times changed, the union hierarchy didn’t. And because compulsory unionism in most states, and industries, handed union bosses the scepter of tyranny, workers had little voice in adapting the workplace and adopting new roles.
Nowhere did the union hierarchy play out its hand with more rapacious intransigence than in America’s formerly world-class auto industry. As the video below demonstrates, the union bosses sewed the seeds of greed … the American worker reaped a harvest of ruin … and “Made in America” went the way of “See the USA in Your Chevrolet.”
ALG Perspective: If “Made in America” is ever again to regain its place of preeminence, the American government is going to have to overturn the sections of the National Labor Relations Act giving union bosses dictatorial rule on the factory floor. As former Washington Post columnist William Raspberry wrote of compulsory unionism, “Good unions don’t need it, and bad unions don’t deserve it.” He might have added: And for the sake of workers and the workplace alike, no union should receive it as a right from the hand of government.
