[Hoot Gibson]

Unions can only work well in businesses that have strong management teams to provide a balance of power, IMO. Early in my engineering career, I worked at quite a few UMWA surface and underground mines and coal preparation plants for one of the nation's largest coal companies. The labor relations at some of those operations were as good as at any non-union operation that I have ever worked. Other operations, often located only a few miles away, made me dread having to go to work in the morning.

The thing that I noticed about UMWA mining operations at an early age was that where management and the union stuck closely to the contract, everybody was much happier than at operations where management, with the best intentions, established "past practices" that became an extension of future contracts. At a couple of operations where labor relations were especially bad, the binder containing these past practices that were in effect dwarfed the actual contract and were the source of many grievances.

Things as simple as offering people overtime in emergencies became needlessly complex. For example, in one case there were three large stockpiles of coal. For one stockpile, if overtime was required, we had to call the members of one local, for another stockpile, we had to offer overtime to a second local only. For the third stockpile, we had to offer half of the overtime to one local and half of the overtime to the second local. Add that to the fact that we had to try to balance the overtime among members of each local, and what should have been as simple as looking at a list and calling somebody in to work became a complicated procedure with a small margin for error.

The other thing that weakly managed companies do is that they make large concessions to avoid work stoppages when business is good without giving much thought to what will happen during a recession. For union shops to work well, both sides need strong, fair negotiators at the bargaining table.

IMO, these are the reasons that public sector unions are always a bad idea. The unions always hold the upper hand in negotiations because the elected officials and the bureaucrats that negotiate the terms of contracts are rarely held accountable for making bad deals. I cannot recall an election where overly generous union contracts were a campaign issue, yet those contracts are bankrupting governments around the country and taxpayers are paying the price. Public sector unions and work stoppages should be illegal in all cases.