Big Labor has been shrinking for decades, but the aggressive rhetoric about organizing new parts of the labor force never stops, as this article in the Detroit Free Press makes clear.
Last year, the UAW won a representation election at a liberal arts college in Wisconsin and I wrote about it here.
With almost everyone talking about the need to make higher education more affordable, you have to wonder about the viability of this new union campaign. Should the UAW succeed in “organizing” faculties (many individual professors don’t want union representation, but our authoritarian/collectivist labor law makes unionization an all-or-nothing proposition) and driving up labor costs, the result in the fairly short run will be to drive away students and compel labor-saving changes that will be damaging to some professors. Maybe the UAW will manage to do for colleges and universities the same thing it has done for General Motors — to give more efficient competitors a great edge.
