Lifetime Guarantee

The Boston Globe has reached a deal with their labor unions to hopefully keep the paper running. Turns out one of the most contentious parts of the negotiations had nothing to do with compensation - it had to do with guaranteed lifetime employment. This is one of the things that makes my mind spin at the labor unions.

I've never worked in a unionized job, so maybe I just lack some critical angle on the whole deal here. But it seems pretty clear that the unions are no longer a bastion of hope against the unfair practices of evil management. It's one thing to organize against sweatshop wages and unsafe work environments. But it's a joke to organize so you blackmail management into a suicide pact - and that's what lifetime employment guarantees are. When business is growing, there's no real impact to an enterprise from that agreement. But it's no wonder that management at any enterprise needs to get those provisions struck when business is weak.

As the economic downturn picked up over this last year, I've consistently heard stories about how unions have threatened the economic viability of businesses. The obvious examples from the Detroit car companies are just the tip of the iceberg. Unionized labor may have been a good thing in the past, but I have to wonder if there will be a point in time when government labor regulations will reduce unions to nothing but a poison pill that threatens both management AND labor with their demands.