Unions Killing our Major Newspapers from Planck's Constant

In Seattle, boxes holding the city’s two major dailies. The
Post-Intelligencer may be an online-only paper after next week.
Photo Credit: New York Times

I have written previously (see my articles on Unions here) that Unions have killed our textile, railroad and automobile industry. They have also been killing the Newspaper industry for decades, fighting against typesetting equipment, offset printing, and anything that might automate the business. Sure, they eventually allowed news owners to get rid of manually inserted typesetting but only after years of costly struggles that saw thousands of newspapers close down. Then Unions begrudgingly allowed keyboard-activated typesetting such as Linotype but only after every non-union paper had it for years; more papers closed.

And finally, years after every newspaper in the world already converted to offset, did they allow large American papers to use the new technology.

The people who run Unions are either the dumbest bastards on this planet or the most evil. Who cannot see the harm that Union featherbedding, technology stalling, automation stonewalling, and productivity sabotaging have done to our economy and in the end to the American worker himself?

This has been a long time coming:

New York Times, As Cities Go From Two Papers to One, Talk of Zero
The history of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer stretches back more than two decades before Washington became a state, but after 146 years of publishing, the paper is expected to print its last issue next week, perhaps surviving only in a much smaller online version.

And it is not alone. The Rocky Mountain News shut down two weeks ago, and The Tucson Citizen is expected to fold next week.

At least Denver, Seattle and Tucson still have daily papers. But now, some economists and newspaper executives say it is only a matter of time — and probably not much time at that — before some major American city is left with no prominent local newspaper at all.

...

The Hearst Corporation, which owns The Post-Intelligencer, has also threatened to close The San Francisco Chronicle, which lost more than $1 million a week last year, unless it can wring significant savings from the operation.

In a tentative deal reached Tuesday night, the California Media Workers Guild agreed to less vacation time, longer workweeks and more flexibility for The Chronicle to make layoffs without regard to seniority. Union officials say they have been told to expect the elimination of at least 150 guild jobs, almost one-third of the total, and management is still trying to negotiate concessions from the Teamsters union.

This is how it goes: Unions choke businesses until they are about to fold completely, then toss a few concessions but only enough to keep the enterprises from falling into a coma, then after every worker who might have been replaced by automation has retired they give in to automation but only enough to keep the whole thing afloat until there is barely a husk of a shell left and concessions are not enough to save the industry and then, then when those jobs go overseas or the company moves its operations abroad or customers buy a competing non-Union product, then the Unions complain of evil and greedy business owners and stingy consumers who don't buy AMERICAN.

Perhaps now, with the country facing its deepest crises in a century, perhaps it is time we did away with unions entirely and save this country from their rapacious and deadly grip.