Obama: Unions bad for companies, good for workers

I am sure you have heard about the Volkswagon workers in Chattanooga, Tennessee voting last week not to unionize. Reuters reported last Friday, while the vote was going on, that President Obama weighed in at a private meeting: "Obama said everyone was in favor of the UAW representing Volkswagen except for local politicians who 'are more concerned about German shareholders than American workers,' according to a Democratic aide who attended the meeting with Democratic lawmakers in the House of Representatives."

James Taranto writes,

if the secondhand Obama comment is accurately reported, it reflects some serious misconceptions, as well as an unwitting but telling acknowledgment.

One misconception is the vaguely xenophobic claim that VW is owned by "German shareholders." In fact, although Volkswagen AG is a German company, it is publicly traded on multiple stock exchanges. Its shareholders include American workers, either directly or through mutual funds and retirement accounts. Owning VW stock does not make you German (which may come as a relief).

Obama's unwitting acknowledgment is that unionization is bad for companies, a corollary of its being bad for shareholders. But that leads to another misconception. If unionization is bad for companies, it does not follow that it is good for workers. The relationship between employers and employees is not fundamentally an adversarial one.