President Obama
regularly conflated labor unions with the middle class in his Labor Day
rant. Wrong. Way wrong.
Labor unions are a legacy of 16th Century crafts guilds. Unions and guilds have been the four wheel brake on commerce throughout history.
Today, they are the most destructive force
acting on large manufacturing businesses and government bureaucracies.
So our president thinks labor unions have created the middle class, created shorter work weeks (which have actually been getting longer every year since 1982) and ended child labor.* Think of GM and the UAW that required a $30 billion taxpayer bailout.
*Think of the UAW that destroyed the NUMMI auto plant in California and put 15,000 plant and associated people out of work rather than take a pay cut.
That
means that while he was at Occidental, Columbia and Harvard, Obama never
noticed that Japan has the biggest middleclass on the planet and
virtually no real labor unions. India has a rapidly growing middleclass
without any benefit of labor unions... the same is true for Singapore,
Hong Kong and Taiwan.
In each of these examples we have a gigantic middleclass with no active labor unions.