Philavore

and I'm always coming across troubling new examples.

On Monday, the NYTimes ran the following headline that has stuck with me over the last few days as particularly egregious example of intellectual sloppiness.

The headline read: "Strained States Turning to Laws to Curb Labor Unions".

Is it me, or doesn’t this headline constitute a misuse of the term "labor union"?

Especially if considered in terms of the context of those folks who originally conceived of the economic rationale for labor unions?

As explained by Adam Smith, labor unions may be justified according to the following economic rationale:

"We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combination of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor above their actual rate[.] When workers combine, masters ... never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combination of servants, laborers, and journeymen."

In that it applies to justify one but not the other, it seems to me that this rationale that incidentally also served as the justification for the Wagner Act ought to demand a distinction between unions that represent government employees versus unions that represent private-sector employees. Conversely, wouldn’t this rationale as articulated by the likes of Adam Smith and Karl Marx make the conflation of the two as if both were members of the same species evidence of a lack intellectual rigor?

Moreover, I'd venture a guess that if the NYTimes had approached this story with any sense of historical context, the fact that Republicans are conflating government unions to erode the legitimacy of private sector labor unions would be made all the more interesting.

By alas, who has the attention span for that? Certainly not the readers of the NYTimes.