The Wall Street Journal reports that the International Brotherhood of Teamsters has thus far refrained from giving its official support to one or the other of the two main parties and presidential candidates in the forthcoming election (“Some Teamsters Rebel After Boss Praises Trump,” August 24). A Teamsters’ spokeswoman declared:
Our endorsement must be earned.
The meaning of this sentence is clear: the organization will officially support the candidate or party that promises to give it the most in terms of coercive legal privileges or hard cash for its members. The Brotherhood sells its support in exchange for privileges, and the government sells the privileges in exchange for support. It’s political exchange between greedy bullies.
What theory of the state can justify that? The cynical view is to think, “Our turn to get privileges will come!” The angelic view of the state consists instead of thinking, “Oh my God, that’s bad, they should (like I do) selflessly pursue the common good.” A basket of other justifications contains many strands claiming that the rules under which we live or have decided to live allow for some limited political exchange; some (James Buchanan, for example) are more defendable than others (say, Jean-Jacques Rousseau).
A different, anti-state, approach has been proposed by economist and political philosopher Anthony de Jasay. The Teamsters’ bargaining is seen as a manifestation of the “adversary state” or discriminatory state, which takes sides in favor of some citizens and against others. Among those who live under the discriminatory state, the winners are those who most efficiently bargain to sell their support to the state.
In a sense, the Teamsters’ officialdom believes in a dictatorship of the proletariat with a human face, that is, in which the proletariat votes. But this is only a first approximation. In fact, many of its members (cops and airline pilots, for example) are no proletarians at all; the others are not paupers. As its logo shows, the union was more proletarian (assuming for a moment that this term has any meaning on a free market) when its original members in 1903 were drivers of horse-drawn wagons. Their hierography presents them as early defenders of “social justice.” According to historian David Witwer, the Teamsters’ union did admit and recruit Blacks as full members but was not uncontaminated by the racism of the trade unions and of the white workers who often resented the competition of the Blacks (see his “Race Relations in the Early Teamsters Union,” Labor History 43-4 [2002]).
Perhaps I should emphasize that in a standard (classical) liberal or libertarian perspective, there is no reason to oppose collective bargaining, provided that every member of the “collective” (the members of the union) is a voluntary member and that the other side, against whom it is negotiating, is not forced by law to “negotiate.” As a matter of terminology, and in parallel to the substantive “collectivism,” I suggest that “collective” should refer to groups that impose their will on recalcitrant members; in that sense, free trade unions might be involved in group bargaining, not collective bargaining. Trade unions would be as useful as any voluntary association, perhaps even more useful in certain circumstances, provided it remains voluntary and does not wield coercive privileges. In general, the way to know that an institution is useful in the economic sense of “efficient” is that it survives with no legal privilege.
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