Andy Stern v. Free Labor

One of our favorite moments in a long newspaper life came in a conversation about the fall of the Soviet Union. We had put a question to the president of the AFL-CIO, Lane Kirkland, along the following lines. “Lane,” we said. “what about all the talk about how our victory over the Soviet Union was a conspiracy between President Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and yourself.” He looked at us and said: “They had nuttin’ to do with it.”

Kirkland didn’t mean to deny the role of Reagan and the Pope in the defeat of Soviet communism. His wisecrack was designed to emphasize the long, pre-meditated, and too rarely recognized role that the free trade union movement played in the long, twilight struggle — and the fact that it was a free trade union, Solidarity in Poland, that finally cracked the Soviet rule in the East Bloc by putting paid the lie that communism defended the interests of working men and women.

We were thinking of this as we read, in the Wall Street Journal, the paean penned by the former president of the Service Employees International Union, Andrew Stern, to the Chinese communist system. “China’s Superior Economnic Model” was the headline over the piece. Full of praise for the Chinese communist system, Mr. Stern argued that the “conservative-preferred, free-market fundamentalist, shareholder-only model—so successful in the 20th century—is being thrown onto the trash heap of history in the 21st century.”

What was so shocking about the piece is that the author, himself a labor union leader, or at least a former one, failed to mention the word “union” or “labor” even once. This oversight was quickly seized on by the readers of the Journal, which published a wonderful series of letters to the editor. Workers at China, wrote the founder of China Labor Watch, Li Qiang, “do not have the right to organize labor unions or to collectively bargain with factories for redress of grievances.”

Wrote Mr. Li: “Those rights taken for granted by Americans, still have to be fought for every time workers at a particular Chinese factory have been pushed too far.” He called the predicament of labor at China “an inevitable byproduct of the Chinese development model that Mr. Stern lauds, since it relies on long-term economic planning at a high level of government. As a result, it is very hard for smaller, less powerful interest groups to have any attention paid to their concerns. Workers and their advocates are exactly the kind of constituency that this system fails.”

A congressman from Pennsylvania, Joseph Pitts, pointed out that the reason China is able to “plan" its economy is that “there is no room for dissent.” Ryan Young of the Competitive Enterprise Institute wrote to say that America itself is not entirely a “free-market fundamentalist nation. “Federal, state and local governments combine to spend roughly 40% of GDP,” Mr. Young pointed out, “and that doesn't count the cost of compliance with federal regulations.”

A reader at Miami, Natasha Gottlieb, wrote to suggest that “China will overtake us not because it has a centralized economy, but because it has moved toward a freer one.” Meanwhile, she added, “we continue to stray far from a free economy. It was when we believed in a free market and limited government that we became the economic engine of the world and created a high standard of living and a large, vibrant middle class. If we want to spark and ‘lead this global revolution,’ we must return to what created it in the first place.”

Another reader, Rich Mirsky, wrote to say that “No bureaucrat or central planner told Apple to create the iPhone or Google to develop a search engine.” And Ken Nicolay wrote from Kansas City to remark on the “delicious irony” that China “expressly prohibits public employee unions” of the kind Mr. Stern represented. “Maybe he is on to something, Mr. Nicolay wrote.

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For our part, we’ve long-since learned to discount the role of central planning in economic development — and to be wary of dictatorial governments boasting, at the expense of democracies, about their economic progress. America may have a public debt that is so large as to be destabilizing. We wouldn’t want to understate that. But the labor overhang in China — the vast understated cost of the slave labor system that China uses — is an enormous balance-sheet problem for the communist regime. In the relative sense, we’d rather have our problem than China’s. For if we respond with sound money and lower taxes, our system of democracy will be rewarded. If the Chinese respond with political freedom and labor rights, their system of Communist Party rule will be destroyed. Lane Kirkland understood that and pressed the point all the way to glory.