Score: Card Check 0, Wal-Mart 1

Now, here's one for all of you who love the idea of card-check unionization as embodied in the nascent Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA).

The United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW), using card check, organized a Wal-Mart store just outside Montreal, Canada, in 2005. And, of course, it began collecting union dues (the sine qua non of labor and politics, the almighty buck).

The UFCW spent the next three-plus years trying to negotiate a contract, and this was in the heart of union-loving, union-friendly Canada, with Wal-Mart balking the whole time.

The issue, a la EFCA, went to arbitration, and the arbitrator this week issued his finding.

Guess what?

Wal-Mart won big time. Arbitrator (remember, this is unionville) Alain Corriveau ruled that the UFCW demands would destroy Wal-Mart's business model, which he said treated employees as well or better, wage- and benefits-wise, as competing retailers.

Wal-Mart’s compensation system, said the arbitrator, "must be retained," and "falls within the culture of the company which encourages and privileges performance at work." He added: "Putting into place...a wage scale as proposed by the union would also drastically change an important piece of [Wal-Mart’s] business model."

He did grant a 30-cent wage increase over the next two years to current employees at the Saint-Hyacinthe Wal-Mart so they wouldn't be "impoverished" by union dues. New hires will not get the raise, however. (Read more details here.)

Question: Are the employees now going to card check the UFCW out of their store?

Answer: If they're smart, they will.

Dem Defection Seems to Doom EFCA

Losing their lone Republican supporter in Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the Democrats pushing the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) in the Senate faced what best could be called an uphill battle.

With the announcement yesterday by Democratic Senator Blanche L. Lincoln of Arkansas that she "cannot support that bill," however, things are now trending decidedly downhill.

Without modifications, EFCA may be finished in the 111th Congress unless the Dems resort to the reconiliation process to bypass a cloture vote, which requires 60 Senators to move a bill along. However, reconciliation would set up several nuclear explosions politically and would have a hard time surviving the Byrd Rule, which states that reconciliation must be used only for budget matters (although they're already hinting about enclosing health care reform in reconciliation).

Other than modifying the EFCA or passing just parts of it, supporters may have to wait until 2010 when there will be more Republican than Democratic Senate seats up for reelection. The Democrats might well end up with a filibuster-proof Senate, or they may get spanked as they did after two years of Bill and Hillary in 1994.

Time will tell.

The Dismal Science Becomes Depressing

I know I studied economics way back when, no doubt in some undergraduate survey course, but the passage of time has helped me mercifully forget many of the economists and theories I studied.

Until today.

In my daily research rounds of reading Google Alerts, I came across a site called the Christopher Hitchens (who he?) Watch. In the most recent blog posting, Greywolf (who he?) regurgitates the Iron Law of Wages from British economist David Ricardo (1772-1823).

You don't want to read it, or be reminded of it, but here goes.

Ricardo held that competition among laborers (that is, from a steady stream of new workers readily available due to human procreation) will consistently drive down wages due to supply and demand. At the same time, staples and base necessities will consistently rise in price because more labor will be needed to provide for an ever-expanding population. In the long run, these forces will drive wages down to subsistence levels, where they will remain if human society is to survive.

Now, we've never reached that predicted subsistence level of wages due to a variety of factors (inventions, wars, immobile factories and workforces, unionization, and so on), but now that the world is one large labor market, Ricardo may have the last laugh--if one can get a laugh from such a prediction-come-true.

I thought Ricardo was particularly perceptive, however, when he wrote about governments' creating "poor laws" to fight wage disparity (and this must be the world's longest sentence):

The clear and direct tendency of the poor laws is in direct opposition to those obvious principles: it is not, as the legislature benevolently intended, to amend the condition of the poor, but to deteriorate the condition of both poor and rich; instead of making the poor rich, they are calculated to make the rich poor; and while the present laws are in force, it is quite in the natural order of things that the fund for the maintenance of the poor should progressively increase till it has absorbed all the net revenue of the country, or at least so much of it as the state shall leave to us, after satisfying its own never-failing demands for the public expenditure.

The scary thought is that it's well within the reach and power of Obama and the Democrats, if they maintain power for two terms in the White House, to have "absorbed all the net revenue of the country" by 2016, or even 2012.

I guess that's why we should listen to our more modern economist, John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), who reminded us that none of this matters because, in the long run, "we're all dead."