Nostalgia

One nice thing about the auto makers asking for a bailout is that we’re getting a return to all the harrowing tales of how the evil labor unions raped and pillaged US industry. If they hadn’t gotten too big for their britches, Flint might still be a vibrant city rather than a ghost town with a criminal and former car dealer as mayor. Oh, those greedy workers! When will enough be enough?! When will they stop cutting into the bosses’ profit margins and forcing them to relocate?

Growing up in Flint, I of course heard stories like this constantly. The basic message: Unions did good things in their time, but they overreached, meaning that we were all screwed in the long term. The assumption seems to be that the owners’ short-sighted pursuit of profit was just a brute fact, but workers should’ve known better than to try to get the best contract they could get — i.e., workers should’ve been looking out for the owners’ best interests rather than their own. Psychologists have a name for this particular style of thought: Stockholm Syndrome.