"A lucid and powerful indictment of American public policy that promotes the establishment and entrenchment of monopoly power in labor markets. [This] book raises sensible questions about a public labor policy that has somehow survived for over half a century, despite the damage it has done to the country and its working people."
-Simon Rottenberg, University of Massachusetts"Making America Poorer is informative and intriguing reading material for the general audience as well as the practiced economist."
-Journal of Macroeconomics
How much do labor unions cost the American economy? Labor's decline reflects a growing understanding, among workers as well as outside observers, of the detrimental effects of adversarial unions. Economist Morgan Reynolds has carefully studied the legal and economic consequences of federal labor law and has uncovered some shocking facts.
Everyone who has a stake in America's overall prosperity and standard of living will be astounded when Reynolds adds up the lost GNP attributable to above-market wages, wage inflexibility, work rules, delay of new technology, strikes, and other effects of adversarial unionism.
Reynolds concludes that there is no sound argument for granting monopoly privileges to unions at the expense of the overwhelming majority of American workers. If we want to increase America's competiveness and treat all workers fairly, he says, we must extend the current wave of deregulation to labor markets.
Morgan O. Reynolds is a professor of economics at Texas A&M University and author of Power and Privilege: Labor Unions in America.
1987/218pp./$3.00 paper ISBN: 0-932790-64-X [ Ordering Information | Book Index | Publications | Home ]