Robert Reich, Goldman School of Public policy

February 7, 2009

Robert Reich
Goldman School of Public policy
University of California
2607 Hearst Avenue
Berkeley, California 94720-7320

RE: “Unions Can Strengthen America” or so you say in this morning’s Miami Herald

Professor Reich,

First, you must tell me if Bill Clinton still makes jokes about you being vertically challenged. They were laugh out loud funny, weren’t they?

Second, and I suppose you never kept copies, but when you were Secretary of Labor – I will resist the overpowering urge to say something about the world’s tallest midget – I wrote to you several times asking but 2 questions.

#1 – Did you ever do any physical labor?
#2 – Did you ever belong to a union?

I did hear back from one of your deputy assistant under Secretaries in charge of answering literate cranks that it was the policy not to comment on request for personal information about the Secretary. Assuming that Qui tacet consentit has not been repealed it would be safe to assume that you never ever did any physical labor and that you never ever had to join a union. I say “had to” because the two unions I was a member of I “had to” join. So much for employee freedom of choice, even then.

Your article shows an astonishing level of ignorance which I must conclude is not invincible.

“Hint: Go back about 50 years, when America’s middle class
was expanding and the economy was soaring.”






I remember a Senator from Massachusetts running for President 50 years ago. He had two themes that he repeated over and over. Long before the mantra was “stay on message” he “stayed on message”. Those themes are:

#1 – There was a “Missile Gap” that he would close. Some things are owed to the ledger. If memory serves the President was Eisenhower. He led 10,000,000 men in combat. 11 months and 2 days after he invaded Europe Hitler ate his gun. Is it possible that this man would have let his country slip into mortal peril? I think not.

#2 – Senator Kennedy spent a lot of his father’s money trying to convince the country that he would get it “moving again”. His method of choice was tax cuts. Perhaps that’s why you choose to forget about them. Perhaps you want to be “the last guy in the room” when President Bambi makes his final choices about the economy. If the middle class and the economy were soaring you could whisper in his ear that the Eisenhower tax rates, the top rate being 90%, made it happen. “What is past is prologue”, right?

“In 1955, more than 1/3rd of Americans belonged to unions.”

Assuming your numbers are correct, an assumption that is difficult to hold since one of the common traits of modern American Liberals is that everything is relative. For example, shape the facts to the argument is fair game for people without regard for the “permanent things”. No modern American Liberal ever met something he didn’t want to change.

If you wanted to say that “in 1955 more than 1/3rd of American workers belonged to unions” you should have, you know what I’m saying, said it.

Plucking some inconvenient facts out of the memory hole we find that in 1962 President Kennedy declared war on U.S. Steel. He even ordered his brother, the Attorney General, to send the FBI out in the middle of the night to roust all the executives of U.S. Steel and tell those bastards that they shouldn’t raise the price of steel.

If you worked for any steel company in America and carried your lunch to work you were in a union. How many union members are employed in the steel business in America today? How many people are employed in the steel business in America today?









If you worked for any part of the Big 3 and you carried your lunch to work you belonged to the UAW. Tell me the last time the Big 3 hired anybody, union member or not?

I believe it was 1971 when the economy switched from capital goods – “metal bashing” as they say in England – to services. Semi-conductors, Peoples’ Express, Pizza Hut, time shares, inter alia.

In the 1980s the 30 members of the Dow Jones Industrial Average added zero net new jobs to the economy. Companies like EDS, Federal Express, ADP, Intel, Microsoft, and MCI and me began to employ millions. Alas, this proved not to be fertile ground for descendants of Joe Hill, the Wobblies, and the AFL-CIO.

The 1990s gave us the Internet. I must add that I will never be able to thank former Vice President Alpha Gump for inventing it. That plus using one of the great phrases of the Clinton years, “no controlling legal authority”, makes him tops in my book. Yahoo and Google. I just can’t see a Tony Provenzano, a union leader to whom I personally paid dues, getting a stronghold in those industries.

“In 2007, nearly 12,000 janitors in New England, represented
by the Service Employees International Union, won a
contract that raised their wages to $16 an hour.”

I don’t know if you ever mopped johns. I did. One of the benefits of mopping johns is that you decide early on that don’t ever want to mop johns again. Edmund Burke was right. “Experience is the only school at which some people will learn.”

The only place where unions have grown is in the public sector. “Close enough for government work” is still a valid judgment, isn’t it? Spare me the rhetorical incontinence of saying that government employees in unions are descended from Samuel Gompers.

Here are 2 prerequisites for becoming Secretary of Labor.

#1 – You have actually done something that can be called “labor”.
#2 –You have actually “met” a payroll for others who have labored for you.

Your brief bio says that you teach at the University of California at Berkeley.





See if you can find a book on Logic. You may want to take a peek at Grammar and Rhetoric. I hope I haven’t spoiled the discovery of the Trivium for you. I know that you have never seen it up close and personal before. If you have then your entire adult life is like a “whited sepulcher”, rife with intellectual fraud

If, as you say, 1/3rd of the American work force belonging to unions in the 1950s led to a time of prosperity and security unequaled since the 5 Emperors, can it also be said that the dynasties of the New York Yankees, the Cleveland Browns, and the Montreal Canadians came about because so many Americans were in the AFL-CIO?

Did all those union members in the glorious ‘50s cause Elvis Presley? Mark Rothko? Rogers and Hammerstein? The hula hoop?

In your odyssey into Logic you may wish to become familiar with post hoc ergo propter hoc.

It could save you from making errors like the big one that filled your article this morning. Too bad it can’t be used retroactively.