George McGovern on the unions

Former senator and 1972 Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern has written an interesting column for the Los Angeles Times on unions.

He argues that the traditional labor union strategy of always seeking, in John L. Lewis's word, "more," is self-defeating. He points to the Delphi bankruptcy, the woes of automakers General Motors and Ford, and the plight of the unionized airlines:

"'More' has, unfortunately, become 'too much' in a global and far more competitive economy."

He also defends Wal-Mart and points out that if the $27 million compensation of Wal-Mart's CEO were distributed to employees, each would receive less than $20. What are his public policy solutions? He calls for government-provided universal healthcare, which of course would relieve the burden of that cost for employers like GM and Ford, which have agreed to union demands for ultragenerous health insurance. But of course that solution has other problems and is not likely to be adopted anytime soon. He also calls for expansion of the earned income tax credit, which was in fact expanded during the Clinton administration, to supplement the earnings of low-income workers.

Whatever you think of his analysis or his proposals, McGovern shows here that he is an independent thinker who has come by his positions honestly and with good intentions. I have a soft spot for him because, near as he and I can figure out, I lived next door to him in Diamond Lake, Ill., in 1947. McGovern then was a practicing minister in a nearby church while he was attending divinity school at Northwestern University; my father was a doctor at Fort Sheridan. My parents, like many young parents in the years after World War II, had a hard time finding housing and eventually found an old farmhouse to rent amid the cornfields of interior Lake County, Ill. The McGoverns also had a young family, and I suspect the house came with the practicing-minister provision. My parents have only vague memories of the McGoverns. We went back to visit Diamond Lake in 1992, and the site of our house, as near as we could figure, was by then a shopping center parking lot. The cornfields had become suburbia.

I supported McGovern for president in 1972 and continue to admire him, even though I disagree now with many of the positions I took then. I think he did an admirable job as ambassador to the Food and Agricultural Organization in Rome; he was appointed by President Clinton and was asked to remain on the job for a year by President Bush, who then appointed Ohio Democratic Rep. Tony Hall to fill the position. Hall, whose interest in feeding the hungry arises out of strong religious conviction, was admired by members of both parties in the House. It's interesting that Bush does not seem to have gotten much credit for appointing these idealistic Democrats.