This is a picture of just some ordinary guy trying to do his job. He's doing his absolutely dead-level best at just trying to get the work done. Maybe he's a labor union member, or maybe he isn't. From this picture, I can't really tell.

Disagreements between unions and management always remind me of two tomcats that some naughty boy tied their tails together and threw them over the clothesline just to watch them fight. The cats fight each other because they don't know the cause of their predicament and can't see any peaceful means of extricating themselves.

Contrary to appearances, management is actually just a form of labor, not a separate factor of the production of wealth. Management, at first glance, appears to be more closely allied with capital, but this is merely an illusion. To see how this can be, let us look at the factors of production: Land, Labor, and Capital.

Land is the entire natural universe and all natural resources before being touched by human hands.

Labor is all human effort applied onto land and directed toward the production of wealth.

Capital is that portion of previously produced wealth that is saved out to aid labor in its efforts upon land to produce wealth.

All human activities, without exception, have one thing in common: they require a location, someplace to be while you are doing it. This makes land a crucial factor in all production, and the value of a location is determined by what you can do with it, which is further determined by (1) its natural attributes and (2) what people are doing on surrounding locations.

There's an unfortunate tendency in our economy for exceptionally valuable land to get held out of use temporarily, and sometimes not so temporarily, by land speculators. This tends to raise land prices, so businesses have got to pay more just to get a location, so after they've sold what they've produced, they've got less to pay both managers and union members.

And thus we see how the naughty boy of land speculation has tied the tomcats of unions and management together by the tails and thrown them over the clothesline. As long as the tomcats (all of us, really) can't see the cause of their predicament they will continue to fight.

We really need to punish the naughty boy of land speculation by raising the taxes on land, thus forcing speculators to sell off their land cheaply. The businesses buying the land would, of course, now be paying these taxes, but they would be paying land taxes instead of the other taxes they would have been paying and thus their total costs of production would be lower and there would be richer pickings to divvy amongst union laborers and managers.

As long as land ownership is given a free ride on the backs of both labor and capital, a portion of capital that would otherwise be used to build businesses will be wasted in acquiring the needed land. Fewer businesses wil exist than are needed to employ all potential laborers. Laborers will continue to be at a bargaining disadvantage, with the only ace in their hand being the ability to form labor unions.

In other words, as long as we insist on being unfair to productive enterprize, we need to equalize the unfairness between labor and management, and labor unions are a pretty decent mechanism for doing just that.