The Union Problem

This file is a single-author, polemical economics chapter: chapter 37 of Murray N. Rothbard’s Making Economic Sense. Its scope is narrow but programmatic. Using the New York Daily News and Greyhound strikes as opening cases, Rothbard argues that effective union power rests less on ordinary bargaining than on coercion against employers, customers, property, and replacement workers, reinforced by state-created legal privilege.

Rothbard begins with contemporary evidence. Both strikes, he says, succeeded because management tried to keep operating and unions prevented that operation through intimidation and violence. The point is then generalized into the essay’s governing thesis:

In short, the use of violence is the key to the winning of strikes.

The first major move is a counter-history of American labor conflict. Rothbard rejects the familiar pro-union narrative in which violence is mainly attributed to employers’ guards at famous strikes such as Pullman and Homestead. He recasts replacement workers, usually stigmatized as “scabs,” as lawful competitors whom unions must suppress in order to win.

Almost all the violence was committed by union goon squads against the property of the employer, and in particular, against the replacement workers, invariably smeared and dehumanized with the ugly word “scabs.”

This leads to his economic distinction between quitting and coercing. Rothbard accepts a right to strike only in the limited sense that workers may stop working; he denies that this gives them a continuing claim on the job, the workplace, or the employer’s hiring decisions. The decisive question is not whether labor may withdraw, but whether others may replace it.

Everyone surely has the right to quit. But that’s not the issue. The issue is whether the employer has the right to hire replacement workers and continue in production.

The chapter’s central conceptual move is to attack what Rothbard calls the idea that workers “own” their jobs. For him, employment creates a right to payment for work already contracted and performed, not a permanent lien on another person’s business. Job security enforced against the owner becomes, in his terms, a violation of property and contract.

The "ownership of jobs" is of course a clear violation of the property right of the employer to fire or not hire anyone he wants.

He applies the same property-rights logic to picketing. Even when unions do not directly use violence, Rothbard treats the picket line as intimidation rather than expression. If the purpose were merely to communicate information, he argues, unions could use minimal notice or advertising; mass picketing functions by discouraging entry, trade, and replacement work.

The idea that picketing is simply a method of "free expression" is ludicrous: if you want to inform a town that there's a strike, you can have just one picket, or still less invasively, take out ads in the local media.

The closing section turns from direct coercion to legal coercion. Rothbard identifies two statutory targets: the Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932, which he says disabled effective injunctions against union violence, and the Wagner Act of 1935, which he argues converted voluntary bargaining into compulsory representation under the NLRB. Majority certification, bargaining units, restrictions on firing organizers, and mandated employer dealings with unions are presented as state-enforced union privilege rather than free association.

In other words, we have been suffering from compulsory collective bargaining since 1935.

The chapter is therefore relevant as a compact statement of Rothbard’s anti-New-Deal labor theory. Its argument is not mainly about wages or workplace democracy, but about the boundary between voluntary exit and coercive control. Strikes are legitimate only as quitting; replacement hiring is part of the employer’s freedom; picketing is suspect when it invades property or intimidates; and modern labor law is treated as political violence by other means.