Your Teacher Said What?! (24 page)

And we had a great time. There's a reason that the show was nominated for five Tony Awards, after all. And why it's been that rarest of things: a hit Broadway musical.

You'd think, in fact, that with full houses, a national touring company, and plans for a movie, all would be sunny in Barry's world. Mostly, you'd be right; he's an optimistic guy. But he does notice some pretty dark clouds on the horizon.

“It's simple,” Barry says. “We're working for our own unions instead of our audiences.”

It's not a problem getting Barry talking about the unions that dominate every aspect of a Broadway production, from the electricians who operate every light switch to the actors themselves. And his talk isn't exactly positive.

This isn't because Barry is reflexively antiunion: He's even a member of the Screen Actors Guild himself. But his real instincts are those of an entrepreneur, which isn't surprising, because he's been starting up businesses—successful businesses—since he was in his twenties, in everything from manufacturing and selling electronics to packaging mortgages. Like most successful businessmen, Barry is all about growing the business—or as he put it to me, “Okay, we have a success. How can it be
more
successful? How can we generate more ticket sales?”

The question was a rhetorical one, but he had a pretty good answer: Since the most loyal and motivated buyers of his product—tickets to
Rock of Ages
—were the people who had already seen the show at least once, Barry figured that he could capitalize on that—and the best time to capture the attention of those buyers was when they were already at the show and having the same kind of fun that Penelope and I had when we saw it.

So, Barry thought, let's make them an offer: Anyone who agreed to purchase tickets for a subsequent performance of the show on the same day they had just seen it could do so at a discount. So far, so good, but doing it at the ticket office would require—because of the standard union agreement—paying overtime to the ticket-sales staff. Instead, Barry wanted to make the offer during intermission; and since the show features a digital screen behind the stage, why not advertise the deal there?

Why not? Because putting
anything
on that digital screen—a single word, even—required the attention of a union member and cost $600.

Or try this one: The Brooks Atkinson Theatre, where
Rock of Ages
was packing them in—it's since moved three blocks away, to the Helen Hayes Theatre—is, like a lot of Broadway theaters, old. The walls and pillars that have been holding up the roof since it was built in 1926 aren't as well situated as you might like, and as a result, a few dozen of the house's thousand-plus seats—those on the extreme right and left—have obstructed views of part of the stage.

On Broadway, you can't let anything go to waste, so those seats were for sale, but at half price. Barry, who was understandably eager to maximize the show's profitability, had an idea: Install two fiftyinch flat-screen monitors on either side of the stage and have two high-definition cameras send a closed-circuit signal to fill in those portions of the stage invisible to those seated in the obstructed seats. They get a better experience; the show gets to sell the tickets at full price. Everyone wins.

Except . . .

Here's how Barry explained it to me.

“How much do you think it would cost to buy two top-end fiftyinch monitors and high-def cameras?”

“I don't know . . . ten thousand dollars?”

“And to install them?”

“Another five thousand?”

The cost to add the monitors and cameras was, in fact, $120,000. The reason is that twenty-six different dues-paying union members were required.

The real cost, though, of these union work rules isn't just the money. It's that a smart businessman like Barry Habib isn't very likely to invest in another show, despite the success of
Rock of Ages
. Like anyone in business, Barry likes to think that talent and hard work are the keys to succeeding, but in his judgment, Broadway's unions have made the theater into a crap game—one with loaded dice.

I tried to explain this to Blake.

“Blake, do you remember when we had our new television installed?”

“Sure.”

“How many people did the job?”

“Two, I think.”

“What if I told you that installing a TV just like this one in a New York theater needs twenty-six people?”

“Is New York better?

“No, Blake. The folks in New Jersey are just as good at their jobs as the ones in New York. But working in New York is like hiring a really good plumber not just to fix the faucet but also to turn it on whenever you want a drink.”

“No one would do that. It's stupid.”

 

Well, yes. But most stupid things started out sounding pretty sensible; once upon a time, that electrical job at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre wasn't something you could buy off the shelf at Best Buy. And there are still a lot of skills needed from a plumber, or an electrician, or a carpenter, and their respective unions make a lot of noise advertising that the only way you can guarantee those skills is by hiring someone with a union card. Whether this is true or not—you can get an earful from both sides of the debate—this argument is what makes them just the latest version of the original “unions” of artisans: guilds.

Trying to answer Blake's questions forced me to do a little digging into the history of guilds and unions. And what I've learned is that though organizations like guilds have been around (probably) as long as people have been specializing in skills, it was during the Middle Ages that they really got going and established the triangular organization that survives to this day among artisans like carpenters and electricians: apprentice, journeyman (who tended to “ journey” from workshop to workshop), and master.

The Industrial Revolution was a funeral for traditional guilds.

The father of the free market, Adam Smith, hated them, largely because of their habit of adding costs to the economy,
³⁴
but those costs were probably affordable where the value of consistent performance outweighed the costs of the guild labor. So long as you could count on a guild-woven tapestry or guild-built cabinet to be superior to one from an unknown artisan, you were willing to pay a premium to a member of the guild, both for his skill and for his access to the techniques kept secret by the guild. With industrialization, the cost of keeping such techniques private started to look like a pretty bad bargain. The Netherlands abolished guilds in 1784. France followed suit in 1791—though French guilds transformed themselves into “mutual aid societies” after 1815 and survive to this day, paralyzing the entire country every few months with national strikes. The same transformation happened in the United States, which had the same apprentice-journeyman-master guilds as Britain until the middle of the nineteenth century, when they turned into craft unions, essentially guilds without the secret passwords and initiations.

The value of craft unions to their members is obvious: higher pay. Their value to the people who buy their services is the seal of approval that a union card gives to its holder. And given the costs of fixing mistakes made by a plumber or an electrician who doesn't know what's what, I'm usually happy to pay extra for that union card myself. It's the same reason that I kind of like the idea that Blake and Scott's pediatrician has “MD” after her name. It's libertarian gospel to criticize all unions, but true craft unions are, at worst, a pretty small problem.

Most union members, however, aren't members of craft unions, the ones that organize members “horizontally”—all of the welders at fifty different machine shops, for example.

Even Barry Habib's electricians, though they are unquestionably skilled technicians, are members of an “industrial” union: the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Moving Picture Technicians, Artists and Allied Crafts of the United States, Its Territories and Canada, or IATSE. It's with industrial unions, organizing the workforces of entire companies and even industries, that unions start to have some real impact on free markets. And the impact isn't positive.

There used to be some real conflict—baseball-bat-and-brassknuckles kind of conflict—between craft and industrial unions. The umbrella organization for America's craft unions, the original American Federation of Labor, insisted that the key thing laborers had in common was
what
they did; its competitor, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, thought that what mattered was
where
they worked. As huge factories replaced small workshops, this made industrial unions, like the United Auto Workers, a lot more successful, because they were willing to represent the unskilled workers who made up an ever larger part of the workforce in those factories.

With this, the economic value of unions to the buyers of their services—the guarantee of
some
level of training and skill—pretty much vanished. But in return, the economic value to the members themselves grew dramatically. The leverage of a few hundred carpenters or shoemakers was insignificant compared to that of a hundred thousand miners or auto workers, and each member benefited accordingly.

It's no accident that the ascent of industrial unionism, like Keynesianism, the New Deal, and other triumphs of the Progressive agenda, occurred during the Great Depression. Union membership, which would grow until it covered nearly a third of the entire U.S. workforce by the 1950s, was yet another expression of the idea that no matter what the Constitution said about the matter, people weren't free at all. They were actually subject to such large forces outside their own control that they couldn't take care of themselves, which meant that someone else needed to take care of them. Given the economic hardships of the day, it's hard not to be sympathetic to the desire of
any
worker to do whatever looked like it might improve the chances of not just keeping a job but also ensuring that employers paid the highest possible wages. It makes emotional (if not economic) sense to fight back against the large employers who were the apparent reason that jobs were so hard to come by in the first place.

However, the unions didn't stop there. Unions represented not just millions of
laborers
but also millions of
voters
.

Politics isn't exactly a business; politicians don't really have to worry about the costs and benefits of their decisions in the same way a factory owner does. However, their actions are still economically rational: They produce laws, which they use to buy votes. If what they sell of the former is valuable enough to buy enough of the latter, they get reelected—and this is true even without bringing corruption into the picture. Which is why, starting in the 1930s with the rise of industrial unionism, legislators started passing a
lot
of new laws designed to appeal to millions of existing and potential union members.

I confess that I didn't know a lot of this when I started this project. But what I learned was eye-opening.

 

“Blake?”

“Yes, Dad?”

“You know the pet store where you buy your fish supplies?”

“Sure.”

“And the people who work there?”

“Yeah?”

“Now let's say that you wanted a job there when you were older. And you were competing for a job with someone who had a lot more experience—”

“COULD I?!”

“Not so fast: What if the only way it was worth hiring you was that you were willing to work for less money—”

“I WOULD!”

“—but you couldn't, because there was a rule that said that everyone who worked in a pet store in New Jersey had to be paid the same as everyone else.”

“NOT FAIR!”

 

Nope. But that's pretty much the case with the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, which required employers to pay “prevailing wages” on federal projects. Since “prevailing wage” was just a code word for union scale, this ensured that employers couldn't save money by hiring nonunion labor on government construction work, even when nonunion laborers were willing to work for less. The original champions of the Davis-Bacon Act made no bones about this, nor about its racist origins; William Green, the president of the AFL, even went on record saying, “Colored labor is being brought in to demoralize wage rates.”
³⁵

Davis-Bacon was just the start. Once unions realized that they weren't just collective-bargaining agents for their members but also political players with votes—and money—to offer, they began systematically agitating for laws that benefited members. And they didn't care who paid for those benefits, which was almost the economy at large: employers, and especially nonunion labor. The Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932, for example, prevents courts from issuing injunctions against strikes even if they violate a no-strike provision in an earlier contract. But the big one came along three years later in the form of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.