La Cucaracha by Lalo Alcaraz for April 05, 2011
April 04, 2011
April 06, 2011
Transcript:
Bug Blog by Cuco Rocha Maine GOP Gov. Hates Cesar Chavez (Room) Maine's GOP Governor Paul Lepage is removing a labor mural from the Dept. of Labor and renaming the Cesar Chavez Conference Room, among others. Lepage called for a contest to rename the room with more business-friendly names, such as "The Happy Sharecropper Conference Room."
Cesar Chavez was the best thing ever to happen to the California wine industry.
Table grapes are picked by hand so they stay pretty for the consumer, which makes harvesting very labor-intensive. Wine grapes, on the other hand, can be picked by machine much more cheaply.
The result of Chavez’s table-grape boycott was that many table-grape growers switched to wine-making with mechanized harvesting, thus losing thousands of jobs but also leading to the flowering of the California wine industry.
That, BTW, is how unions can give the impression that they help the workers. They point with pride to the workers who get higher wages but ignore the ones who lose their jobs or who never get hired in the first place. In economics it’s called the Invisible Man error.
(This is NOT, by the way, an attack on unions. I am in favor of unions, but only under a free-market, meaning there should be no laws either for or against unions. But that concept scares most union leaders, because without the power of law behind them, they’d have to find honest ways to earn their keep.)