Why was Robert Kennedy so adamant about desunionizing the US workforce when he was a democrat?

Question

I thought democrats were for the working man , but Robert Kennedy had much to do with the loss of power of unions in the US. Why is this?

Answer 1

I am not Robert Kennedy fan, for sure, but he did work to ferret out the criminals and organized crime who controlled the unions. He was not opposed to unions, only to the crooks who ran them. BTW, the unions themselves and their criminal activities have caused membership in unions to fall off markedly in the last twenty years, none of which was the due to the work of RFK.

Chow!!

Answer 2

2 Reasons..

1 Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations' should explain it perfectly as this is the model of economics most western countries are based on..where the unions have too much power this interferes with economic growth leading to high inflation/stagnation because firms become uncompetitive.. example being a US producer of product X has to compete with say an Asian producer of the same product, as the Asian producer has lower labour costs the US firm may go bust..

So when Unionisation means that the workers have too many perks or too good a deal - in the long term this can push up prices/lead to unemployment.

As a smart man Bobby Kennedy would have realised this and wanted to keep the economy healthy adopting a more Hayek approach..

2 Unions were often corrupt (although without them most workers today would not have sick pay, holidays etc etc so in their day they did have a place) with those in charge wielding an enormous amount of power to grind companies/countries to a halt.. no economy can work being held to ransom like this.

Answer 3

He was fighting against the involvement of the unions with organised crime syndicates.

Over powerful unions can also be detrimental to a countries economy. Here in the uk the unions almost brought it to its knees. The baclash was that Thatcher almost destroyed them entirely by getting contraversial legislation through parliment.

Balance is what works beween the needs of the business and the needs of the workers.