Wall Street Journal Has a Hilarious Opinion Piece by Paul Christianson That Totally Contradicts WSJ Opinions on Unions

The Hilarious Part – They Don’t Even Know It

The Wall Street Journal editors hate.  They hate Mr. Obama, they hate Democrats, they hate minorities (except for the token Conservatives in those groups) and they hate France.  But most of all they hate unions.  And the emotion of hate can so blind opinion writers at the WSJ that they inadvertently support that which they hate.

Case in point is an opinion piece by Paul Christianson that advocates small employers avoid the ACA health care law by keeping employment under 50.  The way to do this, says Mr. Christianson is for the companies to have their employees form corporations and then the employer simply contracts for services with the corporation.  No employees, no need to provide health care insurance.

Owners of protean companies create a core of strategic employees who manage the big-picture elements of the enterprise—the culture, business model, product mix, vision, strategy, etc. This core then outsources the business tasks to other corporations.

Non-core tasks could include things like accounting, marketing, product development, manufacturing, IT, PR, legal, finance, etc. There is almost nothing that cannot be outsourced—including even the CEO function (which can already happen, e.g., when a company is in turnaround.)

Wow, what a great idea, here’s how it would work.

In the context of ObamaCare, a small business could go protean by offering current employees contracts for doing their current work as a corporate entity instead of as an employee. Entrepreneurial employees will jump at the chance to form a corporation and run their own business. Non-entrepreneurial employees can choose to move on and find other work—or work hard to join the core company.

Going protean won't work without a massive mental shift. A company no longer manages employees, but tasks and contracts instead—a quantum leap in management styles and process.

Okay everybody, let’s see what is going on with this.  A company does not have employees, there is a corporation that hired employees and then the corporation contracts with the company.  The contract would obviously describe the compensation, duties, protections etc that the employees of the corporation of employees would have.  Gosh, what does this sound like? 

It’s a union contract, the employees are now unionized without the union name you idiot.

That’s right what you have here is a union and a unionized work force in every aspect except the name  And this type of union would be free to operate without the current government controls which restrict union activity, as Mr. Christianson points out.

 When a person is an employee, he or she is, by definition, in partnership with the government—the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, etc.—and is subject to all the government's regulations. But when a protean corporation enters into a relationship with that same person, now a corporation, it is a purely contractual relationship with a fellow enterprise. As long as there is no fraud or breach of contract, and the agreement is legal, the government really has nothing to say.

So the union, now called a corporation can keep money, formerly called union dues, from everyone.  And everyone working now has to join the union-now-called-corporation, so goodbye all those so-called Right to Work laws. And the corporation/union makes the hiring decision.  This is not the Closed Shop that all employers hate, it is the Closed Closed Shop.

This proposal is a union organizer’s dream come true.  And since white collar workers would now be effectively unionized, all of the union organization attempts for those workers (and for any non-union companies) that costs money, takes time and requires Federally supervised elections would be gone. Instant unions!!

And the thing that makes the rest of us nearly split a gut laughing, Mr. Christianson and the WSJ have no idea that what they are proposing and supporting is diametrically opposed to their core beliefs.  Really, how stupid can they get!  (Answer, we don't know, apparently they have not reached the limit yet.)