what is produced. Even where
retraining of new labor units obtains, the institution's control of a
system of labor (and training) allows capital to achieve and preserve economies of scale, whether by the retention of strong management, technology, or the phenomenon of entry level or trainee level wage scales. Moreover, the history of management's persistent resistance to any kind of government intervention as regards the independent authority of management to establish wage scales and other working conditions of labor suggests that management seeks to manipulate what ought to be the "free" interplay of the classically based economic system. What this means for labor is that, absent external intervention on the part of government, such as that represented by the National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act) of 1935, management's version of classical economic operations, and not classical economics per se, is what management seeks to establish.
This suggests that free market system proponents who assert that free operation of the labor market, far more than government or unionist intervention, do not take into account the particularities of labor relations, but only the theory that seeks to account for or otherwise structure them. Reynolds asserts that unions have a privileged position in American society, and that union activists and officers have vested interests in maintaining union power (8:131 2). Further, he wonders that they are not more corrupt than they are, apparently unwilling to allow the natural order of self regulation in union organizations the same status as the programmatic deregulation he sees as the wave of the future. He was writing in 1984, of course, before the newly deregulated airline industry had had time to collapse upon itself concentrate into two or three powerful carriers. Moreover, if unions are so privileged, why has their number declined, irrespective of the alleged government protection of the...