As the U.S. labor movement shows signs of revitalization — with the recent union victories at Smithfield Packing and Republic Windows, and the prospect of greater legal protection for union organizing under the Employee Free Choice Act — the drumbeat of anti-union lies and distortion grows louder. Two traditional themes remain prominent in anti-union discourse: inaccurate assertions about the economic impact of unionization, and exaggerated allegations of union corruption. Recent news highlights both the fallacy of these arguments and the duplicity in the portrayal of unions versus corporations.

The first distortion is that unions are economically harmful because they raise the cost of hiring workers. It is true, of course, that union-represented workers are paid more and enjoy more favorable health coverage, retirement, and other benefits. Contrary to what anti-union critics suggest, however, this fact is a feature, not a bug. As author and activist Kim Bobo explained in a recent NPR interview, unionization benefits not only workers who are themselves represented, but all workers — meaning the majority of people — by raising employment and living standards.

The “burdensome cost” argument has been especially prominent in the recent debate over government assistance for the U.S. auto industry. Senate Republicans last week scuttled a plan because the United Auto Workers would not cave in to their demand for immediate wage and benefit concessions. The contrast with the response to the financial industry’s woes is staggering. While compensation for autoworkers accounts for less than 10% of manufacturing costs in that industry, compensation in the financial sector represents the lion’s share of expenses — an average of 60% of total revenue for the seven largest financial-services firms in New York and a whopping 70% of total operating expenses for Goldman Sachs. Yet, despite some mild expressions of populist ire, there has been little effort to pin the blame for the financial crisis on the eye-popping salaries and bonuses that Wall Street executives have reaped as their firms and investors lost money, and even less of an effort to claw-back and restrict such self-dealing largesse in the future. To the contrary, Congress rushed to pass the $700 billion financial industry bailout with “shockingly little oversight” and without “any serious limits on executive pay“.  And now, at least one TARP beneficiary, Goldman Sachs, is reportedly using part of its $10 billion share of the TARP bailout to pay executive bonuses.

The second distortion is that unions are so tainted with corruption as to render the entire labor movement suspect. To be sure, there have been too many serious instances of corruption within unions. No advocate for labor can ignore the real cost of these instances to individual workers and to the labor movement as a whole. Indeed, the most vocal and vital opponants of corruption have been those within the labor movement itself, who understand that unions can only advance workers’ interests when they are clean and democratic.

But, however serious the individual instances have been, the actual extent and impact of union corruption pales in comparison to the extent and impact of corporate corruption. The saga of disgraced Wall Street trader Bernard Madoff is a perfect case in point. Madoff reportedly defrauded his clients out of a staggering $50 billion. The sum total of all union-related racketeering and corruption over the past century would not approach even a fraction of that amount. And Madoff is but the latest in a long line of business and financial swindlers — BCCI, Enron, Global Crossing, Adelphia, WorldCom, just to name a few of the most prominant examples in recent years — compared to whom Jimmy Hoffa and his ilk look like pikers. Yet, even rampant and widespread corporate corruption is routinely portrayed as a problem of a few bad actors, while every isolated instance of union corruption is held up as an indictment of the entire labor movement.

Somewhat to my surprise, neither of these issues came up today during my radio appearance on WUNC’s “The State of Things”. I was on the show as part of a discussion about recent labor activity in North Carolina, including the Smithfield election and the Moncure Plywood strike. I enjoyed the opportunity to disucss these issues, and was very interested in and impressed with the contributions of the other guests: David Zonderman, Professor of History at N.C. State University; Roxanne Newton, Director of Humanities and Fine Arts at Mitchell Community College; and Vernal Coleman, a writer for the Independent Weekly newspaper.