Issue Position: The Job Market

Issue Position

The Connecticut unemployment rate is officially 9.0%. As most people realize, though,
there are many more people that cannot find a job who are looking for a job. Students
who have finished high school or college and cannot find a job are staying at home,
finding temporary jobs, looking for permanent work, and in many cases having to settle
for jobs that pay much less than what they are capable of. Many young people who have
no work experience or skills can find work. High school drop-outs in particular find very
few options for starting work to build their skills.

The market for jobs is constricted by monopolistic job markets in specific trades at
specific companies, by excessive business regulations, by easy lawsuits, by high
unemployment taxes, and minimum wage laws. All such laws are intended to raise
pay, prevent workplace safety hazards, prevent damage to health and the environment,
provide greater equality of opportunity, provide social "safety nets" such as job security
and unemployment benefits, assure employment benefits, make it difficult to be laid-off
without cause, assure the safety and non-exploitation of the young, to assure complete
coverage in insurance, etc.

This sounds great, in contrast to what such laws inevitably result in -- higher
unemployment and restricted employment opportunities, poor pay increases for most
people, excessive costs for no real benefits in such things as job safety, health or
environmental safety. Work rules at unions prevent flexibility of use of labor. The
minimum wage law results in fewer entry level job opportunities for the less skilled
workers, preventing their growth in job skills. Long periods of unemployment benefits
also motivate workers to stay out of the job market longer. All these influences result in
lower productivity and a less skilled and less motivated work force in Connecticut.

Regulations in health insurance have restricted health insurance coverage to high cost
options.

Much of the problem stems from workplace rules imposed as labor laws.

A significant amount of these problems come from the monopoly power of unions,
which prohibit non-union members or members of other similar unions from competing
to provide the job services for the same company at the same time. The Connecticut
law specifically provides exclusive bargaining power to the union that first becomes the
registered and "authorized" bargaining unit.

To provide jobs for all, the Collective Bargaining law should be repealed. Any union
should be able to compete by price and quality of service to the company, even if it
means having several different unions offering workers for the same type of work at the
same time. There needs to be competition in the jobs market in order to increase the
number of jobs available to all people. Restricting the jobs of a company to the a single
union artificially raises the wages of the few union members, and restricts the number
of jobs available. With high enough union forced wages, the companies must relocate
production out of the state and even out of the country, or go bankrupt.

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