CBS's "Undercover Boss" Nothing But a Fairy Tale
By Mike Hall
As kids, we all loved the sugar-coated fairy tales of handsome and brave princes rescuing beautiful princesses from despotic kings.
The new CBS “reality” show “Undercover Boss” that debuted last night after the Super Bowl is a 21st century sugar-coated fairy tale. But this time, the brave prince is actually a CEO who goes undercover as a regular worker near the bottom of the food chain. There he finds how hard and dirty the job is; how stifling and draconian the company’s workplace rules are; and how crappy the pay is.
Then after walking so many miles in an employee’s work boots, the boss sees the light and promotes workers, raises pay, eases rules and promises a new found respect for all workers.
(If your boss isn’t going undercover anytime soon, be sure to check out American Rights at Work’s new website, Fix Our Jobs, where you can vent about how lousy—and even how great—your job is and learn how to make it better. Click here to watch the video).
But just like our childhood stories ignored the dark, bloody and scary Brothers Grimm originals, “Undercover Boss” ignores the grim reality of too many of today’s workplaces.
“Undercover Boss” is a sweet, happy-ending tale for a handful of workers, but make-believe for millions of others. The best way to make workplace improvement and worker rights a reality is with the Employee Free Choice Act, that would restore the right of workers to form unions and bargain for a better life.
The bosses portrayed on the show may indeed be sincere and a handful of workers will enjoy the benefits of their foxhole conversions. But what about the millions of workers whose CEO’s will never be on TV? That’s where unions come in: to ensure employees have a voice at the workplace, with family-supporting pay and affordable health care and retirement security.
Along with the restoring the freedom to form unions, rebuilding the middle class means fighting for health care legislation, strong enforcement of wage and hour laws, holding Wall Street accountable and most importantly creating jobs. Unions and their members at the forefront of all these battles—out in the open—not undercover.
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For those who don't speak "caelum", what he said was, "Yeah unions work real well. See Detroit and the auto workers , Pittsburg and the steel workers and New Orleans and the boat yard workers."
I find it odd the claim unions are so great for the economy . I'm for unions on the grounds of personal liberty, but technically speaking unions are not good for an economy - particularly for equilibrium unemployment . Unions naturally push up wages, which naturally leads to unemployment because it's more expensive to hire. If there is more unionization, it's quite likely that the competitive pressures will drive up wages since you are trying to attract the best candidates , further promoting unemployment. Now, if we assume it's harder to fire people when unions are in place (and it is) all we need to do is go back to the seminal paper by Carl Shapiro and Joseph Stiglitz (Equilibrium Unemployment as a Working Discipline Device) to know that worker discipline then goes out the window and there will be massive shirking on the job, leading to greater inefficiencies - with no real mechanism to escape the trap.
Unions tend to have a perverse effect on the economy on the whole. They are usually beneficial for the people who are in unions, but they usually effect everyone else negatively, as least when the exist prominently. Also, some of Mark Gertler's work on nash wage bargaining is demonstrating some really bad effects of significantly asymmetric power (as is the case of unions) in wage bargaining for the macro economy perspective.