It is a dark secret of the Heretic that he enjoys mangling wood on the weekend. Like many folk who returned to wood working a decade or two after wood shop, the bug has bitten and after a year or so, I can occasionally produce something worthy to be seen in public. Why do I bring this up now? To explain how I came across this article.
A French maker of wood rasps, in business since 1856, and respected as one of the providers of the best rasps for furniture and cabinet making, has closed its doors. Not to retire, nor to enjoy the wealth and respect that a century and change of creating truly fine tools provided, but instead because it cannot fight a system which is determined to crush businesses in the interest of protecting workers rights. Michel Auriou heir to a family secret of producing fine rasps, has decided to walk away. His employees had organized, made demands, and he did not cave to those demands. Instead he decided he would turn the company over to liquidators and walk away. The organized labor so strident in pursuing their rights now has no job to return to.
Ok so what you ask, what is the point here except some obscure tool maker is going out of business? My point is that when labor has such a drastic upper hand in negotiation, business owners cannot profit, and the end result is a non viable business. American automobile manufacturers are in a similar situation. Crushing employee benefits have made it likely that GM and Ford will at some point in the near future go bankrupt. Nissan, Honda and Toyota have proven that it is possible to build fine automobiles in the US, without the intervention of the unions. Workers in these factories have repeatedly voted down the UAW's attempts to make inroads at these factories and realize that by making themselves more attractive to the companies who own these factories, they will continue to have jobs and share in the success of the business.
There is a very simple lesson here, if you make it economically unviable for a business to make a profit, sooner or later the business will be gone. Be it raising the minimum wage, mandating excessive retirement benefits, or in the case of France mandating shorter work weeks, and guaranteed worker rights, sooner or later the owner of the business may just decide to walk away.
