If only America could work like … : In his State of the Union address, Obama grounded his vision of how American society should work on the functioning of a Navy SEAL team:
They’re not consumed with personal ambition. They don’t obsess over their differences. They focus on the mission at hand. They work together. …
Hmm. You know what Navy SEAL teams don’t have? Unions! Specifically, adversarial Wagner Act unions. The whole point of Wagner Act unionism is to formalize a distinction between “management” and “labor” and set them to work obsessing over their differences.
Or did I miss the part where the pilots who landed the helicopters on the Bin Laden mission had staged a pre-raid job action because they were expected to inspect their choppers afterwards, violating a work rule they’d negotiated 15 years earlier?
P.S.: For more on Obama’s troubling-when-you-think-about-it SEALs model, see Tabin and Goldberg. … Let’s just say the SEAL ideal is not incompatible with corporatism! Everyone does their part and everyone knows their place. Fine for a military outfit, but …