One real economics lesson of The Simpsons is that unions protect incompetent employees, such as Homer Simpson.
The best thing about the fantastical Atlantic piece romanticizing American working-class life in the 1980s and 1990s, “The Life in The Simpsons Is No Longer Attainable,” is that it inadvertently levels a devastating critique of unionism.
From start to finish, the piece peddles a bunch of progressive myths about the glories of lunch-pail jobs and diminishes the historic gains made by middle-class Americans over the past 30 years (I’ve written on the topic on numerous occasions.) But let’s, for the sake of this piece, accept the premise that in the good old days, men like Homer Simpson, a mere high-school graduate, could hold a steady job at a nuclear-power plant that “required little technical skill” and yet also support “a family of five” and a “home, a car, food, regular doctor’s appointments, and enough left over for plenty of beer at the local bar” all on a “single working-class salary.”
As always, the alleged declining state of the American working class is supposedly tied to the decline of “union membership,” which has “dropped from 14.5 percent in 1996 to 10.3 percent today,” but “protects wages and benefits for millions of workers in positions like Homer’s.”
The real question is: Why in holy hell would anyone want to protect Homer’s job? Homer is a drunken, slovenly, bungling idiot who nearly triggers a nuclear catastrophe on a seasonal basis. Mr. Burns, his boss, is left to praise Homer for having “turned a potential Chernobyl into a mere Three Mile Island.” And yet he never loses his job.
Only unions could possibly believe keeping Homer working is a good idea. And the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant is apparently teeming with equally unconscientious and incompetent union-protected employees who endanger the welfare of the entire community.
When Mr. Burns’s assistant Waylon Smithers is looking for a replacement that won’t “outshine” him, he enters the word “incompetent” into the company database. Back come 714 matches – or, every employee of the company. When Smithers tries to narrow his search he enters “lazy,” “clumsy,” “dim-witted,” and “monstrously ugly,” but again ends up with 714 matches. “Oh, nuts to this, I’ll just go get Homer Simpson,” Smithers says. Homer, believing he was picked because of his motivational skills, notes that, “Everyone always says they have to work a lot harder when I’m around.”
While unionism incentivizes laziness and protects incompetence, it undermines meritocracy and internal competition. Homer, it seems, holds the same position (and we assume a similar salary) as his African-American coworker Carl, an immigrant from Iceland who earned a master’s degree in nuclear physics. His other friend and coworker, Lenny, who teaches a “How To Chew Tobacco” class at the adult-education annex, also possesses a master’s degree in nuclear physics.
While a person may succeed without credentials in a competitive labor marketplace, it is rare in a union-dominated industry. And it’s not as if Homer has demonstrated any special proficiency, work ethic, or initiative that shows he deserves to be paid as much as his more-qualified coworkers. But unions exist to slot everyone into their predetermined spots like automatons.
So, yes, for someone like Homer, unions would probably have been great. For conscientious workers — most of them — not so much. Which is why Americans rarely join unions of their own volition nowadays. Most union jobs today are public-sector, a monopolistic racket that is used to blackmail the public and coerce workers to join (a practice that Janus v. AFSCME should have stopped). In fact, if The Simpsons were first being produced today, the writers would probably have to make Homer a public-school administrator for plausibility’s sake.