David Wessel revisited this question in his “Capital” column in the February 24, 2011, Wall Street Journal. He correctly stated that the Federal Reserve under Chairman Ben Bernanke takes the position that the course of inflation depends on expectations: Inflation will stay low if people expect it to stay low. Wessel quotes Bernanke: “The state of inflation expectations greatly influences actual inflation and thus the central bank’s ability to achieve price stability.”

The Fed chairman has the causation precisely backwards. Fed policy systematically shapes inflation expectations. His statement focuses on the short-run and ephemeral over the long-run and permanent. In so doing, Bernanke follows in a long line of central bankers.

In A History of the Federal Reserve (volume 1: 1913-51), Carnegie-Mellon University Professor Allan Meltzer summarizes the central-bank mindset. To the degree there is theory behind the policies of central bankers, it derived from the nineteenth-century banking school thinkers. Chief among them was Thomas Tooke, who “denied that money, credit, or base money bore any consistent relation to prices. Most Federal Reserve officials remained in this tradition in the 1920s. They denied that their actions affected prices” (57–58).

Unfortunately for defenders of current Fed policy, inflation is accelerating around the world. Singapore’s economy has benefited from revived global trade, but consumer price inflation is now running at an annual rate of 5.5 percent. In Vietnam, an emerging economy of note, consumer price inflation is running at 12 percent. Food riots plague India. Even American consumers are starting to feel the lash of inflation, as anyone who goes to the grocery store can attest. It is not a question of whether inflation is on the horizon. Inflation is here.

In a February 23 Wall Street Journal op-ed, retired Journal editorial writer George Melloan explained how economics has contributed to the turmoil in the Middle East. Consumer price inflation in Egypt rose to 18 percent annually in 2009 from 5 percent in 2006. In Iran inflation rose to 25 percent in 2009 from an already high 13 percent rate in 2006. Inflation surges hit family budgets hard, especially for the many in these countries living at the margin. Desperate people take to the street. As Melloan wryly observes, “About the only one failing to acknowledge a problem seems to be the man most responsible, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.”

Monetary policy is not the sole culprit in the rise of food prices. There have been a number of negative supply shocks affecting the supply of various foodstuffs, and these shocks have certainly contributed to higher prices. Central bankers often point the finger at these to deflect accusations that monetary policy is at fault.

Two points must be made. First, global food production and prices have been rising. Rising prices and output reflect rising demand relative to supply. Second, nearly all commodities, not just agricultural commodities, have been caught in a monetary updraft. Along with food prices we have seen rising prices of oil (even before the Middle East turmoil), gold, silver, copper, and a whole range of other commodities used in production. One noteworthy laggard is natural gas, whose price has been kept down by positive supply shocks of new discoveries. This, contrary to the narrative of central bankers, is the supply story.

Commodities, along with most globally traded goods, are priced in dollars. The Fed creates “base money”: bank reserves plus currency. Banks then expand on base money by lending out reserves. The more base money and bank money produced, the higher the dollar prices of commodities and other goods. It is the old story of too much money chasing too few goods and driving up their prices. That is inflation conventionally defined.

The inflation story this time has been complicated by a weak U.S. economy, whose growth is still dampened by the consequences of the housing boom and bust. The bank expansion of the money supply through lending has occurred not in the U.S. economy but in emerging economies, particularly in Asia and Latin America. Bernanke promised his easy-money policy would create jobs, and it has—but not in the United States. Of course, to the degree that prosperity in these countries has depended on the Fed’s easy-money policy, it has been a false prosperity. The citizens of these countries are paying for it now in the form of inflation.

The Fed has been paying a low interest rate on reserves, which to some extent has restrained lending by banks. With loan demand weak or of poor quality, banks have chosen to keep money on deposit at their local Federal Reserve bank and earn a safe return. As loan demand picks up, however, banks will likely begin lending out their reserves. That appears to be happening as this is being written.

Here are some details of the linkage between Fed policy and global inflation. The currencies of many countries are pegged to the dollar. Their exchange rates are either a constant or change only slowly. The Hong Kong dollar is an example of the former, the Chinese yuan of the latter. Even so-called floating currencies are not really floating. Central banks intervene to prevent their value from rising rapidly against a flagging U.S. dollar. The only important central bank that seems to be letting its currency float freely against the U.S. dollar is the Swiss, and the Swiss franc is appreciating against the dollar fairly steadily.

Thus, as a practical matter, when the Fed creates dollars it results in an increased money supply in other countries. It is not necessarily one for one, but it is proportional. The Fed’s low-interest policy has fueled not only a commodities boom but a real-estate bubble in Asian countries and elsewhere. Some countries have imposed capital controls to counteract Fed policy, but these are seldom fully effective.

The Fed chairman argues that foreign central banks can offset Fed policy. Doing so confronts them with a Hobson’s choice. Foreign central banks pegged to the dollar can break the peg and let their currencies appreciate and domestic interest rates increase. If they act effectively they risk sending their own economies into the tank. Based on experience, it is equally likely that higher interest rates in those countries would attract more speculative capital, fueling asset bubbles, commodity prices, and eventually consumer price inflation. The last is what has in fact been happening. Small, open economies in practice are unable to offset a tsunami of dollars.

Bernanke is being disingenuous about the options foreign central banks and governments have to counteract the Fed’s easy-money policy, which threatens a global outbreak of inflation similar to the 1970s.

Today much of Africa remains hungry—almost a third of sub-Saharan Africa is undernourished. Since the late 1960s Africa’s agricultural production has been in decline: Farm productivity has dropped and food imports have risen. African governments are complicit in the continent’s hunger because they have hindered their citizens’ ability to grow as much food as possible.

In Starved for Science: How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa, Robert Paarlberg argues that Africa fails to feed itself in part because of the limited use of biotechnology and blames African governments and their European counterparts for that failure. Starved for Science explains how the increased use of genetically modified seeds would benefit African farmers—and stomachs—and explains why the use of biotechnology and other agricultural science is so limited in Africa.

Paarlberg, who teaches political science at Wellesley College, makes the case for science in agriculture by detailing the dramatic impact the vast changes in agriculture have had over the past few hundred years. The book focuses on the latter half of the twentieth century, when the Green Revolution swept through Asia and, through the use of technology, hugely bolstered agricultural production.

Africa desperately needs similar changes—yields per acre in some African countries are less than a tenth of yields in the United States. African farmers would gain greatly from better technologies and seeds. Unfortunately, government policies stand in their way.

Paarlberg blames developed-world biases for Africa’s lack of agricultural improvement, especially a bias against genetically modified (GM) foods that dramatically limits Africa’s ability to grow more. In part these biases stem from the developed world’s ability to feed itself without a strong emphasis on the agricultural sciences or GM foods. Officials can therefore indulge environmentalist crusades against agricultural progress without apparent cost.

The European Union, non-governmental organizations, and the United Nations all played a role in exporting these biases to Africa, although the local governments also deserve a share of the blame. Instead of helping African farmers grow bigger crops to feed more people, European governments are doing the reverse, actively working to strengthen regulations in African countries, making the approval and use of GM seeds more difficult, and subsequently decreasing the potential productivity of African farmers. The governments of Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway, for example, have funded efforts to promote anti-GM regulatory frameworks and deprive farmers of the best tools they have. Similarly, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) exists not to help African farmers increase their output, but rather to increase the regulations that inhibit their farming.

Starved for Science makes a succinct case regarding the who’s and why’s of the barriers to Africa’s biotechnology use, but there are a few components of Paarlberg’s argument that could be stronger.

He spends little time discussing the specific problems that biotechnology can solve and the specific advantages of GM seeds. Although he details the possibilities of a drought-resistant seed, Paarlberg does not delve deeply into the successes of GM seeds in countries where they are currently being used, such as South Africa. With freedom to make their own decisions South African farmers are growing more food for themselves and their families and have enough extra to sell to others. Beyond increasing the local supply of food, having extra crops allows the farmers to increase the sizes of their farms, create jobs, start other businesses, and save money for the future.

The other incomplete aspect of Starved for Science deals with the incentives Africans face when debating growing GM crops. Even when they have the choice of using GM seeds they have to decide if it’s worth doing so, since European markets usually ban GM goods. The book would have been improved if Paarlberg had investigated the tradeoffs here more thoroughly.

Allowing free rein for biotechnology would be an important step toward eliminating the hunger that plagues Africa. The sad truth is that politics is apt to continue obstructing that and other avenues of progress.

In the 12 months leading to March 2008, the United Nations Food Price Index rose more than 52 percent. Last year global wheat prices rose 120 percent. In Bangladesh it now takes half-a-day’s labor for a poor family to afford a 4.4-pound bag of rice.

Even in the United States food prices are noticeably higher. Milk prices rose 19 percent in 2007, while cheese and bread prices rose more than 10 percent. Overall, U.S. food prices increased 4.9 percent last year, compared with 4.1 percent for prices in general.

In many poor countries higher food prices have sparked demonstrations or riots. In January thousands marched in a food protest in Mexico City. In February police in Malaysia arrested more than 50 protesters during a demonstration against rising food costs. Food protests or riots have also shaken Haiti, Egypt, Bangladesh, Mozambique, India, Indonesia, Burkina Faso, Morocco, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Mauritania, Cameroon, Senegal, Uzbekistan, and Yemen.

What is going on?

We can discount the usual claims that for ecological reasons food production is falling. As Harvard economist Amartya Sen wrote recently in the New York Times, “The global food problem is not being caused by a falling trend in world production, or for that matter in food output per person (this is often asserted without much evidence). It is the result of accelerating demand.”

In the 1800s French economist Frédéric Bastiat observed that the “prodigiously ingenious mechanism” of the free market somehow—without a central plan—fed Paris. Years before, Adam Smith wrote of the “invisible hand” that guides self-interested individuals to provide food and drink for others. As Smith observed, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

Today’s food crisis may lead us to ask whether Bastiat’s “ingenious mechanism” has broken down. Has Smith’s “invisible hand” become a visible failure?

Hardly. While some of the rise in food prices can be traced to rising global demand or natural events, all too often the visible hand of government, which is all thumbs, is making matters far worse than they otherwise would be.

American Agricultural Policy

Government interventions infest agriculture markets like weeds and have the same choking effects. Some interventions, such as tariffs, quotas, and land set-asides, are designed to keep food supplies down and prices up. At the same time, other interventions, such as price supports and other subsidies, are designed to keep marginal farmers in business. Still other interventions, such as food stamps and subsidized school meals, are designed to offset the effects of government policies that make food more expensive.

Interventions that reduce food supplies include tariffs, quotas, and “antidumping” laws designed to block imports of cheaper foreign goods. Such interventions are common in the Third World, but they exist in the United States, too. Such interventions force American consumers, for example, to pay at least double the world price for sugar and dairy products. In 2003, according to the Trade Partnership, antidumping regulations forced Americans to pay duties of 148 percent on preserved mushrooms from Chile and 194 percent on honey from China.

Another intervention that cuts food supplies is the U.S. Conservation Reserve. This program, created in 1985, pays farmers to keep environmentally sensitive land out of production. Payments totaled around $2 billion annually from 1995 to 2002. Last summer more than 400,000 farmers were paid a total of $1.8 billion to keep 36.8 million acres idle—an area larger than the state of New York.

Even American food relief to poor nations has costly strings attached. Poor countries receiving U.S. Food for Peace aid must buy from U.S. farmers and the aid must then be transported on U.S.-flagged ships. In the end, less food gets to those who need it.

Unfortunately, the U.S. government is not alone in meddling in agricultural markets. In the industrialized world, government support accounted for one-fourth of all farm income in 2006. In Japan, farmers get over half their income from the government. The European Union and Mexico ban imports of genetically modified foods, and India, among many other interventions, bans foreign-owned retail grocery stores.

All told, the cost of these interventions is staggering. The International Monetary Fund estimates that ending farm subsidies in the industrialized world alone would increase global income by $100 billion.

Regardless of their immediate effects, all government interventions have important costs. Tariffs, quotas, and set-asides have direct and easily identified costs for consumers. Yet even subsidies that encourage agricultural production are costly. The money used for subsidies must first be taken from those who earned it and is therefore diverted from other uses. Perhaps more important, these subsidies distort key market signals. The miracle of expanded production that emerges from the law of comparative advantage only works when market participants face the true opportunity costs of their actions.

Ethanol and Biofuel Policies

As if all of this were not bad enough, the United States and Europe now mandate the increased use of ethanol and biofuel, which divert scarce farmland away from food production. In the United States this year nearly a third of the corn crop will be turned into ethanol. And the energy bill signed last year by President Bush will force the doubling of ethanol production by 2022.

Adding to the ethanol drive, the U.S. government provides an ethanol tax credit of 51 cents per gallon and imposes a tariff of 54 cents per gallon on cheaper Brazilian ethanol. All this means the demand for American-made ethanol and, therefore, corn is through the roof. In mid-January corn was selling near a record level of about $5 per bushel.

Increasing the demand for corn, of course, means less of an incentive to grow other crops. While corn acreage is at its highest level since 1933, last year’s rice acreage was down 3 percent, while cotton was down 18 percent and soybeans 16 percent. As the supplies of these and other crops have fallen, their prices have risen. Falling wheat stocks, for instance, helped contribute to more than a doubling of wheat prices last year, according to the World Bank. And although wheat prices have fallen recently, this spring they remained more than twice their 2006 level.

Higher corn prices have also made livestock feed more expensive. The National Chicken Council recently said higher corn prices have driven up the cost of feeding chickens by 40 percent. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, in a report published last year, said higher corn prices—thanks to ethanol production—have meant higher consumer prices for beef, pork, and chicken.

In all, the IMF and the International Food Policy Research Institute estimate biofuels have contributed between 20 and 30 percent to higher food costs, while other organizations, such as the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and the American Farm Bureau, say the figure is closer to 15 percent. Either way, it’s clear that biofuel mandates are having a significant impact on global food prices.

Other Reasons for Price Increases

There are certainly also nongovernmental reasons food prices are presently higher. Demand for food around the world is rising rapidly as the people of China and India, which together make up 40 percent of the world’s population, become wealthier. The International Herald Tribune reports that per capita meat consumption in China has more than doubled since 1985 to 110 pounds annually. By some estimates, people in developing countries will consume 25 percent more poultry and 50 percent more pork by 2016.

Weather has also played a role. A drought in Australia has caused supplies of wheat to fall and has contributed to higher dairy prices as well. And a rising world population, increasing around 1.1 percent annually, also means greater demand for food of all sorts.

Still, there is much that governments have done to make matters far worse than they would otherwise be. And many government responses to the current crisis will only add to the suffering. Egypt, Argentina, Kazakhstan, and China, for example, have recently imposed restrictions on grain exports, while Vietnam and India have announced future curbs on rice exports. Russia, meanwhile, is expected to place a 40 percent tax on exports of wheat, and China has imposed price controls on grains, edible oils, and dairy products such as milk and eggs. Meanwhile, the French government is urging nations in Africa and Latin America to adopt self-sufficiency in agriculture policies.

Fortunately, not all government responses have been bad. The U.S. Congress is considering a small reduction in the subsidy for ethanol. India may reduce tariffs on imported food, and Mexico may end its ban on genetically modified agricultural products. Each of these modest steps would be in the right direction.

Despite the current crisis, hunger is clearly not the problem it once was. In 1970 around 37 percent of the population of the developing world was hungry. Today that percentage is closer to 17 percent, despite an 83 percent increase in world population during the same period. Thanks to investment in better production methods, real food prices have fallen 75 percent since 1950.

Even in the United States the food picture has changed dramatically in less than a single lifetime.

In 1950 Americans spent 21 percent of their income on food; today, that figure is just 9 percent.

Still, for these dramatic improvements to continue, private property rights must be protected and market forces must be free to work. The proper response to the current food crisis is to dismantle not just some but all government interventions that currently do so much harm. Only a free market will guarantee that Bastiat’s “prodigiously ingenious mechanism” will supply food to the masses of the world. And only economic freedom will enable Smith’s invisible hand to lift food into hungry mouths.

Reginald Labbe, an English farmer better off than most in his time, died in 1293. His will listed the following possessions:

• one cow and one calf
• two sheep and three lambs
• three hens
• a bushel and a half (about 90 pounds) of wheat
• a seam (about 400 pounds) of barley
• a seam and a half of fodder for cattle
• a seam of mixed grain
• clothing comprising a hood, a tunic, and a tabard (a short, heavy cape of coarse cloth)
• a bolster (a long, narrow pillow or cushion)
• a rug (used as a blanket)
• two sheets
• a tripod or trivet (for cooking food over a fire)^[1]

Like most English farmers of the time, he had used tools (probably little more than a hoe and a scythe) belonging to his landlord—which meant, too, that he owned neither land nor dwelling. He had no money. The money value of his estate in his day was figured at 33 shillings 8 pence (1 pound 73 pence), or about $2.75 at today’s exchange rate. But of course in his day a shilling bought a great deal more than it does now, after seven centuries of inflation.

What would his possessions have been worth had he died today? Precise calculation is impossible; we don’t know the age, weight, or health of his livestock or the quality of his other possessions. But rough estimates put the total value of his livestock today at around $1,000 (assuming that they were smaller and less healthy than typical livestock today), his grain and fodder at around $475 wholesale, his tripod at around $10, and his clothing and bedding at nothing (because they would have been both very worn and of such inferior make that no one today would be willing to use them). The total value of his estate, then, might have been around $1,485 (or £935). For comparison, the average value of farms in the United States today is about $350,000.

When Labbe died, the executor sold off his possessions to pay expenses. He paid a penny sterling (about $8.65 today) for the grave to be dug; twopence ($17.28) for the tolling of the church bell; sixpence ($51.84) for making his will; eightpence ($69.12) for court fees; 46 pence ($397.44) for food for the mourners and pallbearers; and threepence ($25.92) for the clerk who drew up the account for the estate—a total of 66 pence ($570.25), or a little over a third of the value of his estate. (Of course, he was not embalmed and had no hermetically sealed, velvet-lined, stainless steel casket to preserve his body for a thousand years.)

If Labbe lived to the average age of people born in the thirteenth century, he was under 30 when he died. More likely, since he had survived infancy and childhood (about half did not), he died in his 30s or 40s. Probably at least one wife had preceded him in death, perhaps in childbirth—one of the most common causes of death for women at the time. Assuming he had fathered eight children in his years of marriage, he would probably have buried four of them in their infancy, perhaps another before its fifth birthday, and another before puberty. If he was fairly typical, then, two of his children survived him.

Slow Population Growth

Such was life, for the moderately better off, in a society in which the death rate was normally so close to the birth rate that population grew at only about 0.17 percent per year, doubling about every 425 years instead of every 42 years, as it would at the world’s average growth rate in the 1980s, or every 51 years, as it would at the average rate for the 1990s.^[2] Even for the wealthy, life wasn’t much more secure. Infant and child mortality rates were little better for the very rich—royalty and nobility—than they were for farmers and peasants, even into the eighteenth century. Britain’s Queen Anne (1665–1714) was pregnant 18 times; five of her children survived birth; none survived childhood.

To be more precise, such is a tiny glimpse of life for people throughout most of the past millennium in countries that now are among the richest in the world. There is a good deal more to describe. Most of it is about as dismal by comparison with our experience.

You might have been surprised at the cost of the food served to the mourners and pallbearers at Labbe’s funeral—by far the largest cost associated with his death. That is because food was far more expensive in the past, in comparison with labor and practically any manufactured product, than it is today. Agricultural yields were far lower, both per acre and per man-hour of labor.

Eighteenth-century French farming, for instance, produced about 345 pounds of wheat per acre; modern American farmers produce about 6.2 times as much, 2,150 pounds.^[3] Early fifteenth-century French farmers produced about 2.75 to 3.7 pounds of wheat per man-hour, and the rate fell by about half over the next two centuries;^[4] modern American farmers produce about 857 pounds per man-hour^[5] —about 230 to 310 times as much as their French counterparts around 1400 and 460 to 620 times as much as French farmers around 1600. (By the way, this means modern farmers also manage to farm from 37 to 100 times as many acres as their earlier counterparts did. Chalk it up to mechanized equipment.) As the great French historian Fernand Braudel pointed out, life was difficult to live when productivity in wheat fell below 2.2 pounds per man-hour, but for most of the 350 years from 1540 to 1890, productivity was well below that.^[6]

Such facts help to explain why earlier generations spent a major part of their incomes just on food (excluding its preparation, packaging, transport, and serving), while we spend far less (under 6 percent of total consumer expenditures in the United States in the 1980s). These developments—along with the advent of glass windowpanes (to admit light and heat but exclude cold and pests) and screens (to admit fresh air and exclude disease-bearing insects); treatment of drinking water and sewage; mechanical refrigeration (to prevent food spoilage and consequent waste and disease); adoption of safer methods of work, travel, and recreation; and the advent of sanitary medical practices, to say nothing of antibiotics and modern surgical techniques—also help to explain why people live about three times as long now.

All this is just one way of looking at changes in human material conditions over the past millennium. Others also are important and instructive.

When Would You Rather Have Lived?

Try a thought experiment. Would you rather live as you do today, with your present income and expenditure patterns, or as royalty lived throughout the last millennium up to the late nineteenth century? It is tempting to pick the life of past royalty. But consider just a few of the things you would have to do without:

Electricity and all it powers: lights, telephones, radios, televisions, refrigerators, air conditioners, fans, VCRs, X-rays, MRIs, computers, the Internet, high-speed printing presses, and all other industrial automation.

Internal combustion engines and all that they power: cars, trucks, buses, planes, farm and construction equipment, and most trains and ships.

Hundreds of synthetic materials like plastic, nylon, orlon, rayon, vinyl, and the thousands of products—from grocery bags and pantyhose to compact disks and artificial body joints and organ parts—made from them.

None of these things were available to anyone, at any price.

No matter how rich you might have been a millennium—or even 150 years—ago, if you’d contracted a bacterial disease, you could not have been treated with antibiotics. If you had wanted to travel from Great Britain to Australia, you could not have done so in less than months, at great discomfort and great risk, not in less than a day and at less risk than driving across London. You could not have enjoyed air conditioning or iced drinks during a hot summer. You could not have talked with anyone by any means other than direct voice. Until the advent of the telegraph in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, you could not have communicated at a distance in writing any faster than you could have traveled; and it was decades later before telegraphic communication was readily available to most cities and towns. You could not have taken or viewed photographs, listened to recorded music, or viewed—let alone made your own!—motion pictures.

Yes, the few rich of the past lived in opulence. (Don’t think of castles, most of which were cramped and quite uncomfortable, built for defense rather than comfort.) Think of the great mansions like Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, the Château Fontainebleau in France, or even, here in the United States, the Biltmore House in Asheville, North Carolina. Or picture the homes of royalty, like Buckingham Palace or Hampton Court in London, or the Palace of Versailles in France.

But however opulent the surroundings, with their magnificent architecture, gardens, carpets, furniture, china, silver services, and art collections, they were not very comfortable. Heating and especially cooling these mansions were constant problems. They were far less sanitary, and far more smelly, than most lower-class dwellings today. Indeed, the very magnificence of the dwellings of the rich is testimony to the absence, in a pre- or primitive-market culture, of other, more attractive uses of their wealth. A higher proportion of people in advanced countries today can afford to build and furnish great mansions than could in centuries past. But they don’t. Why not? Because most of them invest their wealth in productive enterprises or spend it on travel and entertainment instead.

And sanitation? The literary historian James Clifford, after years of note-taking on every reference he could find to sanitation in London, wrote an article that American historian Bernard Bailyn described simply as “horrifying.”^[7] “A bathroom was a very rare luxury in . . . seventeenth- and eighteenth-century houses. Fleas, lice and bugs conquered London as well as Paris, rich interiors as well as poor,” wrote Braudel. “So if we moderns were to enter into an interior of the past, we would very soon feel uncomfortable. However beautiful it might be—and it was often wonderfully so—what seemed like luxury to the people of the past would not be enough for us.”^[8]

Overland travel even for the rich was by horseback or carriage, and the 450-mile journey from London to Edinburgh, driven by lower-class car owners today in a comfortable seven hours or flown in an hour, required two 18-hour days in a bumpy carriage with neither air conditioning nor heat. For the poor, travel was almost entirely on foot.

Keep the Doctor Away

Medical care? You don’t even want to imagine most of it. There were no more effective anesthetics than alcohol and cloves, so when limbs gone gangrenous from infections that would be cured or more likely prevented easily today had to be amputated, patients gritted their teeth and hoped they would pass out from the pain of the crude saws. Germ control? Non-existent. The germ theory of disease didn’t become current until the late eighteenth century, and the use of antiseptics didn’t begin until half a century later. Even then, what your doctor didn’t know could kill you. The high rate of maternal death in childbirth in early nineteenth-century America is attributable in part to belief in “laudable pus.” Doctors believed pus itself was curative, so they would purposely spread it from patient to patient, including to mothers in childbirth.^[9] Got a fever? Don’t call the doctor; he’s likely to bleed you to death trying to cure it. In fact, medicine was so primitive it was a favorite cover for spies; physicians were trusted everywhere, but it took little knowledge to pass for one.^[10]

Education was the province of the rich. Few countries before the Reformation had widespread education, and even afterward, schooling was available principally to the rich. A major exception was Scotland after John Knox’s followers, convinced that personal knowledge of the Word of God was essential to the maintenance of religious as well as civil liberty, arranged a parish-by-parish system of church-run grammar schools which ensured that practically every child could at least become strongly literate. Scotland’s high literacy rate, coupled with its Calvinist ethics of work and saving, were important factors in its making contributions to the Industrial Revolution far out of proportion to its small population. But even there, few were schooled for more than five or six years, and only a tiny percentage attended college, let alone graduated.

Today, by contrast, in the United States, 81 percent of persons 25 years old and over are high school graduates and 23 percent are college graduates, and the growth in availability of education is worldwide. That is a particularly crucial factor in predicting the world’s material future, because the creation of wealth depends primarily not on brawn but on brain.

The bottom line? Materially, the world is a far, far better place today than it was not only a millennium ago but even a century ago. Today, every raw material—mineral, plant, and vegetable—is more affordable (which economists will recognize as meaning more abundant), in terms of labor costs, than at any time in the past. Every manufactured product is more affordable than it has ever been. And in producing all this great abundance, we have also reduced health-threatening pollution. Put simply, the world is both a wealthier and a healthier place today than ever.

The most crucial measures of material welfare are mortality rates and life expectancy, since most people value preserving life more than any other material good. A thousand years ago, life expectancy everywhere was under 30 years; today, worldwide, it is over 65 years, and in high-income economies it is over 76 years. The under-five mortality rate has plummeted from about 40 percent everywhere as late as the nineteenth century to under 7 percent worldwide today, and under 1 percent in high-income countries. And improved life expectancy comes not just from declining child mortality but from declining mortality rates at every age of life.

The late economist and statistician Julian Simon, a friend and mentor, produced in 1995 as his last major editing effort a big book, The State of Humanity, to show long-term trends in hundreds of material measures of human well-being. Parts cover such categories as life, death, and health; standard of living, productivity, and poverty; natural resources; agriculture, food, land, and water; and pollution and the environment. Want to know long-term trends in slavery, housing quality and affordability, leisure time, energy resources, forest growth, crop and livestock productivity, air and water pollution, disease, murder and suicide, even accident rates? They’re all there, in chapters by 60 world-class scholars.

“This is the central assertion of this book,” Simon wrote: “Almost every absolute change, and the absolute component of almost every economic and social change or trend, points in a positive direction, as long as we view the matter over a reasonably long period of time. That is, all aspects of material human welfare are improving in the aggregate.^[11]

Simon’s view has raised eyebrows through the years, but the empirical evidence supports it overwhelmingly. If you’re looking for a good way to get a grasp of the material changes we’ve experienced over the last millennium, The State of Humanity would be a great place to start.

Notes

1. Russell Kirk, Economics: Work and Prosperity (Pensacola: A Beka Book, 1989), pp. 250–51.
2. Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism: 15th –18th Century, 3 volumes, volume 1, The Structures of Everyday Life, trans. Sian Reynolds (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), p. 41.
3. Computed from ibid., p. 121, and Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1996, Table 1105.
4. Computed from Braudel, p. 135.
5. Computed from E. Calvin Beisner, Prospects for Growth: A Biblical View of Population, Resources, and the Future (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 1990), p. 127.
6. Computed from Braudel, p. 135.
7. Bernard Bailyn, On the Teaching and Writing of History (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College, 1994), p. 51.
8. Braudel, pp. 310–11.
9. Private communication from Philip T. Newton, M.D.
10. Alan Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage in the Reign of Charles II, 1660–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
11. Julian L. Simon, ed., The State of Humanity (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), p. 7.

Many economists have long viewed unions as essentially cartels of workers which collude to push their wages above free-market levels. As Texas A&M University labor economist Morgan Reynolds has explained: “Unions are fundamentally cartels—groups of producers with sectional interests diametrically opposed to those of consumers. Unions are labor OPECs” whose rallying cries have always been “take competition out of wages” and “take labor out of competition.”^[1]

Competition and the entry of new (and lower-priced) competitors are the bane of all cartels. Even the infamous OPEC oil cartel collapsed once American and other oil producers significantly increased their oil production and lowered their prices. Unions have always attempted to block competition from nonunion workers through special-interest legislation and regulation, and by committing acts of violence and intimidation against nonunion workers. For the entry of nonunion workers is just as devastating to a union cartel as a new lower-priced competitor is to a business cartel.

The purpose of all cartels is to raise prices above competitive levels and to redistribute income from consumers to cartel members. When unions successfully raise the price of labor above free-market levels, much of the employers’ higher labor costs are passed on to consumers.

America’s struggling private-sector unions, which today represent no more than 10 percent of the labor force, recognize that in order to increase union membership and, more importantly from the union’s perspective, to increase dues revenues, they must devise new techniques to destroy the threat of nonunion labor in their industries. In the grocery industry in particular, unions have recognized that the key to increased unionization is a new definition of “market share”: the share of a market that is controlled by unionized firms. If the grocery industry, for example, were 100 percent unionized, then there would be no competitive threat from lower-priced, nonunion grocery stores that would take business away from higher-priced, unionized stores by providing consumers better value for their money. This paper examines the implications of recent “corporate campaigns” in the grocery industry.

The Union Imperative to Raise Grocery Prices

It is instructive to listen to what union organizers themselves have said about their self-imposed imperative to either raise the prices of nonunion grocery stores or drive those stores into bankruptcy. Consider a speech delivered by Douglas H. Dority, the executive vice president and international director of organizing of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union at a 1990 union organizers’ conference.^[2] The biggest problem facing the union, said Dority, is that “nonunion stores grew faster [during the 1980s] than we organized them” so that “the lesson of the ’80s is market share.”^[3]

“We must educate our members about market share,” said Dority, and explain to them the union’s newly designed strategy for cartelizing the grocery market. The key point of advice offered by Dority was: “When the unionized share of the grocery dollar declines in any geographic area, our ability to produce at the bargaining table is diminished. That is what happens when we fail to organize the nonunion competition.” (emphasis added)

Dority compared the Washington, D.C., and Tidewater, Virginia, grocery markets, the former being about 90 percent unionized, whereas the latter is only about 10 percent union. The effect is a difference in hourly wages of “about two dollars,” which leads to the second most important point, according to Dority: “When a company expands its nonunion operations—in the same geographic area or elsewhere—it can better withstand a strike to achieve our members’ bargaining objectives.” (emphasis added)

In the eyes of union organizers the existence of nonunion grocery firms is a deadly force against their campaign to cartelize the labor market in that industry. The union imperative, therefore, is to increase “the unionized share” of stores in every market and, especially, to organize doublebreasted companies—ones that have both union and nonunion stores. This strategy, Dority says, represents “a sea change in union thinking.”

Perhaps the biggest threat to union cartelization efforts in the grocery industry, according to Dority, are the low-priced “warehouse clubs” and “hypermarkets” which “we have shown we can hurt with picket lines and [bad] publicity.” Another “very real threat” to the market share/cartelization strategy is “the nonunion chains—the Food Lions, Price Choppers, and Hy-Vees of our industry.” “Over the long run, we must either reduce these chains’ market share . . . or we must put them out of business. There is no other option.” (emphasis added) Low prices may be a “threat” to Dority’s position as a union organizer, but they are a great benefit to consumers, especially lower-income consumers.

Other union executives in the industry have voiced similar sentiments. Joe Crump, the secretary/treasurer of the Grand Rapids, Michigan, local of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW), stated in Labor Research Review that his union defines successful organizing in one of two ways: “either a ratified, signed collective bargaining agreement with a previously non-union employer or a curtailment of a nonunion operator’s business, including shutting the business down. Neither of these outcomes will occur by relying on the NLRB.”^[4] (emphasis added) A self-congratulatory Crump then boasted that “after a three year struggle, the battle with [the nonunion] Family Foods is over. . . . The company went out of business.”^[5] Family Foods’ employees lost their jobs and consumers in those areas where its stores had competed with higher-priced, unionized stores began paying higher prices, something this “labor leader” is most proud of.

Clearly, driving one’s competitors out of business may be good for aspiring monopolists, but is bad for consumers and those workers at companies like Family Foods who lose their jobs. Low-income Americans will be hurt the most, as they always are when prices rise.

“Organizing is war,” says Crump, and that means harassing nonunion employers and “costing them enough time and energy and money to either eliminate them or get them to surrender to the union.”^[6] Employers must be made to “pay for operating nonunion.”^[7] “If we can’t organize [nonunion supermarkets],” says Tom McNutt, president of Local 400 of the UFCW, “the best thing to do is to erode their business as much as possible.”^[8]

Sometimes unionized grocery stores conspire with their unions to try to drive their lower-priced, nonunion competitors from the market. As Crump correctly points out, unionized employers “love to see their nonunion competitors having such a tough time.”^[9] This kind of business/union conspiracy may be directed toward nonunion stores, but the ultimate victim is the consumer.

And union harassment campaigns (discussed in detail below) can bankrupt a grocery store more easily than most people might imagine, given that profit margins in the 3 percent range (as a percentage of sales) are common. As Crump instructs his fellow union organizers: “If a supermarket loses 10 percent of its customers, its profitability is probably eliminated.”^[10]

The Union Assault on Employee Freedom

The ultimate objective of “corporate campaigning” is to pressure the company to accept a union without ever permitting its employees to vote on whether or not they want a union. That is what Crump meant when he said that neither of his two top priorities as a union organizer—to either have a company sign a union contract, or go bankrupt—would ever “occur by relying on the NLRB” and its electoral certification processes. This is a stark admission that, at least in the grocery industry, unionization cannot succeed if employees are allowed to vote on whether or not they want a union. Extortion has replaced organizing.

A most telling document entitled “Developing New Tactics: Winning With Coordinated Corporate Campaigns,” published by the AFL-CIO, describes to union organizers how “United Food and Commercial Workers Local 400 had tried for years to organize the Magruder’s supermarket chain in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area.”^[11] After the union picketed the stores and “informed the public” about the store’s allegedly substandard products and labor practices, “Magruder’s voluntarily recognized the union—without an NLRB [National Labor Relations Board] election” because it wanted to avoid “the threat of informational pickets and bad publicity.”^[12]

The word “voluntary” here is used in a most peculiar way. When one succumbs to threats and intimidation, which is what the corporate campaign against Magruder’s was, one thinks of extortion rather than voluntarism.

Crump promotes this tactic by pointing to a kind of history lesson: in 1937 more than 3 million workers joined unions in the United States but “only 2,470 used NLRB elections as the vehicle to gain their collective bargaining rights. The rest employed `other means.”’^[13] By using such strategies, Crump advises, “you don’t need a majority or even 30% support among the employees. A few people inside and outside are all that’s necessary. . . . Fired employees are a great source of information.”^[14] Organizing employees can be “complex and unpredictable,” says Crump, but “employers are simple and predictable—organize employers, not employees.”^[15]

He recognizes that “waging economic war on an unorganized company” might “turn employees against the union,”^[16] but then advises union organizers to forget about that—employees’ opinions need not matter. For “if you had massive employee support, you probably would be conducting a traditional organizing campaign” in which employees were permitted to vote on whether or not they wanted a union.^[17]

Thus, the essence of the “corporate campaign” strategy is this: Unions cannot convince workers to join their union voluntarily through NLRB elections, so they intimidate and threaten to extort employers until they sign a contract with the union without holding a union certification election. Despite all the talk in union circles about “workplace democracy,” such tactics are anything but democratic: they are designed specifically to avoid the “inconvenience” of holding union certification elections, which the unions know they will lose.

The “Threat” of Competition

A recent New York Times article about national competition in the grocery industry explains why unions are so intent on literally destroying nonunion grocery stores and why, if they are successful, this strategy will greatly harm American consumers. The article contrasts grocery store chains in the heavily- unionized Northeastern states with those in the largely nonunion South and describes how Southern chains are expanding into the Northern states and providing new competition.

In a unionized store in affluent Westchester County, New York, “shoppers squeezed their carts through aisles cluttered with towers of unpacked boxes that blocked the goods on the shelves. Whole shelves yawned emptily, unstocked. Customers waited in lines as checkout clerks doubled as baggers. Spilled milk by the dairy cooler had not been cleaned up. The floors were littered with flattened vegetables and packing materials. . . . A clerk maneuvered a broom along the aisles, redistributing the litter instead of cleaning it up.”^[18] Much of the population of the North “has become inured to poor service” and many Northerners “put up with conditions that people in the South would not accept,” observes a retail expert at Smith Barney.^[19]

A supermarket run by the nonunion firm, Publix, in a middle-class Florida community “offered a startling contrast,” according to the Times: “clutter free, wide-aisled, spotless” and with helpful employees.^[20] Publix is part of a “revolution” that is “transforming the supermarket business in the South and West,” the Times observes, where fierce competition is providing customers with superior service at competitive or lower prices. The Publix chain, for example, enjoys lower labor costs and “uses the tenets of aggressive management and employee ownership to create a culture that values efficiency and service.”^[21] The 64- year-old company has been owned entirely by employees, managers, and the family of the firm’s founder, the late George Jenkins. (Employees become eligible to purchase stock after working there for one year.)

A 1993 survey of 10,000 readers of Consumer Reports magazine rated Publix the best supermarket chain in America over 23 competitors. The service is so good at Publix that the firm has had to advertise that its prices are competitive “because some customers think it is a luxury chain.”^[22]

Publix employees are paid bonuses tied to the revenues of the stores and can make as much as $300 extra during each 13-week inventory period. They are also not subjected to rigid work rules, such as the ones that exist in unionized supermarkets. In some unionized stores, “if the customer spills a bottle of jelly in the aisle, the rules might prevent a cashier from sweeping up, even if the cashier is idly sitting around with no customers.”^[23] It is these kinds of rules that have been so detrimental to other unionized industries, such as autos and steel, and are a plague on efficiency. That’s why Publix executives recognize that a key to their (and their employees’) financial success is a union-free workplace.

Flexible labor relations are a key to the company’s efficiency, and such flexibility is rarely—if ever—found in unionized firms. Rigid job descriptions and restrictive work practices ratchet up costs and prices at unionized grocery chains, all to the detriment of the consumer. These higher costs and prices also threaten the job security of unionized employees who work for uncompetitive businesses, as auto and steel workers have learned all too well over the past 25 years.

Not surprisingly, the UFCW has launched a propaganda campaign against Publix, accusing the company of “gender discrimination” on the grounds that “too few” women are managers. But merely claiming that the number of female managers is “too small” does not prove that any discrimination has occurred, any more than claiming there are “too few” white professional basketball players proves that the National Basketball Association racially discriminates against white players. The union obviously hopes that mere repetition of the charge will harm the company’s public image and, consequently, its sales.

The Propaganda Campaign Against Food Lion

Unions have not been successful in organizing the employees of companies like Publix or Food Lion because the great majority of the employees there do not want to be unionized. Having abandoned any pretense of organizing a union at Food Lion, the UFCW has waged a “corporate campaign” against Food Lion designed to force the company out of business or, at a minimum, to preserve the market share of unionized stores. The union assault on Food Lion provides a case study of the anti-consumer conspiracy known in union circles as “corporate campaigning.”

One of the first tactics of the campaign against Food Lion was to persuade ABC News to air a story that promoted the outlandish union claim that Food Lion stores routinely sold rotten fish and ham, covering up the spoilage by bathing the meats in Clorox. The show was aired on November 5, 1992. “Diane Sawyer and her producers worked hand-in-hand with the union, and then did their best to pretend that it had little or no role in the broadcast,” the Washington Times revealed.^[24] Apparently, the union provided ABC’s “Prime Time Live” with a roster of “disgruntled former employees” to interview, which the network did. The UFCW also gave an “undercover” ABC News reporter “minimal training and arranged for a phony letter of recommendation so she could get a job at Food Lion.”^[25]

The notion that any supermarket could get away with routinely selling ham bathed in bleach in the hyper-competitive grocery industry is absurd. If a grocer were so foolish as to attempt it, customers could certainly detect it, if the grocer’s competitors did not do so first. The immediate result would be a loss of sales or even bankruptcy. No grocery chain (all of which, incidentally, rely on repeat sales more than most other businesses) could be as successful as Food Lion has been by selling rotten food that smells of bleach. Consumers are just not that easy to manipulate.

Food Lion was one of the fastest growing supermarket chains in the country before the ABC News segment, opening more than 800 stores from 1983 to 1992, with sales and earnings increasing by 22.5 percent and 23.3 percent, respectively.^[26] But Food Lion’s earnings fell by 55 percent in the fourth quarter of 1992 and its earnings for the first quarter of 1993 were 56 percent below the first quarter of the previous year. The company also reported that its net income declined by 41.6 percent for the second quarter of 1993 compared to the second quarter of 1992.^[27] The chain closed 88 stores in 1994, laying off 1,300 full-time and 2,200 part-time workers.^[28] The closing of these stores also diminished the degree of competition somewhat—at least in some markets—which can only harm the consumer. ABC apparently made no attempt to shoot film footage of some of the filthy and unsanitary supermarket environments of the unionized firms in the Northeast—including the New York City area, where ABC News is located—described by the New York Times as “supermarket purgatory.”^[29]

Union “Front” Organizations

The attack on Food Lion is so blatantly anti-consumer and so obviously a union scheme, that the union decided it had better set up a front organization to implement its “campaign.” It established “Consumers United With Employees (CUE),” a front organization that has the same mailing address as the Food and Allied Service Trades, a subsidiary of the AFL-CIO. Also part of the organization are other, older union front organizations such as the National Consumers League (NCL). For years, the NCL has advocated such anti-consumer but pro-union policies as increases in the minimum wage, bans on “home work,” and limitations on the hours teenagers may be allowed to work. The purpose of such front organizations is to fool the public into believing that the attack on Food Lion and other nonunion companies are not motivated by greedy unions, but by selfless and public-spirited “consumer advocates” united with “employees.”

The first tactic employed by CUE was to issue a series of headline-grabbing press releases on February 4, 1994, claiming that it had conducted a “study” of Food Lion and had “discovered” the chain allegedly posed a threat to the health of babies through “sale of outdated infant formula at Food Lion Supermarkets.”^[30] In a letter to CUE members the same day, signed by Robert F. Harbrant, President of the Food and Allied Service Trades Department of the AFL-CIO “on behalf of C.U.E.,” Harbrant urged CUE members to “contact your Congressional representatives and urge them to investigate this matter,” and “contact your state and local representatives” also.^[31] The organization also contacted the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and urged it to investigate Food Lion (but not any other grocery chain).

The “report” did not mention that “outdated formula” poses no health hazard; only that the manufacturer cannot guarantee the freshness of the ingredients after that date. A spokesman for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration tried to calm mothers who might have been frightened by the CUE “report” by announcing that “outdated baby formula doesn’t pose a health hazard.”^[32]

The union also made no attempt to compare sales of outdated formula (and other items) at Food Lion stores with those of other grocery chains, especially unionized stores. There are bound to be “outdated” products to some degree at virtually every grocery store, not just at the nonunion ones. When asked why he didn’t examine infant formula dates in unionized stores, Sean Cunniff, a CUE spokesman, pleaded poverty: “It’s very difficult in terms of resources. . . .”^[33]

CUE has specifically targeted Food Lion stores in Virginia with its “inspections,” for Virginia is a state in which Food Lion is currently attempting to expand into the highly-unionized Northern Virginia market that is dominated by Giant Foods and Safeway. But a spokeswoman for the Virginia Department of Agriculture stated publicly that “in Virginia, Food Lion’s overall compliance rate with state-inspection requirements is among the highest in the state.”^[34] Bob Gordon, director of the North Carolina Department of Agriculture’s Division of Food and Drug Protection, called the “report” a “low blow” by CUE and said that “much has been made about nothing.”^[35]

The whole episode is foolish, says Gordon, because “any consumer can pick up a can or bottle and see the expiration date.”^[36] Gordon makes an important point: Even if infant formula—or any other product—is “outdated,” the fact that it is indeed outdated is clearly written on the package!

A more comprehensive comparison of all grocery chains in the markets focused on by CUE found that in every single instance, the nonunion grocery chains performed better than the unionized ones in terms of the number of outdated products found on the shelves.^[37]

Using Regulation to Reduce Competition and Raise Prices

A union organizers’ manual published by the AFL-CIO informs its readers that “businesses are regulated by a virtual alphabet soup of federal, state and local agencies, which monitor nearly every aspect of corporate behavior.”^[38] This is a sad but true statement about the American workplace—it is awash in regulations, most of which are impossible for mere humans to understand, let alone comply with. One U.S. Department of Agriculture official candidly stated, for instance, that if all meat-inspecting regulations were actually enforced to the letter, there would be no meat-processor in America open for business.^[39]

Unions—especially the UFCW—have taken advantage of this fact to impose regulatory costs on nonunion firms as another tactic in their corporate campaigns. As the AFL-CIO manual states, “unions can use the regulators to their advantage. An intransigent employer may find that in addition to labor troubles, there are suddenly government problems as well.”^[40] The manual then advises union organizers to catalogue the myriad rules and regulations that nonunion companies must comply with and try to determine if they are in total and complete compliance, a virtual impossibility for any business. If not, they should be reported by the union to the regulators, who are all too happy to be able to justify their jobs. If noncompliance is determined, press releases should be forthcoming so as to impose public relations costs on the nonunion firms as well. As the Wall Street Journal has stated, “unions are using regulatory laws as strategic weapons in their organizing and bargaining battles,” the purpose of which is to “harass them in the marketplace and blackmail them into voluntarily recognizing unions without a National Labor Relations Board-sponsored election.”^[41] This tactic has worked in some cases already; in Salt Lake City, Utah, Smith’s Food and Drug Centers, Inc. “voluntarily recognized the union at its Phoenix stores” when confronted with the possibility of protracted and expensive litigation instigated by UFCW organizers.^[42]

UFCW organizer Joe Crump has recognized that because of the sheer size and complexity of federal regulation, “virtually all companies are wholesale law breakers. Even `good’ ones, even organized ones.”^[43] Crump knows that it is impossible for businesses to be in compliance with all laws and regulation at all times, even if they sincerely wanted to, for there’s civil rights laws and wage-and-hour laws. Safety-and-health laws and right-to-know. Unemployment compensation and workers compensation requirements, and Social Security, plant closing and pension laws. There’s public health and environmental laws. And at the local level, there’s zoning and fire codes and various ordinances. At all levels, there are tax laws.^[44]

The point here is that regulation is so out of control that any business person in America, at any one time, is most certainly “guilty” of noncompliance with at least some regulations. It is beyond human comprehension to possess knowledge of the tens of thousands of OSHA, EPA, IRS, and other regulations. The unions realize this—indeed, they lobbied for many of the regulations in the first place—and intend to use regulation as a tool for extorting “concessions” from nonunion employers, i.e., recognition of the union without a representation election. This is yet another reason why deregulation of labor relations—and of the economy in general— is sorely needed if the American economy is to prosper. Far from protecting the consumer, as they are in theory supposed to do, such regulations typically impose great harm on consumers and employees.

Conclusions

So-called corporate campaigns might best be described as the practice of predatory unionism. The purpose of the “campaigns,” as stated by the AFL-CIO and its affiliates, such as the UFCW, is to use whatever means necessary—propaganda campaigns, abuse of the regulatory system—either to drive up the costs and prices of nonunion firms or to drive them into bankruptcy.

As cartels of workers, grocery unions cannot succeed if there are lower-priced (nonunion) grocery stores in the same market. Thus, it is imperative to them that, at the very least, grocery prices be raised at nonunion stores.

This kind of predatory unionism is not only anti-consumer; it is also anti-poor. Higher grocery prices impose a greater burden on lower-income consumers than on the more affluent. Informed consumers should take whatever unions and their front organizations say about nonunion businesses—in the grocery industry or elsewhere—with a very large grain of salt. []

2.   Remarks by Douglas H. Dority at the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Retail Food Conference, Tropicana Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada, October 29, 1990.

3.   Ibid. The following quotations of Dority are all from this speech.

4.   Joe Crump, “The Pressure is On: Organizing Without the NLRB,” Labor Research Review, vol. 18, p. 34.

5.   Ibid., p. 35.

6.   Ibid., p. 36.

7.   Crump, p. 38.

8.   Randall Bloomquist, “Tom McNutt: He’s Built a Working-Class Empire on Innovation and a Willingness to Deal,” Regardies: The Business of Washington, July 1988, p. 2.

9.   Ibid., p. 42.

10.   Ibid., p. 40.

11.   Industrial Union Dept., AFL-CIO, “Developing New Tactics: Winning With Coordinated Corporate Campaigns” (1985), published by AFL-CIO, 815 16th St., NW, Washington, D.C. 20006.

12.   Ibid., p. 11.

13.   Joe Crump, “The Pressure is On,” p. 41.

14.   Ibid., p. 43.

15.   Ibid.

16.   Ibid., p. 42.

17.   Ibid.

18.   Glenn Collins, “In Grocery War, the South Rises,” New York Times, April 25, 1995, p. C-1.

19.   Ibid., p. C-2.

20.   Ibid., p. C-1.

21.   Ibid., p. C-2.

22.   Ibid.

23.   Ibid.

24.   “The War Against Food Lion, Phase II,” Washington Times, Feb. 7, 1994, p. A-20.

25.   “A Union’s Corporate Campaign,” Washington Times, May 7, 1995, p. B-2.

26.   Eleena de Lisser, “Food Lion Hopes to Prove It’s Not a Toothless Tiger,” Wall Street Journal, May 6, 1993, p. B-4.

27.   Adams et al., “An Analysis of the UFCW’s Campaign,” p. 561.

28.   “The War Against Food Lion, Phase 2.”

29.   Glenn Collins, “In Grocery War,” p. C-1.

30.   CUE Press Release dated Feb. 4, 1994.

31.   Letter to CUE members, Feb. 4, 1994, by Robert F. Harbrant, President, Food and Allied Service Trades Department, AFL-CIO, “on behalf of C.U.E.”

32.   Eleena de Lisser, “Union Group Says Food Lion Inc. Stocks Stale Goods,” Wall Street Journal, Feb. 4, 1994, p. A-5B.

33.   Lisa Saxton, “Food Lion Hit by Claim on Dating, Refunds,” Supermarket News, April 24, 1995.

34.   Ibid.

35.   Neil Holthouser, “Group Singles Out Food Lion,” Salisbury (N.C.) Post, Feb. 4, 1994, p. 1-A.

36.   James Greiff, “Grocer Coolly Confronts Allegations,” Charlotte Observer, Feb. 5, 1994, p. D-1.

37.   Thomas J. DiLorenzo, “The Corporate Campaign Against Food Lion: Media Manipulation by `Consumer Activists,”’ prepared for a symposium on “Comprehensive Corporate Campaigns” sponsored by the John M. Olin Institute for Employment Practice and Policy, Washington, D.C., Nov. 16, 1995.

38.   AFL-CIO, “Developing New Tactics,” p. 6.

39.   Philip K. Howard, The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America (New York: Random House, 1994), p. 32.

40.   AFL-CIO, “Developing New Tactics,” p. 6.

41.   Robert Tomsho, “Unions Search for Regulatory Violations To Pressure Firms and Win New Members,” Wall Street Journal, Feb. 28, 1992, p. B-1.

42.   Ibid.

43.   Crump, “Organizing Without the NLRB,” p. 39.

44.   Ibid.