Things Republicans could do to make me take them seriously - labor relations

Republicans need to develop a view of labor relations that learns from the past, rather than seeking to return to the past.

Unions are just another special interest group out for whats best for them.  But unions are a less than ideal solution to a very real problem - before unions market forces often led companies to treat their employees as little better than slaves.  Unions evolved out of working folks banding together to protect themselves from abusive management practices.

Because governments approach has always been reactive, our current labor relations laws are based on an adversarial relationship between management and labor.  This seems to me to be nuts.  It is sort of like building a football team by making the linemen and the ball handling players fight it out to see who gets steak and who gets gruel.

Republican don't seem to acknowledge the function Unions serve, so they propose solutions that history has already demonstrated allows market forces to push companies toward paying their employees as little as possible for as much work as possible, and then the ensuing race to the bottom destroys the consumer base that companies need in order to sell their products.  Republican solutions are to abolish or hobble unions, but offer no ideas for protecting workers from abuse by newly empowered management.

What if instead of trying to abolish or hobble private sector unions we made them irrelevant?  What if government used Corporate tax policy to counteract the market tendency to reward the companies that pay their employees the least.  A company with a pretty flat pay scale, that shared the wealth up and down the payroll, could qualify for a lower corporate tax rate than a company that pays its management enormous salaries and its workers minimum wage.

Public Sector unions offer a special problem.  When public sector unions bargain they don't bargain with people who will ultimately foot the bill, they bargain with other public employees.  The public employees bargaining on behalf of taxpayers often have conflicting loyalties - they may need the public sector unions support to maintain their political position.  Recent history is replete with public sector contracts that granted far more in long term compensation than the public entity can afford.

So what if instead of trying to abolish public sector unions we made them irrelevant.  We tie public sector compensation to the average private sector compensation.  By law politicians would be limited in their ability to buy votes by either paying public employees to little or to much.