The curse of the major league baseball union

I am pro-baseball and anti-union. And major league baseball provides two examples of unions at their worst.

Curt Flood filed an antitrust lawsuit against major league baseball in 1970 because his team, the Cardinals, had exercised their unilateral right to trade him. They traded him to Philadelphia, a perennial loser at the time. When no active player testified on Flood’s behalf and the players union gave him luke-warm support he lost at the US Supreme Court (which for some reason sustained baseball’s continued exemption from the Sherman Anti-Trust Act).

The next major league baseball union boner was the player association’s refusal to allow testing for steroids when performance enhancing drugs grew in use in the late 1980s. The union’s principle was that this was an unreasonable search by ownership. The union’s mistake was that it meant that its players were destined to have to choose between: 1) taking a substance that has a numerous ill health effects, or 2) being at a major competitive disadvantage.

I am against the War on Drugs and think that all drugs should be legalized (including steroids). But I also think that employers should have the right to test for any and all drugs they determine a disadvantage for their business.

Unions are almost always a bad deal for Americans. But for some reason they get treated like motherhood and apple pie rather than the curse they are.