Conservative Paper criticizes objective poll

The Washington Times has an op-ed about the latest union attack on Wal-Mart, that being the hiring of an "objective" pollster to come to the conclusion that Americans think Wal-mart "is bad for America." Wal-mart's tremendous sales this season notwithstanding.

I used the title I did because while the mainstream media makes every effort to inform people of the biases and agendas of conservative groups, their investigation skills flag a little when a liberal group has a dog in the fight. True, in the Reuters story about the poll that many outlets picked up, they did point out that the poll was funded by WakeUpWalmart and even pointed out that WakeUpWalMart is really just a union front and not the "grass-roots effort" they claim to be, but they didn't point out that Zogby, the pollster who did the poll, had received tens of thousands of dollars to testify against Wal-mart in a number of cases. For those of you who don't follow polling, Zogby is a media darling, I think largely as a result his relatively accurate call in the 2000 presidential race. Though of course, he remained a media darling as a result of his "Kerry in a landslide" prediction before the 2004 race. While many members of the media go to sleep with that well-worn prediction under their pillows, you think it, and several HUGE errors in the 2002 and 04 elections would make people start to question his quality as a pollster.

The Times article does a fair job pointing out that a pollster can still be accurate even if they are on the take, but it should be incumbent upon the pollster to point out that they may have a perceived conflict. Also, an "objective" pollster might not let the viscously partisan union hacks that ordered the poll also report the results by writing the press release, but that is exactly what Zogby did.

"Most Americans" probably don't care, as evidenced by the success Wal-mart has had at the register these past few weeks. How ironic is it that in the press release the union boss talks about Wal-mart being in a "tailspin"...dizzy though I'm sure he is, the tailspin isn't Wal-mart's, it's the unions own declining membership (12.5% and falling). The imminent bankruptcy of Ford and GM should bring that number under 10% once the dust has settled. Mickey Kaus has an excellent analysis of what the unions have done to GM, how they scuttled the success of the one successful GM division (Saturn) because the union contract there was more efficient. Here's the key passage (search for "Spring Hill" on his blog to see the whole thing, no direct link is available):

Why didn't GM build on [Saturn's] success? Because the Saturn workers' very competence threatened the continued existence of other, less competent parts of General Motors--and there were more people working there than at Spring Hill. ... I suppose this tension--between productive and unproductive divisions--exists at every large organization, but it's surely exacerbated by the presence of a powerful union, especially a powerful small-d democratic union. The UAW, you could argue, was legally obligated to represent the interests of the majority of its members--and the majority worked in the unproductive parts of GM that Spring Hill threatened.

Unions today are essentially involved in one activity--leveling. Sure, they'd like it if everyone were leveled at a high productivity rate and a good economy, but since that's impossible, they'll take stagnation and bankruptcy just as well.

What the unions did to GM they would now like to do to Wal-mart (being that GM won't be around much longer). It's a simple economics game. Wal-mart makes a certain amount of money--let's call that the pie. The vast majority of the pie goes to buying the things Wal-mart sells, meaning that Wal-mart works on an extremely low margin of profit. So that's what they use to pay employees and build stores. Now the unions are setting up front organizations to force Wal-mart to organize so they can get part of the pie, via union dues. But the remaining pie is finite and rather small relative to Wal-mart's total size (that's why the prices are so low). If the unions and union bosses like Andy Stern get their pie slice, there is less for someone. There's not much fat at Wal-mart, as we all know, it's the most "ruthlessly" efficient company in America--so whose pie slice is ultimately given to the unions? Look at the unemployment lines, the gutted pensions, and the empty factories of GM for your answer.