Matthew Lau: The NDP wants lower grocery prices but higher wages for grocery workers. How does that work?

financialpost.com:

The largest strike in the history of Canada’s largest private-sector union, Unifor, is currently underway, with 3,700 workers shutting down 27 Metro grocery stores in the Greater Toronto Area by refusing to work. The strike is supported by NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, who in the same breath in which he rails against high prices at grocery stores demands grocery stores pay significantly higher prices for the labour that allows them to operate. It is not a political position calculated to demonstrate financial literacy, and is clear evidence the NDP cares nothing about actual food affordability: they just hate businesses earning profits.

Unifor and NDP statements in favour of striking workers are notable for the absence of sound economic reasoning to justify unionized workers’ demands. Since wages should match workers’ productive output, higher productivity would be a good justification for increasing wages, but no one has demonstrated that unionized grocery store workers are much more productive than previously. Nor has Unifor or the NDP shown Metro workers are paid less than they are worth by offering evidence of workers being paid more by other companies to do the same work.

In fact, that Metro workers are unionized is well nigh conclusive evidence they are currently overpaid. Without exception, unions are monopolistic institutions that try to raise wages not by increasing workers’ value (in fact, the rules they impose often reduce worker productivity) but by limiting the labour supply and relying on government privileges such as unbalanced labour relations laws, preferential treatment under, or exclusive access to. government contracts, and special subsidies or other forms of government protection. The 73.5 per cent