The Brilliance of Labor
Admit it. Many of you think labor unions are dinosaurs, lumbering beasts with pea-sized brains stumbling along waiting for extinction in a world passing them by. God knows, union leaders have done stupid things at times, but what strikes me is the sustained innovation and intelligence by unions over the last decade or so, barely noticed by the media or even fellow progressive activists.
So on this Labor Day, this is my celebration not of the justice of the labor cause, but of the brilliance of those fighting and often winning against long odds in the modern economy.
What's Been Won: Just surviving in the fact of political and corporate assaults by a rightwing that wants to kill off labor is an underestimated victory. I remember in the early 90s when talk of the death of the labor movement started and many analysts confidently predicted that union workers would make up less than 5% of the workforce. If you look at this table, labor has seen some steady erosion in the percentage of works organized since the early 90s -- although even that stabilized a bit last year -- but the actual number of workers unionized has largely stabilized around 16 million members in the last decade.
With total annual budgets from dues of $5-6 billion per year and with hundreds of billions od dollars in union-connected pension and health funds, unions remain the only institution that combines more resources that pretty much all other progressive groups combined with a mass membership. Which is why they have faced bad laws, hostile courts, and anti-union political and corporate attacks-- and their holding onto to nearly 16 million members is a testament to the innovative tactics and strategies they have developed over the years.
And what were those strategies?
Card Check to Replace a Hostile NLRB: As federal labor law and the National Labor Relations Board largely abandoned protecting workers, leaading to over 20,000 workers being fired each year for trying to organize unions, labor leaders realized in the last decades that they needed to emphasize new ways to strengthen the freedom of workers to form unions without depending on the NLRB. The tool was pressuring companies to agree to have independent groups - church leaders or private arbitration groups - measure whether a majority of workers had requested having a union brought into the workplace. (See these resources at American Rights At Work for more on how card check works).
The results have been dramatic. In an early signature campaign reviving the fortunes of the union movement, janitors began organizing around the country, largely using card check to win. In Los Angeles, for example, a union local where once 5000 workers were organized collapsed down to just 1800 members by the mid-0-s. But with the support of community allies, they used dramatic street protests to pressure janitorial companies to recognize the union and raise wages and benefits in the industry. Now, over 25,000 building service workers are organized in California alone. Similarly, hotel unions in Las Vegas would use card check to expand a local to over 50,000 members in that city alone.
And in the high-tech world, traditional telephone-based unions used card check to make inroads into new industries like cell phones. The Communication Workers of America has organized over 39,000 cell phone workers at Cingular Wireless, many of them workers in the US South. After initial resistance, this campaign has even forged a partnership with SBC (now AT&T) that has helped workers and management pursue win-win gains in the workplace, rather than the hostility bred of constant union busting and outsourcing in so many industries.
Corporate Campaigns: Beyond traditional "street heat", unions have begun wielding economic resources they control, such as union pension funds, as part of the tools to pressure companies to agree to card check agreements. William Greider in this Nation article describes many of the tactics used by labor, from proxy fights to shareholder lawsuits, to put pressure on management, but one of my favorite descriptions of this work is by an anti-union consultant who explains to companies in this piece what they face. The author describes the combination of boycotts, pension actions and other publicity actions as a coordinated strategy that brilliantly turns former financial allies against corporate management:
These tactics are not meant to get banks or consumers or regulators to redefine their self-interest. Rather, they encourage these constituency groups to act selectively in their own self-interest. The campaign tries to create a business environment in which that self-interest actually promotes the goals of the unions and anti-corporate groups. Thus, the company’s essential supporters become de facto allies of its opponents. This is a very sophisticated organizing strategy.Signficantly, business recognizes the effectiveness and sophistication of current labor leaders often far more than many other progressives.
Mobilizing Customers: As part of such corporate campaigns, unions have long used simple consumer boycotts to pressure companies, but now they are becoming even more sophisticate in organizing consumers before a conflict to preemptively pressure companies before a conflict even begins. A brilliant recent example is the Informed Meetings Exchange, a project of UNITE-HERE where a broad range of academic, political and religious organizations have signed onto an organization that will advise them on which hotels to stay at for large organizational conferences-- the lifeblood of many hotels. By providing experise to help these groups get a better deal at conference hotels, the union will also be in a position to steer those groups away from hostile hotels and towards those less likely to disrupt a conference with a strike or lockout. As John Stephens, Executive Director of the American Studies Association and Board Chair of INMEX, stated:a>
"Subscribers will use INMEX to help them make more informed decisions about where and how they spend their highly coveted meetings and conventions dollars. With this type of transparency and information exchange, all of us can ensure that the dollars we spend have a positive impact on hotel workers lives and the communities they live in."
It's a nice summary of how progressives can work with labor to strengthen the whole movement.
Use of Local and State Politics: Getting little help from the federal government, unions have found ways to mobilize locally to support new union campaigns. The "living wage" campaign that demanded that private workers paid for with public money receive a decent wage is one of the most prominent examples of this kind of politics. More specifically, the campaign to organize the hundreds of thousands of home health care workers -- those paid by governments to care for the sick and disabled in their homes -- has been a key success for unions in recent years. This piece describes the successful campaign in California, where workers previously treated as "independent contractors" with no right to form a union were converted into employees of newly created public authorities and then unionized, most dramatically in Los Angeles in 1999 when 74,000 home care workers voted to form a local union, the largest union vote in decades, which has been accompanied by tens of thousands of other home care workers unionizing. Similarly, tens of thousands of child care workers have also unionized in recent years.
Organizing Globally: Part of the success of the union movement has been matching global outsourcing by the business community with global organizing of its own. This is a still a tough challenge, but unions are increasingly making inroads. Unions increasingly draw on help from overseas, as the chemical workers union did a few years ago in Alabama-- taking on Imerys, one of the largest global minerals companies in the heart of the anti-union South. Mobilizing help from the 20 million-strong International Chemical Energy, Mining and General Workers Unions (ICEM), the workers were able to pressure the company to recognize the union.
And instead of just bemoaning corporate outsourcing, unions are increasingly organizing the outsourcers themselves. For example, three large multinational firms -- Sodexho, Aramark and Compass -- subcontract work from other firms to do everything from food service to laundry work to janitorial services, employing 300,000 workers in the US and 1.1 million globally. Unions are forging global alliances with European and counterparts in other countries to demand global agreements with those companies. And they are succeeding with all three companies signing card check agreements to allow organizing of their employees.
Conclusion: These strategies by labor don't often get a lot of play in the mainstream media, but on this Labor Day, I thought it was a good time to celebrate the sophistication and persistence of US workers and their labor leaders in taking on the challenges of the new economy and actually winning where many people had already written the labor movement's obituary.
So Solidarity Forever everyone.
Comments (37)
Americans have always been hostile to Unions. But let's face it, without Unions what you get is corporate feudalism. And that ain't good for anyone, but a handful of CEO's.
September 4, 2006 6:27 AM | Reply | Permalink
Done.
Not so sure about the "passing them by" but your thesis appears unexceptionable.
"Corrupt" is the first pejorative that comes to mind for this person who paid his way through college mostly through union membership in construction that required considerable effort to obtain. "Xenophobic" is the second.
Undoubtedly unions have to battle against elitism and perverse ideology as well.
Thanks for your encouraging words. Every liberal should be willing to acknowledge the debt owed to unions. I fear few do. Always good to hear of some advances against the odds in a hostile environment.
Best, Terry
September 4, 2006 6:57 AM | Reply | Permalink
"The brilliance of labor.... [is] just surviving."
Some brilliance.
I know it's Labor Day and we're supposed to be happy about whatever it is we're supposed to be happy about. Just like on Memorial Day we should celebrate new painted schools in Iraq and how this is proof that we're winning the war.
But profits have been rising to record highs for years now and wages have been going south. Union membership (never that high to begin with) is half what it was 30 years ago.
But with a big enough microscope one can see lots of happy stories. Meanwhile the big picture is that workers' rights have fallen off the radar screen and that (with a few exceptions) our leading Dems seem much more interested in growing our military and keeping our flag from burning than providing health care, higher minimum wage and decent working conditions.
Unions used to be able to tap into a romantic Fight the Man narrative. No longer.
Our loss.
September 4, 2006 7:28 AM | Reply | Permalink
One of the greatest mistakes made by the nascent union movement in this country was to focus on specific kinds of workers and organize the union to the employee, rather than push through to representing all workers of all employees. Organizing globally is a way to have that chance again.
September 4, 2006 7:48 AM | Reply | Permalink
If we expand the definition of union to include guilds then some form of union has been around a long time, and the fortunes of guilds and unions rise and fall with the control they can exert over their services.
When the skills of riverboat pilots was essential to commerce, they set high fees and earned incomes better than airline pilots now. When auto manufacture depended on machining and welding skill those expert workers could make it worth their while.
The Mississsippi was dredged and the skill factor went way down. Robots came to GM, same result. Music saw this effect, also. When health care becomes automatic doctors will no longer be the career choice of doting mothers for their sons.
It has been pointed out to me that in Europe, unions were more directly involved in politics, not just endorsing candidates but pushing legislation effectively. This may be why work-week limits and other union goals were national policy instead of particular contracts. The efforts of government support labor, at least until now.
Unions have trouble transforming when their skill set is simply no longer needed, but national legislation can protect workers regardless of industry. Unless, of course, the national labor department re-defines workers as managers.
September 4, 2006 7:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
Let's not forget what corporations are: organized wealth. It's a bundle of privileges that government grants to shareholders to supposedly create some higher benefit to society.
Wage stagnation and rising inequality are not inevitable market outcomes; they're largely created by the mismatch of privilege between shareholders and employees.
Shareholders enjoy the special privilege of organizing into a corporation. Wage earners deserve a similar right to organize into a union.
It's funny how the supposedly peabrained dinosaurs understand this but the higher primates in the White House do not.
--
-- All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. (John Kenneth Galbraith) --
September 4, 2006 11:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
Capitalism is an economic system which by definition pits owners against workers and workers against owners. Defined - capitalism needs cheap labor and resources and impoverished workers need jobs. As long as capitalism is America's system of choice, this dynamic between owners and workers will continue. Under Republican rule the ownership class has the edge and the working class loses ground. In today's political climate it's not guaranteed that rule by Democrats would change the picture much. Labor's struggle has to come from the people.
September 4, 2006 11:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
Happy Labor Day.
Break over. Back to work.
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September 4, 2006 11:43 AM | Reply | Permalink
...without Unions what you get is corporate feudalism. And that ain't good for anyone, but a handful of CEO's.
Valdron, that's right. The unions - warts and all - were the only counterforce against unrestrained corporate power, which is pretty much what we have now. Most of the politicians, as well as the advisors and strategists in both parties, are virtually owned by business interests.
September 4, 2006 2:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
now, let's be really, really honest here... have labor unions become corporate bureaucracies of their own...? have they suffered from entrenched leadership anxious to perpetuate its perks and power...? have they sometimes picked battles simply for the sake of demonstrating they are still capable of looking out for workers' rights even if the case didn't have merit...? of COURSE, and the list goes on... and, reasonably and rationally, why WOULDN'T union organizations mirror the same organizational dysfunctions of the employers of the workers they are there to represent...? do unions need a different, more vital, more in-tune-with-today approach that tackles today's REAL worker issues... do we still need unions...? the answer is a resounding YES... but, in order to regain their power and their credibility, unions have to shake off the mossback union leaders and the self-serving power brokers, just like the corporations need to do, just like government needs to do, just like the republican and democratic parties need to do... (and, just in case there's any doubt here, i am a 110% supporter of unions and workers' rights, having championed them all of my life, sometimes even covertly as a member of management...)
And, yes, I DO take it personally
September 4, 2006 4:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
Your "analysis" is deeply flawed and shows just superficial political punditry is in America.
There are other issues, pretty much ignored by political pundits (and wannabes) that are much more influential and which swamp and overwhelm the factors you cite.
To wit:
1. The collusion of unions, churchs, government, media (& political pundits & wannabes) and business lobbies in the mass immigration scam to flood the labor market, and which has driven down wages and increased real unemployment and underemployment. It is called "The Law of Demand and Supply." Look it up sometime.
This factor is far more of a force in America that the tweaks you cite.
2. Also mass immigration has helped cause a re-focusing of political activism on culture and identity politics. Instead of a focus of leftist activism on "rich vs the rest of us," you and your ilk have helped have helped divert leftism into working class white males vs women, gays, metrosexuals, and racial minorities.
Hence the growth of the Fake-Left.
3. White-hating Identity Politics is an outgrowth of the above factors. Inertia has caused the fake-Left ideological religion to adopt as one of its core tenets the idea that working class white males are in some way responsible for all of the world's past evils. Somehow RICH PLUTOCRATS became synonymous with "white male."
And so guess what? White males are sick and tired of being the stand-in boogeyman for the evils of the rich. So they are PUSHED AWAY from leftism by the White-hating Fake Left. Now play real close attention here: if the Fake Left repels you, where do you turn? TO THE RIGHT! And since politics in America is essentially a religion, and since the canons of Rightist Political Religion disapprove of unionism, and since white people make up almost 70% of the electorate, and since blue collar white males were the largest voting bloc in recent elections, GUESS WHERE America is headed? AWAY FROM UNIONISM!
So now you understand some of the more important factors in why America is turning away from unions. And, mr newman, as a putative leftist (you are actually a fakeLeftist), you have helped kill unions in America. Congrats!
My documentary/book in progress is at http://www.leftwingmediamachine.blogspot.com
September 4, 2006 4:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
Here's the deal with me and my conflicted feelings to unions. My parents belong to a union, a state union. They have been screwed over many times by the unions when they have been unfairly treated by mangement. They have been lied to and ignored by the unions who are there to protect them because the union bosses are more concerned with bedding down with the management and keeping their own petty power than helping their workers.
A short word about cryofan's post: It so happens that most Rich Plutocrats in America are white. Hence the conflation. While I believe that a number of factors in geography influenced the development and culturues of European civilizations (10,000 years ago switch the African and European populations and you'd have largely the same history with European dominance) that is not particularly relevant today. America's Rich Plutocrats remain Rich Plutocrats who are 90% or more white.
September 4, 2006 6:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
We black-hearted Irish are proud to be against you white male English boogers but we love your females, especially the blondes.
English men who aren't racists are fine BTW.
Best, Terry
September 4, 2006 6:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
Tom Wright says:
I'd like to turn that last sentence around and have us consider that the Labor Movement needs to help putative "managers" see themselves as workers. The great mistake of the middle class has been allowing itself to be deceived into thinking collective bargaining is just for "them"...the guys in blue collars and not for "us"--the coat and tie set. I applaud success in organizing Janitors. I want to also applaud success in organizing IT professionals watching their jobs migrate to India. I want to applaud any group which realizes how powerless it really is in corporate America, and then does something about it through political action and through unionization--the two go hand in hand.
If I were to mark the greatest moment of shame in recent Labor Union history it would be the way organized labor let Reagan bust the air traffic controllers with no more than symbolic tut-tutting. We're still paying for that mistake with skies less safe, near collisions, over-worked and over-stressed air traffic controllers. Any hierarchy needs a balancing mechanism. Court decisions (and department of labor decisions) creating the myth of "managers" without any real power over their destinies in the economic sphere are assisted when those "managers" buy into the myth. So let's be proud of being workers on Labor day, regardless of the color of our collars or the prestige of our positions. I'm delighted to be a Union member. I'm delighted to be a College Professor. I see no conflict between wearing those two hats, and without my Union I'd be as vulnerable to arbitrary and capricious governance as any maintenance man or food service line worker...my brother and sister workers; my brother and sister unionists.
aMike
September 4, 2006 6:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
That is a very good point! When I was working as an engineer, we were told we were members of management - our jobs were management jobs. That was something to be proud of. But, when the mechanics we served and sometimes supervised on jobs went out on strike, we engineers had to go work the mechanic's jobs or lose our jobs. See, we were management. Then, those strikes and labor negotiations gradually built up the pay scales for the mechanics, until we "management employees" found we were often working for less pay than those we occasionally supervised, plus we got no pay for overtime, since, as management, we knew we were to work whatever hours it took to do the job (never, ever less than 40 hours a week, of course.)
Eventually we got ticked off - being slow learners, that eventuality took several years. So, we all signed the cards demanding a union representation election. The real management then expanded our work class to include many employees who worked and lived in low cost of living areas, where their pay was still top notch. That, of course, meant we would always lose the union representation election. That state of affairs remained intact until I retired, and presumably still remains. And, during that time there was always a hard core of engineers proud to be management employees.
Hoppy in Sacramento
September 4, 2006 8:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
You made a couple of fair points, but the fact remains, the "white male" (who apparently is fearful of everyone that isn't a white male,) is pretty dim to be going over to the Republicans merely because their "feelings are hurt."
It's one thing to stand up for who you are, another to vote against your own self interest.
I believe that is called cutting off your nose to spite your face.
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September 4, 2006 9:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
I am not blonde, but I was was winked and smiled at by an Irishman by the name of Larry Mullen Jr.
I was feeling pretty good about myself until a fair Irish lass straightened me out. She said, "Oh! Those Irish lads...a wink is like a handshake."
:)
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September 4, 2006 9:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yeah, historically unions did a lot. But here's a union in action today, and it's SEIU, the supposed union of the future.
In Chicago, we had a race for Cook County Board President-- the #2 power seat, commander of a vast patronage army. On the one side, John Stroger, machine hack, source of a million scandals about a county hospital bearing his name which he had explicit orders NOT to take him to if he got sick (which he did, finishing the race as a drooling stroke victim), forest preserves full of trash, summer and winter facilities which never opened for the season, no-show employees who spent their workdays at bars, a huge property tax increase because he couldn't find anything in county government to cut, etc. On the other side, Forrest Claypool, a smart reformer with a golden track record.
Given a butt-obvious choice between the sleazy old politics and modern, responsible government, guess who SEIU got out the vote for and pushed over the top. That's right, Drool Boy. (Incidentally, they had help from St. Barack of Obama, Profile in Courage, who sat the race out rather than cross the color line to endorse Claypool, his own former chief of his transition team. However, he did endorse a 26-year-old kid for State Treasurer because the kid's family gave him lots of money.)
Every time I get my property tax bill, I will think of SEIU, and spit on what the labor movement has become. And if St. Barack runs for president... sorry, I'm sitting that one out.
September 5, 2006 6:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
While I thoroughly agree we are in period of corporate excess, even when I was an employee, I was one of those that resisted the union representing professionals. The organizers made it very clear that advancement would be on seniority rather than performance & knowledge, which we found unacceptable.
Now, the situation is even more complex, with many engineers and other professionals being forced to be individual contractors rather than employees. I ask a serious question, a request for information without the slightest intent of being snarky. How can unions help with these two issues?
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
September 5, 2006 7:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
Howard, you raise a big issue and one I have seen little evidence that the unions are prepared to deal with.
Unions are perfectly adapted to the workplace of 1925-- what Henry Ford was talking about when he said "all I want is a pair of hands, why do I have to take a brain with them?" The assembly line workplace of interchangeable workers, protected from interchangeability by union seniority rules.
Needless to say, this was a major source of the mediocrity in the auto industry, to name one, that has ultimately made it so vulnerable to other countries' industries and in the end, doomed the labor movement. But for those of us in modern information-driven businesses, the idea of being forced to accept mediocrities around us and failing to receive the benefits of our efforts to advance the company or our part of it is simply intolerable. We don't want to be those hacks, we don't want to work for those hacks, we don't want to be in a sluggish, corporate culture defined by those hacks. We want challenge, we want a company that moves fast and reinvents itself constantly, we want to be part of Apple, not GM-- or the post office. Yet the union system is designed to produce hacks and fill the company with them.
I don't know what the answer is. All I know is the union movement, geared to lifetime employment on the assembly line, is wildly out of step with both how we work today and what we want to be.
September 5, 2006 7:27 AM | Reply | Permalink
So let's get this straight. Even though unions are still declining in importance, the fact that they haven't disappeared altogether is evidence of their "brilliance"? That's a pretty low bar to brilliance, wouldn't you say? By that standard, George W. Bush is "brilliant" seeing as he's survived as well, despite everything.
Sorry, but a slightly higher standard is required.
Perhaps the first step unions need to take is to recognize that what they do, which is to seek to restrict the freedom of corporate managers to decide how to treat their labor force, by definition makes those companies - on which those same workers depend for their livelihood - less competitive.
Unions were born at a time when foreign competition was less significant than it is today and technology was at a much lower level. In today's more competitive, faster changing economy, companies require flexibility to survive and unions are a drag on that flexibility. Sure lots of managers are greedy and wouldn't flinch at abusing labor if they could get away with it. But it should be obvious by now that that is no longer the norm.
So why not try a different approach? Why not try partnering with management to get the most value out of the work force? Why not take as a starting point the idea that management is innocent until proven guilty when it comes to how workers are treated? Why not seek to work WITH managment to apply progressive training and productivity ideas in the company and in exchange make sure labor participates in any upside the company receives as a result? Why not agitate for stricter performance goals for managers by making sure unions own stock in the companies?
The point is that the adversarial approach to management, which is the core of organized labor's ethos, is outdated in today's economy. The protection of workers interests lies in the prosperity of the organizations they work for. We cannot close off from foreign competition and we cannot undo technological change. Therefore we cannot undo the need for flexibility.
A strengthened union movement that was a force for competitiveness would be a great thing. It would also be a much stronger advocate for progressive goals that impact competitiveness, like universal health care. But as long as they are primarily focused on sticking it to management, they will continue to decline in relevance.
September 5, 2006 7:52 AM | Reply | Permalink
Any Irishman who would not wink at a pretty lass like yourself would have to be blind or one bloody blackguard who wouldn't deserve to be in any kind of union.
Best, Terry
September 5, 2006 7:53 AM | Reply | Permalink
My job is classical music and we have a collective bargaining agreement with the orchestra management. This only represents a floor, and our principal players, like concertmaster and principal flute, negotiate contracts separately. The concertmaster makes about three times what I do (and about the same as the CEO). There is a small seniority differential for rank and file.
No reason why an organized group has to be structured like the auto workers. What about guilds? Organized skilled workers is hardly a 20th century abberation.
As to hacks, they abound in management, too, so one can't blame unions for their presence. One wonders how the Japanese auto companies could deliver quality while coddling its workers so, at the same time we were delivering junk with fewer benefits for the workforce. That's not the workers' fault, it's management. Assuming management can claim any credit for successes it has to accept responsibility for poor quality, too.
September 5, 2006 8:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
I was going to post something similar but BradtheDad said it all much better. Unions have to give up their focus on job security-- a chimera in today's world-- and find ways to protect and support workers in a world in which people change jobs regularly-- and like it.
Oddly enough, though Hollywood is normally the last place I'd go looking for policy advice, it's the best example of a place where unions have adapted to the idea that no single job lasts forever and everyone's a freelancer. Now they just need to spread the idea to the rest of the world-- including government.
September 5, 2006 8:07 AM | Reply | Permalink
That's good information about contract negotiation. How large is your orchestra? I'm wondering how this could scale, for example, to the engineers at Boeing. I'm emphatically not saying that it couldn't, but just want to think about how.
Clearly, this gets into potential new forms. For certain areas, we do have professional certification and regulation, which certainly gets close to a guild. Things might get more complicated for evolving industries like IT. For example, I was a college dropout with some graduate courses, but, when I worked in the corporate research lab, my job description called for "earned doctorate or equivalent". Without really thinking it through, guilds might work for independent contractors. How this would work with contract negotiation and such is anyone's guess.
Japan is an interesting case, and some of the elements of their culture simply won't transfer here. Especially unlikely to transfer is the custom of senior executives taking responsibility, and doing things like retiring to a Buddhist monastery. Of course, the highest form of apology in Japan is not to your peers and subordinates, but to your ancestors -- and you must take positive steps to be with your ancestors.
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
September 5, 2006 8:14 AM | Reply | Permalink
All of us independent, professional types who earn our raises and benefits by our brilliant performance on the job, tend to forget that our pay, our benefits, and our working conditions are all what they are because the unions who represent other workers negotiated and sometime went on strike to gain those advances. We just tagged along.
The self made man really doesn't exist except in rare circumstances. We all owe what we have and get today to those who came before us, and to those who work for other companies and negotiate better pay and benefits. Surely in this day and age no one believes that any corporation is going to pay anybody any more than absolutely necessary to keep them on the job? And, what it takes is comparable pay, benefits and working conditions to those in competing corporations. The unions got us where we are today.
Hoppy in Sacramento
September 5, 2006 10:01 AM | Reply | Permalink
Nathan,
I agree with the core of what you say, but there are a few major issues that unions have shown they have nearly no ability to deal with at the moment, and it's holding them back dreadfully:
I recognize that unions have had a fight just staying relevant. But they still need to embrace a few basic changes to keep them relevant in today's economy. We need them, badly.
September 5, 2006 12:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
The thing is, though, I can believe all that and still make a perfectly rational case that I don't want today's unions anywhere near me. Gratitude to Samuel Gompers doesn't mean I want to subject myself to Hoffa Jr.; that I want to work at a company where, if I need some PERL scripting done for my shopping cart functionality, I have to hire 8 PERL programmers for a month to do two days' work, and if I'm not happy with their work, I go into an arbitration process.
September 5, 2006 2:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
The first day that the craft people were there, we took them to the break room, where we had personalized coffee mugs waiting. One of the team that worked with us was the shop steward. We started rolling out plans, and then looked at the CWA people, who appeared to be in total shock. They eventually got out that this was the first time, in a computing project, that they were treated as full parts of the team, and as professionals. They couldn't do enough for us; their wire distribution frames were eventually photographed for internal training.
After a while, I didn't have to go through dispatch; I could just call the data crew. I knew I had arrived when the shop steward answered, and I told him exactly what board had failed in a modem, from knowledge I wasn't supposed to have from documents they had carefully "discarded". He said it would be a couple of hours, but he had a courier who could bring the spare board if I wanted to replace it. Technically, that was such a huge violation of union rules that I don't think union leadership could have conceived it.
I've also known some people, at trade shows, to challenge IBEW to a cabling contest, and, if the exhibitors did it faster and better, the IBEW people would be welcome guests and get paid, but we really preferred to run our own cables. It was a split decision; some of their people were as fast as ours, but few of them.
I feel as if there's a kernel on which one could build, although, as you suggest, it's hard for organizers to think about. Getting human communication and respect would be a first start.
I don't, however, want to be in the middle of a project and told I can't do something because it's not in my job description, or someone in another union has to do it. I want to be judged on performance and advance on it, not by seniority. -- Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
September 5, 2006 4:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
Orchestra agreements typically cover about a hundred people, interestingly similar to the proposed largest prehistoric hunter-gatherer troop. One hundred is considered the largest number of people you can know well.
Our agreement, like state constitutions, does not contradict anything in more general union agreements, and the solo players' individual contracts ditto. For example, they do not give up overtime benefits for higher regular pay. instead they just get a higher scale, as well as a few special considerations like more time off.
There is justification for people doing identical jobs being paid identically, so in traditional assembly-line it makes sense. Same for section violins, in that the goal is precisely to be identical. It doesn't accomplish anything if I can play a tune faster than everyone else. I don't have any opportunities to exhibit personal talent (a major frustration, but it's the deal). In this there is a resemblance to assembly-line. If one worker can complete his task quicker it doesn't help since the line moves steadily.
Guilds and unions can take advantage when a technology or market is stable. Companies capitalize on stability by merging and such. When things are in flux it's tricky for both capital and labor. Fortunately for me, classical music is mostly stable as a market, with a few complications regarding recording and broadcast.
September 5, 2006 5:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
In the broad computing field, there are much wider differences. It's not uncommon to see the best programmers able to generate code at least ten times faster than average ones, and, if they also tend to write error-free or low-error code, the productivity difference can go up several orders of magnitude.
While I don't program as much these days, I produce designs a lot faster than most people -- and I also frequently have the responsibility for thinking up new products and getting them from concept to sales. Now, this doesn't mean I still don't get screwed by a corporation, but, at least some of the time, there are measurable financial benefits from which I logically should derive some income.
Value was much harder to define when I worked in Nortel's corporate research lab. While my team did hope that our radical design for a network device would actually go directly to salable product, but sadly didn't, some of the techniques and insights we had benefitted several regular product team. This is difficult to quantify in value.
Your metaphor of the size of an orchestra is giving me weird images of modified strings bows that shoot arrows at mammoths, or really big darts blown from tubas.
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
September 5, 2006 9:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
And if you could hear the gossip---
September 6, 2006 5:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thinking you refer to the hunter-gatherers, "Ug has a really big dart...wink wink nudge nudge know what I mean?"
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
September 6, 2006 6:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
Howard Says:
If I believed that management made rational, objective decisions in every instance (or even in the vast majority of them) I'd have few qualms about accepting this idea. However, I have deep suspicions that this is not the case. I read that Intel is reducing its work force by 10,000 individuals and closing "unprofitable" divisions in order to raise the profitability of the company. Do I believe that the ones to be released are the ones who would be rated the least productive, the least innovative, the least valuable generally? I'd like to think so, and perhaps in an ideal world that would be the case. But I suspect that those whose lives are going to be disrupted, and whose communities as well, are rather those who are least well networked, newest, and least socialized into the prevailing culture of the company.
The truly incompetent, those at the management level which didn't take the Celeron chip seriously, are going to be the ones doing the releasing; and if the reports I heard are accurate, one of the areas which is going to suffer budgetary cuts is research and development...the area most important for retaining a competitive edge.
Nor is seniority necessarily an issue. If there is an inviolable seniority system anywhere it is in management. We talk, after all, of "senior" and "junior" management. The person most responsible for the turnaround of Boeing jumps to Ford because he sees no chance of becoming the CEO of the company at which he's worked for nearly four decades. I put it forward as at least a possibility that greater worker governance rather than less is the key to increased productivity. Union members are perfectly willing to remove co-workers who don't pull their own weight.
During my first dozen years of experience with a union, several under-performing members were recommended for non-reappointment by the personnel committees responsible for evaluating performance and making recommendations. The key was peer review and process transparency.
That changed not because of the Union, but because one administrator decided to interfere. He told the personnel committee that he reserved for himself the right to refuse to replace the person in question and to reassign the salary line to another department. Had that happened the positions of the rest of the department would have become untenable, and their jobs and livelihoods put into jeopardy. Under those circumstances it might be expected that the incompetent member was protected; not for his sake but for those of the persons his termination would have imperiled. Insisting on "management prerogatives" undermined productivity. It didn't enhance it.
aMike
September 6, 2006 7:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
Speaking for myself, I would have never suspected you of being blonde, workerbee.
You say you were winked at by Larry Mullen, Jr.?
Larry Mullen, Jr., eh? Hmmmmmm.....isn't he the bass player from U2?
My goodness, workerbee--to have been noticed AND winked upon from a superstar rock star of his...shall we say, world travelling experience & stature--you must be a fetching lass indeed.
:-)
And I hope you take no offense...as none was intended.
September 9, 2006 6:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm looking forward to a clear explanation of how unions profited from undercutting their wage position with illegal immigrants.
September 9, 2006 7:11 AM | Reply | Permalink
English boogers, izit?
Well--perhaps no one else here minds your extremely off-putting remarks about the English, but I assure I do...
Good day, sir.
Btw, you appear to have me at a disadvantage...
Cheerio-
September 9, 2006 8:17 AM | Reply | Permalink