I have been in renovation in New York City since the 1980s. My former partner has gone on to a much larger contractor. I am prepares to say that a lot of contruction unions are made up of thugs. This doesn't make all unions or even most unions corrupt but it does not suggest sainthood either.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

Some Teamster locals and New York construction unions have some of the worst histories in this regard-- but they are not representative even of most unions in New York, much less union locals across the country.  I'd also note that the thuggish of the construction industry did not start or end just with the unions-- most corrupt or thuggish unions reflect industries where ownership is pretty damn thuggish and corrupt as well.  If you think of corrupt unions when you watch the Sopranos, note that it's also the mob that owns the companies as well. 

There are 15 million union members and unions collectively are neither saints nor thugs-- but a diverse set of organizations representing a diverse set of people.  And most of them are average Americans fighting to feed their families and improve our society as best they can-- with unions a key institution for helping them achieve that goal.

And your evidence is?  Show me the indictments that show serious violence or corruption when divided by the 15 million people belonging to unions.  Show any evidence that the teachers, nurses, janitors, autoworkers, telephone workers, government workers and other unions that make up the overwhelming majority of union membership are HAVE ANY serious corruption issues or "thuggish" history. 

Your paragraphs are representative of anti-union statements.  No facts, no links, no evidence, just propaganda statements with no evidence to back it up.

As for unions being a cartel, it's pretty strange cartel that makes up only a minority of workers in many industries.  If unions are so unstable, why have they existed throughout Western Europe.  Are you arguing that they are all thugs there as well-- inherently?  Do you have additional evidence to add to your other non-evidence that unions in Europe are also thuggish, since as you argue unions inherently must be in order to exist?

I like to think of the days of mob infiltration of the unions here are past us, just as I like to hope that unions have a greater role in progressive politics than when, as a kid, I associated construction workers with beating up war protestors.

You must not have attended any IWW meetings. They were great for radicalizing the left leaning. 

In my youth I remember two organizations that organized on the left before other, more campus oriented anti-ware organizations took up the cause: the IWW and the NAACP. 

Is Nathan Newman defending mob-run unions? Maybe. Sure sounds like it. But he makes a good point, too. Does corruption in unions rank so high as to invalidate the concept of unionism? Some of you think it's so obvious - yet all you're doing is repeating stuff that "everybody knows" that may be urban myths. "Everybody" knows Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet - except he didn't. Nathan's done some research here, bringing out some new data. The chortlers need to do the same.

The other point worth making is that much union corruption is favored by, in fact, caused by, management - the kind where corrupt individuals in charge of unions take kickbacks from companies to sell out their members. You never hear about these types of corruption but they exist - and they show another side of the corruption issue that isn't heard about as often - corruption of the union BY management.

Cartels are inherently unstable without the threat of punishment for going against the cartel. Any Monopoly that does not have a mechanism to threaten competitors or barriers to entry will suffer instability. That is one reason why Unions are declining in the private sector and increasing in the Public sector. They do not need to personally threaten you with physical violence, they allow the government to do it by proxy. If you compete with a public monopoly, you are breaking the law, your personal property will be forfeited and if you refuse, you will be physically apprehended and placed in a cage.

No need for free lance thugs to threaten you, have Big government do it for you.

"...While unions are declining in the private sector, they are expanding among government employees. Government agencies are usually monopolies, so competition is no threat to their jobs.

Taxpayers get hit with the high cost of these monopolies. There is no such thing as something for nothing.

Teachers' unions fight desperately and ruthlessly against vouchers, because they must maintain a monopoly of school children under the compulsory attendance laws. Their members stand to lose jobs if forced to compete with private schools.

Monopoly is the key to unionized teachers' job security -- at the expense of children's education as well as the taxpayers' money...."

If there is one reason for less corruption and Thuggery in Unions, it is because Big Government is doing the inimidation for them.

You like the Socialism of Europe? Their economies are under performing and depending on which nanny state you are referring here, they are a doomed culture. If you look at the typical Socialist Scandanavian countries, they sit on a never ending supply of North sea oil, Tourist dollars, an infrastructure that we destroyed and then rebuilt better than new(for free), they live under the protection of the American defense budget which they don't need to pay for, and have GDP of 1%, two months of vacation, and the right to sleep at work. You may want to model your world on a dying culture of sloth and dependence, but I don't.

In the name of Freedom, why don't you focus all your attentions on only one of the 50 states and set up a single state as a European Unionized Socialized Nanny state. Pick the poorest state, just for effect. When your state outperforms the other 49, we will either rush in to join you or imitate you. But that would be competition. That would call for freedom of choice, which you oppose.

The lesson of the 20th Century is that the Socialism of Europe initiated a bloodbath of hundreds of millions of deaths. The forces of freedom beat them back and intends to keep them out of power.

Live and let live. You want socialism, good for you. I hope you find it. I want freedom, leave me alone.

"Communism only works in heaven, where they don’t need it, and hell, where they’ve already got it." ---Ronald W. Reagan

Here's the catch-22 with union critics -- if you say that most union members are nurses, teachers, and other folks who are obviously not mafia, you are told you are ignoring the problem.

So I was emphasizing that even when you look at the most notoriously corrupt example of union history, the economic costs to workers was not as high as the stereotype claims. I am and have been quite critical of the Hoffa and successor history, but that's from an internal labor critique of what the union movement most needed to be strong over time.

As for unions reaching out, they do all the time. They are part of most coalitions out there and fund a range of groups working on everything from health care to clean energy campaigns.

I have seen corruption first hand. But the corruption I've seen first hand was the type where the union was corrupted by management to sell out the rank and file.

You don't hear so much about that kind of corruption. The union leaders who do it are not ostracized. They make good salaries. They live in the burbs. They may be tied in with the mob -- or not. But management doesn't complain about this type of real day-to-day corruption that does exist and that they partake in.

But the idea that all unions use criminal violence to beat concessions out of a virtuous management is an absurd distortion of reality.

"The economic costs to workers was not as high as the stereotype claims." Oh, I understand, and unions were good for workers then and now, so a good point to make indeed. On the other hand, I'd have said the stereotype was that bosses controlled things, as you argue well against in the other post, not so much that a matter of how workers fared. The only anti-union argument you hear much of that claims to focus on the worker's self-interest is the one that, oh, dear, if anyone earns more than a pittance, no one will have a job.

Anyhow, I just mean that the less we make excuses for Hoffa's time the better. Just as we wouldn't say that union "bosses" aren't so bad, when there you're right to attack the "frame."

John 

http://www.haberarts.com/

"organized crime"

Just what the hell do you think Enron was? That's ORGANIZED CRIME. What do you think Martha Stewart was doing, baking cookies or indulging in ORGANIZED CRIME. When industry after industry writes it's own legislation and then gets a rubber stamp from a bribed Congress and President - that's ORGANIZED CRIME.

Sorry itsbenj, you been watching to many b-movies. If you want to see ORGANIZED CRIME at work, step out into the light and watch how banking, credit, insurance, pension funds, and stock brokers really work.

Well, two union Presidents that I knew personally ended up in Federal penitentiaries, so I know a little about this subject (and I have a wonderfully funny Central States anecdote that I can't put up here (but would share privately)).

All I can say is that when a ranking union official begins hankering to play golf at private country clubs, that is NOT a good sign.

Martha Stewart in organized crime? I thought it was just insider trading.

I agree some Unions have been associated with thugs, but sometimes you have to fight fire with fire.

Without our forefathers pressing the issues of 8 hour workdays, contributing to worker safety, child labor laws, etc. The Capitalist’s of that day wouldn’t, no; didn’t, care less about the working class.

If you or one of your children, lost an arm in a machine, tough, was their attitude. If you complained you were Blackballed, or neutralized.

Likewise today if the working class doesn’t get it’s collective A** in gear we’ll have nothing but a Capitalist Class that longs for the good ol’ days. Profits; trumping worker concerns,

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymaker_Square_Riot

On May 1, 1886, 340,000 went on a nation wide strike in urge for an eight hour work day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pullman_strike

The Pullman Strike occurred when 4,000 Pullman Palace Car Company workers reacted to a 28% wage cut. Some workers did find themselves locked into a kind of "debt slavery" (one form of truck system), owing more than they earned to the company stores and to the independent sister company that owned and operated the town of Pullman. Money owed was automatically deducted from workers' paychecks, and a worker ..... might never see his earnings at all. During the major economic downturn of the early 1890s, the Pullman Palace Car Company cut wages, but, inexplicably, the corporation that operated the town of Pullman didn't decrease rents. Discontented workers joined the American Railway Union (ARU), 

The strike was broken up by United States Marshals and some 2,000 United States Army troops, commanded by Nelson Miles, sent in by President Grover Cleveland on the premise that the strike interfered with the delivery of U.S. Mail. During the course of the strike, 13 strikers were killed and 57 were wounded.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truck_system

In the developed world, most truck systems died out in the early 20th century, as government grew and workers and trade unions became better organized and more powerful. In some countries, truck systems have been formally outlawed under a Truck Act.

One kind of truck system was immortalized in the chorus of the song "Sixteen Tons", written by Merle Travis in 1947: You load sixteen tons, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt. Saint Peter, don't you call me, 'cause I can't go; I owe my soul to the company store.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arizona_Copper_Mine_Strike

The Arizona Copper Mine Strike was a strike called in 1983 by union copper miners against the Phelps Dodge Corporation in Morenci, Ajo, Clifton, and Douglas, Arizona. The bitter strike lasted over a year and only ended when the company hired replacement workers who voted to end union representation.

Jonathan Rosenblum. "Union Busting: How Arizona's 'CIA' Helped Phelps Dodge Destroy The Unions."

 http://www.tucsonweekly.com/tw/06-29-95/curr4.htm

Fighting for our rights, isn’t for the weak, and some of the people, who work for a common goal, aren’t all saints.

Howard raises some very interesting questions, and also makes some quite interesting comparisons.  Just for the sake of argument, it might be interesting to spend just a minute thinking about ways in which the medical profession is "unionized" without ever using terms remotely related to unions.  Let me give a few comparisons, and please excuse me for not developing them as fully as I could.  Some of the things unions are either credited or blamed (depending on one's point of view) with doing include:

• Limiting or restricting entrance into the union, creating scarcity of services and thereby raising wages.
• Can it be argued that there is a similar reason why the number of medical practitioners has not risen proportionately to the rise of the population in general, and that the creation of new medical schools and teaching hospitals has not kept pace with the growth in population?  The Boston Globe has a most interesting story on this.  Certainly the fact that Harvard is raising salaries across the board for teaching physicians sounds like the result of some informal collective bargaining.
• Exercise undue political influence on policy makers in Washington with lobbying efforts which augment the good of the few at the expense of the many.
• The A.M.A. is lobbying fiercely to amend the Medicare bill to raise Medicare payments.  The A.M.A. may be more like a guild than a union, but I'm not sure the political behavior is all that different.
• Argue for the right to police themselves free from outside interference. 
• The Medical Profession defends its right to police itself in terms of standards of medical practice.  Medical Boards of Examiners are largely composed of Medical Practitioners.  The impetus for the National Board of Medical Examiners was "...the need for a voluntary, (my emphasis) nationwide examination that medical licensing authorities could accept as the standard by which to judge candidates for medical licensure. Since that time, it has continued without interruption to provide high quality examinations for this purpose and has become a model and a resource of international stature in testing methodologies and evaluation in medicine."
• Questions of Medical Errors pit the guild of doctors against the guild of lawyers (another "closed shop").  Doctors, of course, prefer to keep decisions of proper practice in their own hands.  Who blames them?
• Unions argue for the right to set, or at least negotiate working conditions. 
• So do doctors' organizations.

Let me quickly say I'm not arguing against practitioners in the medical professions from exercising these rights.  What I'm suggesting that any skilled professional (and in that sphere, I include anyone from an atomic scientist to a master carpenter, to a mason, to a computer programmer) might prefer to have some control over

• who gets to practice that skill, and with what qualifications
• who gets to judge the quality of the product when the quality is called into doubt
• who determines what working conditions are safe or unsafe
• who determines liability and continued ability to practice the profession.

The learned professions (architects, engineers, planners, health care professionals) generally get these rights through credentialing and licensure.  I think this is a good thing.  At their best, unions provide the same kinds of rights, protections, and control. 

aMike

Rick,

Yes, I see that argument. Though I think you're being too simple by calling people "blind." There's really no doubt that some of them, at least, could negotiate better pay for themselves if they're outside of the union scheme.

Admittedly, they take on more risk in doing so. They know that. Maybe you're right and what they want isn't best for them in the long run. I don't know. What they resent is having that decision made for them.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

Thanks!

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

Just one thought -- if you've been pushed into contract work and don't have benefits, some sort of freelancers union might be able to save you money with a health insurance pool. I don't know that for a fact though, because I've never tried it.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

Hello Howard, You brought up a good question "would a unionized Enron have had the same problems, or would unions not have been in a position to see the financial corruption?"

I was working in Arizona at the time of this Copper Strike. It was getting pretty ugly. Guard troops called up, police, DPS.

Bruce Babbit was (D)Governor. The Unions wanted the Governors help in order to review the books, of Phelps Dodge, to show that Phelps Dodge was playing hardball, and really wanted to break the Unions by offering a LOW wage package. Knowing full well that they were scre**** the workers.

Phelps Dodge in Arizona is not a Saintly Corporation and is rather vicious and predatory to workers and the environment. The workers fought to open the books, but P.Dodge refused.

Bruce Babbit did nothing, to help the workers. Had the books been opened, it might have shed light on the motivation of greed, and exploitation.

I think the workers of Enron, if they had Union Representation, would have discovered that the funding for the Health and Welfare programs, that are the most contentious bargaining in negotiations, would have thrown red flags down. The Unions would have scrutinized the security of the funding for these programs. Maybe?  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arizona_Copper_Mine_Strike

I agree with you, some oganizations will find it difficult to organize.

I think the best that could be achieved is at the blue collar level.

If we eventually could contol the flow of undocumented workers, skewing the supply and demand side of the equation for/against labor.

If the carpenter and the cement finisher increase their wages. (The Trades) because of the ability to negotiate wage increases.

This would be the equivalent of the application "that a rising tide raises all ships."

The professional or white collar worker, who finds that his plumber, painter or gardener, demands more money, then the white collar worker makes his demands known to his employer, that the current wage package is insufficient.

Forcing a reaction by the white collars employer, the ability to retain, or interest employment at a particular firm.

In effect for every action their is a reaction.

The teaching of "What you did to the least of these my brothers, you did to me"
Returns, as what you did to the lowest levels of worker rights, benefits me/all, also.

Except, we know that middle class America benefited, expanded with The Union Label.

When Unions were strong, and it's members understood the stakes, of buying the Union Label, or Made in America, Label. Americans fought off cheap imports eliminating good paying jobs at home.

I never understood why the Union members supported Reagan and his trickle down, mislead.

Why Union membership,or for that matter, Non Union, failed to appreciate, that collectively we were stronger together, a Political force to be reckoned with. Political candidates, coming to seek Labors blessings.

Now quite the opposite, Candidates seeking BIG business interests, blessings.

Walmart, pretending to care, for the least fortunate, lowering their prices, so average Americans can afford to buy the essential goods. In reality, it fails to deliver anything, but profits to the Corporation, who in turn uses it's political clout to sway Congress for it's OWN class interests.

Americans can't get decent wages, can't get affordable healthcare. But by God we can buy cheap goods. (sarcasm)

This was the PRIZE, our Union forefathers fought for, EMPOWERMENT, to empower the American worker with collective strength, Political power, clout, a United Voice, a Union.

It should be evident that when you place labor Union (lift up)despite it's shortcomings and contrast it with trickle down.

The American worker, has lost it's voice, it's strength, it's concerns are ignored.

Capitalism has had sufficient time to prove, it's claims of being better than Unions, We see it's produce. Profits, No solutions, except what will make more PROFIT

For those who advocate trickle down, I don't think they realize, they'll not benefit, in the long run.

** Maybe you remember the quote or who wrote it? It's when they came for a particular group, he did nothing, and then the enemy, came for another group and he still did nothing. and now they're coming for him, and no one is around to defend him.

The Capitalists have defeated the Union Movement, it's only a matter of time, that all of the working class, including white collar,(H1B) will pray for the crumbs that fall from table set for Capital. Unless together we buy the Union label, We buy Made in America, goods. But what the h--- thats an old mantra isn't it.
"You reap what you sow"

I remember a trip to Old Town Williamsburg, listening to the portrayal of Patrick Henry, it was so moving, it changed my perspective, of the Revolutionary struggle.

On stage with passion, Patrick Henry explained how the Crown was destroying America by importing 3rd rate goods, destroying American Labor. Squeezing Boston into submission, after the Tea incident. Patrick Henry realizing that New York could be next.

American workers better wake up!

See my post today on corporate corruption and tax disclosure.

The quote is usually attributed to Martin Niemoller. Wikipedia has a good article on the variants on the quote, of which there are many. Here's the one they consider reasonably authoritative:

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]