Have unions outlived their usefulness?

Great Debates
1

I applaud the union movement for its historical victories: greatly reducing child labour, raising the dignity of the worker, and acting as a counterbalance to the power of corporations. The easy answer to my question is: if the unions disappear so will those victories. I disagree; laws now offer those protections. The unions won the battle of making those laws political realities, so with those things behind us, do we still need unions? It seems to me unions are an anachronism, and thus have moved from their initial purposes, have grown too big, and should gracefully dissolve (shyeah, as if that’s gonna happen). Here are some observations that lead me to this:

I live near Windsor Ontario, which is right across the river from Detroit Michigan. Windsor bills itself as the Automotive Capital of Canada. Indeed GM, Ford, and Chrysler - The Big 3 - each have major manufacturing plants here, and each are unionized. There are a host of parts manufacturers and other operations that exist to support these plants. Almost everyone in the area can trace the existence of their job to the automotive sector.

My neighbour on one side of me works for Ford and on the other works for Chrysler. They each are wonderful people and good friends, who happen not to be highly educated, nor highly skilled, and whose job consists largely of tightening a screw when the bell rings, wait for the next screw to arrive, repeat. This is honest work, but they receive a bloated hourly wage, eight weeks of vacation, a handsome benefits plan, and a very generous retirement package. Even they admit they’re overpaid. Of course this level of compensation was achieved by a long series of negotiated contracts between the companies and the union. Each successive contract had to improve over the previous without giving anything up, else face the risk of strike. Each contract was a short-term win, but what is the lasting effect of the series? The Big 3 all cry financial woes, evidenced by GM’s junk status debt rating, plant closures and layoffs galore. How much of the blame lies with the unions?

Toyota (not unionized) has never laid off a full-time production worker. They have recently announced it will build a new plant in Woodstock, Ontario (2½ hours down the road from Windsor). The talk around town is “No way would Toyota come to Windsor - the union wouldn’t let’em.” If statements like this are true, it seems silly to fight against a move that would have bolstered the Windsor econony and provided more for those unionized parts manufacturers and other supporting operations - among other benefits. Toyota is expanding at a time when the Big 3 are licking their financial wounds. Analysts point to the fact that Toyota, without the burden of a union, is more agile as an organization and can build products with a lower price tag that still turn a higher profit than their union competitors saddled with their huge union expenses.

I am a software developer. The company I work for is not a manufacturing plant, but has as its largest clients the Big 3. Union shops prefer dealing with unionized companies, so as a strategic move (many years before I got here) the company encouraged the workers to organize. This was before the company owned a computer. When the first computer rolled into the building, the job of “computer programmer” was created, along with the question, “Should this be a union or non-union job?” There was only one or two programmers at the time so it was no big deal one way or the other - into the union they went. Today the IS department is 40 strong. When I was offered a job here I was told, “To work here as a developer you must join the union.” Without realizing the implications, I did. So here I am - a guy who doesn’t know a carburetor from a johnson rod - a card-carrying member of the Canadian Auto Workers union (CAW).

One insidious aspect of union life is that job security is not related to performance. There is absolutely no difference in the way a star performer is treated compared to a barely competent mirror-fogger. There is no incentive for the mirror-fogger to strive, and no incentive for the star performer to continue to excel. In fact, those that excel are subtly derided for making others look bad, for raising the standard too high (“If you do that the company will expect everyone to do that”). Further, if the mirror-fogger were fired, the union would fight to keep him/her employed. This is fertile breeding ground for apathy and mediocrity - and I confess it is affecting my performance too (I’m writing this while at work). Before coming here I owned a consulting company and could set my own hours, which usually were gruelling 14-hour days and I loved it.

This is bizarre: the bargaining unit I’m in is composed of software developers, customer service clerks, mail-room handlers, secretaries, accountants, janitors, and other divers professionals. That means one contact is shared by each of these job classifications. The rules that apply to janitors apply to accountants and to software developers and secretaries. When a raise is negotiated, everyone gets to the penny the same raise. Imagine what it’s like during negotiation time. I find myself spending way too much time parsing the niceties of the contract, deliberating with my “brothers and sisters” how something that makes sense for the IS department is good for them too (I could tell you stories!), and lamenting with a management that would like to be innovative but can’t because their hands are tied.

Now the typical culture of developing software entails the thrill of getting someting really good done as fast as possible - bend over backwards, swim in creativity, do what it takes, high stakes, high pressure - get’er done. This was certainly the culture I came from as I entered my new union shop. Such a culture demands a high degree of flexibility. Flexibility is not what being in a union is about. After five years amongst shouts of “That’s not in the contract!” “That’s not my job” “Hey, that’s a union job!” “How come they can do this but we can’t?” and the clock-watching-play-by-the-rules mentality, I find I’ve lost that edge of agility that brought such a rush and sense of satisfaction to my job. I now feel my job is little more than tighten the screw when the bell rings, wait for the next screw to arrive, repeat.

There is a billboard in town that proclaims in words six feet tall “Union Made is Better Made” or words to that effect. What logical argument could possilbly lead to this conclusion? I see no mechanism by which this is possible - rather the foregoing suggests the opposite.

Unions are loud activists, I suggest in part looking for “battles” to justify their existence - looking for the next child labour victory. They amass clout (read: money) by collecting dues from a multitude of members. They use this clout, ostensibly, to influence society to change such that its members benefit. This activism is not what I’m paying my union for. Further, activist policies formed nationally by the union trickle down to when they negotiate my contract - without really considering how such policies fit in my workplace.

To increase clout means to increase membership. I’m sure the CAW (for example) would say they’re trying to do that by influencing society to create an economy that will support the purchase of more cars, and hence require more auto workers, and thus increase its membership. Good luck. Much quicker is to extend it’s grasp beyond the automotive sector. The CAW also “represents” casino workers, newspapers, salt miners, furniture stores, and soon (if they get their way) Anglican priests. How can practices that work for auto workers be applied to Anglican priests?

The CAW locally has been pushing the workers at Wal-Mart to organize. In vote after vote the workers said “no.” Now, in my workplace, flyers are being put up urging everyone to boycott Wal-Mart - nasty inflammatory flyers full of patent misinformation calling the company “Mal-Wart” (it bugs me that I’m paying for these professionally produced flyers). So it’s “Join us so we can coerce others to join us. If you don’t join us, we’ll fight you - and unfairly.” Unions have become a force unto themselves, serving their own interests. If they do serve the interests of their worker-members it’s only by coincidence.

End of rant (deep-breath): what’s your opinion?

2

Two points, if I may:

What exactly is that “bloated hourly wage”? It would help immensely to determine if these auto worker are fat cats or just middle-class folks if we could put an actual number to it. What do you consider “bloated”: C$30K/year? C$50K/year?

Second, I would posit that unions are one of the reasons why Toyota is moving to Woodstock at all. Woodstock beat out several American towns for that plant, some of which were offering huge incentive packages, because Toyota felt that the lower training costs they would incur in Woodstock made Woodstock more competitive. Those lower training costs are the result of the social safety net in that part of Canada…mainly education and literacy…which is paid for out of tax dollars, which in turn come at least in part from those nice union salaries. If the unions hadn’t been there fighting for higher wages, then there wouldn’t have been as much of a tax base to provide education and literacy. That in turn would have made Woodstock less attractive to Toyota.

3

I used the word “bloated” on the basis that they each admit they’re overpaid. I honestly don’t know the dollar figure.

If you say “at least in part” then yes unions contributed to the chain of features that culminate in lower training costs. It’s quite a stretch though to credit unions with Canada’s level of education and literacy.

Further, it can be argued that at the same time those nice salaries are contributing to the public coffers, they’re also contributing to the higher cost of goods.

Finally, I believe there are unions in the other jurisdictions competing for the Toyota plant - so whatever training cost savings occur in Canada are more likely the result of other factors.

4

I can tell you that my own union (IATSE) is a very necessary thing. I have worked both non-union and union and I am much happier working with the backing of IATSE.

My line of work is very different from most people’s tho. My job is very demanding physically, yet also requires a great deal of technical knowledge about electricity, properties of light and color, and about a stunning array of lighting equipment from hundreds of different manufacturers. Without my union behind me, I would be lucky to make $12/hour. As it is, I make considerably more than that, with double time, short-turn-around pay (if we don’t get at least 8 hours off between shifts, we roll over into a premium rate), a pension fund, health insurance, etc. all covered by my union contract. Working conditions are spelled out along with job class descriptions. When I was on my own, I had to set all that with each employer. Since sometimes I have more than 20 people who pay me in a year, that can be tiresome. It is also difficult to enforce, on my own. All an employer has to do is brand me a “whiner” and I lose gigs from him and from anyone he might have recommended me to. With the union involved, the contractually agreed to terms are less likely to be broken (by either party).

Make no mistake about it: laws can be changed. If all unions were to disappear tomorrow, by next week someone would have a proposal on the table to lower the minimum wage. After that would come the 40 hour work week. We’ve all seen the recent decision about pension funds… do you think employers would provide this on their own? The employer who will do the right thing on his own is extremely rare, and is always subject to change at his whim. Never forget that your employer’s goals are different from your own.

A word about pay rates and their place in making a business profitable or un-profitable: A company could employ 120 workers turning screws for $50,000/year for the $6,000,000 bonus given to one exec. It isn’t the line worker, or the welfare mother, or any of the other “little” people who’s extravagences bring down economies. Unions seek parity in how wealth is distributed.

As for the propaganda… well, if my union starts pushing an issue I don’t like, I call someone and tell them. If it persists, I can bring it up at a membership meeting and try to stop it. If that doesn’t work, I can run for office every 3 years and try and change it then. A union is a democratic institution, and will yield to the will of the people, if the people have sufficient will.

That’s all for now. Hope I provided some insight and wasn’t just rambling. :smiley:

5

I don’t view unions any differently then I view corporations. Employees can often find themselves getting the short end of the stick so it makes sense for them to organize in order to have a bit more leverage. I think unions and corporations are great organizations but they’re both subject to human abuse. I don’t automatically side with unions in disupute but I suspect they still do some good.

Marc

6

Do you think that laws are written in stone, inviolate for all time? Living people can and will take whatever steps they think they can get away with, and it is only in the presence of a competing effort from the other direction that workers’ viewpoints will be heard and their rights and gains retained. To assume that just because they now have them they will keep them for all time is false, and lazy, and ultimately dangerous 9if you’re a worker).

7

I think it’s very true that there are serious structural problems with the modern union setup. Perhaps the most glaring is the “cross-industry” membership issue—why should a software programmer, as you point out (or for that matter a university teaching assistant), be part of an autoworkers’ union?

This is actually a very timely thread, because the major union federations have been having some stormy meetings over the past several months, and it looks as though there are some drastic changes on the way. The Nation and the American Prospect have both run a few articles recently on these developments, and we should hear more about them during and after the big labor federation convention later this month.

However, I think that anyone who generalizes that unions as a whole have somehow become obsolete or irrelevant, because they happen to know some overpaid and/or underworked people in a few unionized professions, is seeing only a small part of the picture. Genuine exploitation of workers like service/hospitality, textile, and foodpacking employees is still a serious problem, and unions are desperately needed to organize those sectors and put a brake on the abuses (as some are already starting to do).

And anyone who assumes that “laws now offer those protections” is way too complacent for their own good. At least in the US, enforcement of labor law by the Labor Relations Board has steadily been weakening for years, to the point where even flatly illegal management maneuvers, like firing workers who try to organize their workplaces, have become routine.

As Marc points out, just because a certain type of organization is sometimes inefficient and bloated doesn’t necessarily mean that the whole concept has become “an anachronism” and needs to go away. Og knows that the structure of the modern corporation has produced plenty of inefficient, wasteful companies with obscenely overpaid executives, but we don’t conclude that therefore corporations per se are pointless and obsolete and we should just get rid of them.

8

Regarding labor unions, attributed to philosopher / longshoreman Eric Hoffer…

9

My own experience with unionized workers has been negative. I was working on a project and it was on a deadline. I did overtime to get it to the printers so it could be produced in time. I went to the UNIONIZED printer for the press check. In the midst of trying to get the color right, a whistle went off and he stopped working. I had to wait around until breaktime was over before he came back to finish his job.

That was the last time I ever worked with a unionized printer.

10

One other aspect that should be considered: Until we’re able to successfully export unions to China and India, I don’t see how we can maintain our competitiveness with other countries. I’m not an economist, so I may just be ignorant of how we can continue to do this. Please educate me.

11

Of course not, they’re good in many recipes, fried up in rings, chopped up for pizza or hot dogs, big slices on a burger, and lots of stuff. Plenty useful as far as I can see :smiley:

12

Hey you!: Until we’re able to successfully export unions to China and India, I don’t see how we can maintain our competitiveness with other countries. I’m not an economist, so I may just be ignorant of how we can continue to do this. Please educate me.

Okay. First of all, you need to know that India, at least, already has unions. (So does China, but they’re strictly controlled by the Chinese government and very subservient to management.) The Indian workforce, admittedly, is probably less organized even than the American one (US union membership in the private sector is, I believe, under 10% of the total workforce), although that might not be true if you exclude agricultural workers. Anyway, trade unionism, though late-blooming, is definitely quite active there (as anybody who’s lost a workday in India because of an unexpected “bandh” or strike will tend to agree).

Maintaining competitiveness with lower-paid workforces is partly, as you suggest, a question of encouraging the development of international parity in workers’ rights. But it can also be done by taking advantage of higher-paid and higher-skilled workers to produce higher-quality, more prestigious, or better-marketed products. That’s part of why Europe can still export manufactured goods even though they’re much more unionized than their American competitors.

(And I have to say that your alleged Eric Hoffer quote has got to be about the dumbest analogy I ever heard. Yeah sure, “a gorgeous body” and “a sparkling personality” are appropriate metaphors for how desperate Depression-era workers were “seduced” into supporting unions. Right.)

(And somebody can nonviolently drag cosmosdan out and shoot him—I’ll swear out the warrant later.)

13

I work in the computer game industry. We’re not unionized.

We work tons of crunch time- unpaid overtime, and lots of it. We can be fired at any time, and often are- usually with not even a day’s notice. Days off are fairly unheard of. We’re often promised bonuses and royalties at the beginning of the project, but never actually see 'em at the end.

A union might be a good thing for us… but trying to actually get one going is hard, when you know that there are tons of wannabe-developers out there looking for a shot at getting into the fun and excitement of the game industry.

14

Well written OP, NC.

I’ve been on both sides of the union as a forklift operator for a Price Club for 11 years (before the Costco merge) and now I currently am a business owner for the last 13. I realize that unions do some good for employee representation but at the same time, there trying to save some crackhead’s job who is a danger to himself and his fellow workers by looking for any technicality that management did or didn’t do in order to terminate his employment. It’s a mixed bag of goofiness from my point of view.

When I started my business though, I did take my copy of our union contract and used some of the better rules to develop our employee policies and used a hybrid merit raise structure with some union philosophies to back it up. PTO accruals, personal leaves, and other policies were derived from the union booklet. In the 13 years that I’ve been the employer, only 2 people out of 350 employees over the years have ever muttered, “Let’s start a union!” Even with this type of employee policy in place, I’ve still retained the right to be the Judge, Jury, and Executioner when it’s needed without the hassle from the union.

Also, I would not trust union bosses just like I wouldn’t trust any other large company coporate officer…they’re basically the same animal, except one has spots and the other has stripes.

15

Don’t get me started on the damn union. My job forced me to join the union if I was going to be hired by them. I hated it when the union would take money out of my check especially when I knew I would never use their services. So, add me to the list saying the union should be abolished.

16

It is really important to remember how many different sorts of unions there are, and the different functions they serve.
I’m part of the teaching assistants’ union at UW - the union’s main function is negotiating contracts and creation and support for formal procedures (grievances, setting workload limits).
Through the work of the union and graduate students, we have earned:

  • tuition remission for all TA’s and PA’s with a 33% time or more appointment (For me, in the humanities, one class, 4 hrs/ week teaching +prep, grading = 36%. For a business TA, three hours/ week discussion section =50%). Before the tuition remission, one student in my department brought home about $100/ month for teaching.
  • health insurance + zero premium: this is a big one, and a major reason we have been without a contract for two years. The state wants us to pay for our premiums, but does not want to make those premiums proportional or commesurate with salary/ raises. At this point, it is better for me to be working under an extension of the old contract (as is the case now), than paying health insurance premiums that can be raised exponentially per the whims of the state.
  • Workload. Helped to establish guidelines on working hours…we still work insane hours for little money, but it’s better than it was.

TA’s and PA’s exist in limbo: we work for the university, but get paid by the state (most of us - some of the wealthy departments pay their own students). So on one side, we get “State employees! Lazy bunch of bureaucratic fat cats who earn huge salaries doing nothing!” and “If you get a raise, tuition will increase!”; both are false - the average TA income is $10k/ year, and tution increases have nothing to do with our salaries: at the same time that UW tuition has increased almost 40% (and that’s a whole 'nother rant), we have received no raise at all, not even cost of living.

This is the only union I’ve ever been involved with, and I can’t speak to the sorts of abuses mentioned in the OP…however, in all seriousness, to those that think unions are pointless, do you really think a group of 3000 unorganized graduate students would have a snowball’s chance in hell of earning raises/ benefits from the state without some form of unionization?

17

This is absolutely a bigoted, unfounded reaction. One anecdote, one experience, and you have written off a class of printers… and even extended this one experience to apply to all union workers. Do you do this with other types of people as well?

If you have a bad experience with the first Christian you meet, do you then feel that ALL Christians (or immigrants, or lawyers, etc., etc.) are the same way?

Please, learn to refrain from unwarranted generalizations.

Besides, why in the world should YOUR emergency (or failure to meet a deadline) become disruptive of this printer’s day? He didn’t screw up and get the stuff to the printer late, after all.

18

What you said.

I worked IATSE calls for several years to help pay tuition bills. I loved the work, and the union was a lifesaver. My local might have been an exception, but they went to bat for me repeatedly. I always knew that in a business with a long tradition of screwing over the curtain monkeys I would get a fair shake.

:shrug:

19

And this is why we have unions… and governments… and lawyers and judges and police… because we cannot trust each other to do what is right.

I applaud your track record, Yeticus, and give you more than faint praise for realizing that treating your workers well will have a more beneficial effect on your business than treating them as chattel. But for every one person like yourself, I can show you hundreds who would act otherwise.

I said it before, I’ll say it again: Never forget that your employer’s goals are different from your own.

A union is one way to make sure that worker’s are adequately compensated for helping a business achieve it’s goals.

20

I don’t think that promoting based on senority (union style) means that the best person doesn’t get the job. In my limited union experience the most senior worker got the chance to do the job for a probationary period and if they didn’t perform as required, they went back to their old job. On the other hand in non union jobs I’ve seen plenty of people promoted over more qualified people because they were hunting buddies with the boss or the owners nephew or similar reasons. The choice isn’t always between seniority and merit.