Are Unions Obsolete?

There seems to be in the Anglo-sphere, a dearth of Unions which are effective, why is this so? Is the legacy of the ‘Winter of Discontent’ and the ways in which they are perceived to stifle productivity still in the minds of businesses and workers alike?

In my experience, I’ve come across a generation of workers who have never experienced Unions in the sense of a strike for better pay or working conditions, and are completely apathetic to the idea.

Can we ever get back to a point where effective organised labour isn’t an exception to the rule?

For me, it seems some major companies try to co-opt workers organising by having their own work forums to voice problems or ideas, this in itself is good, however, it dilutes the independence of a labour force in a bargaining process.

So what happened?

My boss in the U.S. a decade ago asked me to give him a brief presentation on the decline in union membership and why they seemed to have waned generally in the U.S., except in their core sectors. I came up with the following after some reading and googling:
[ol]
[li]A lot of the functions unions traditionally handled, or started by handling, have been taken over federally. Between OSHA and the NLRB, many workplace issues are now handled outside the union, removing a key role for having or joining a union.[/li][li]The shift to the service economy wasn’t paralleled by a move into service jobs by the unions. As the U.S. economy diversified, the amount of pie available to the unions for sharing, decreased.[/li][li]Early on, a protected U.S. economy meant there was plenty of profits to go around, so unions amounted to a demand by the workers for a rent-sharing arrangement. As the U.S. economy opened up to foreign competition, profits decreased and unions and management again fought over a shrinking piece of pie.[/li][li]Women entered the workforce in large numbers, but perceived unions to be an old-boys network offering little to no benefit to them, so had little enthusiasm overall.[/li][/ol]
That’s what came out of some basic research of mine, but I also found something disheartening: that analysis came from business sources, while union sources simply wailed “WE’RE NOT HOLDING ENOUGH ELECTIONS!” In other words, businesses were adapting and unions weren’t to the changing conditions.

This has paralleled my experience working with unions in Canada as a website developer. While some large ones are skilled and effective collective bargaining units (something of which I’m all in favour), and others offer businesses a really distinct value-add (such as training and certification for members, and things like wage top-ups and retirement planning), many are run badly by cranky, difficult people who sought refuge in unionization because they were going to be fired otherwise. In other words, unions frequently have trouble breeding good leadership because they’re recruiting and promoting from within a pool of people who aren’t going to law school or business school, but are coming off the shop floor by being loudly pro-union.

Seriously, the state of IT within unions alone is dismal. I just fixed a portion of a site where you can fill out a form to update your contact information–which is then emailed to the receptionist who types in the changes to the internal contact management system. sigh I’m a diehard union supporter, and it kills me that they’re organizationally so lacking.

I don’t know about other countries, but in the USA we’ve never had the majority of workers unionized. Even at their peak, unions only accounted for about one third of workers.

When a worker considers whether to join a union, he or she sees costs and benefits. Nowadays it seems that most workers see the costs as higher than the benefits, and hence don’t desire to join a union. Thus the union rolls have been shrinking steadily for decades, except among government workers.

I think its in part due to the exponential increase in wealth and power by those in management versus the laborers. Its a sad thing when a CEO can make hundreds of times what a typical employee makes. The wealth gap continues to grow with no end in sight, something needs to be done about that.

What happened? We lost our monopoly on world trade, other countries became competitive with us both domestically and world wide, US companies found they couldn’t compete, partially due to the total cost of labor (salaries and benefits, especially retirement) pushed by unions in certain key (at the time) sectors, so US companies either failed, moved to other states where labor costs were lower and/or there wasn’t a lot of union support, outsourced or offshored or heavily automated…or, in many cases, several of the above.

I don’t see this realistically shifting back in favor of unions in the US any time soon. Globally, it’s going to be difficult for US companies to compete from a labor perspective, since even at minimum wage our labor costs are higher than in many other countries, and there isn’t really any sort of value add to US labor, aside from the fact it’s here and speaks English. Automation has made such deep inroads that it’s hard to imagine the US ever going back to using large amounts of high paid and low skilled workers, and this is one of the key sectors that unions have focused on keeping. You don’t see a lot of unions making inroads into, say, the IT sector or other technology oriented high paying sectors.

At first look I took this as are unicorns obsolete :eek:

Carry on:)

I’ve worked with skilled trade unions for years. The ones I’ve dealt with (which are local affiliates of Teamsters and some other larger unions) were okay in what they provided to the members, such as cheap training and other such items.

The problem was, between the company and the government, you were quite likely to not need the union at all. The union several training classes at $120 each. The company (everywhere, not just in it’s union locations) offered the same classes for free. The medical benefits were never rolled under the union and always controlled by the company. The union was just taking up space.

Not to mention, the bi-yearly contract renewal flyer to the union members was always full of complete bull. I kept one around for a few years after I left my last employer, and it literally said “We are fighting to double your pay!” among other grandiose claims.

These particular skilled workers earned about $28 median an hour. The company certainly wasn’t going to start paying $56 an hour. At the end of the two and half months of negotiations, a 4% raise was agreed upon for the employees and a 12.5% raise in union dues (the company paid side of the union dues) was put in and the negotiating was over.

There is a time and a need for collective bargaining…but a lot of unions, in my opinion, spend too much time trying to legitimize themselves to their members. “We are relevant! Really!” It’s kind of a shambling state of affairs. Unions could try something like re-branding themselves as an ACLU-type lawyerin’ group for the little guy and perform bargaining and legal help for employees to drive a higher value for the members and ostensibly drive value and prop up the idea of unions, but they really are the same as they were 60+ years ago.

On the union member side, the union members that reported to me didn’t like the union, but the place was locked to a union contract. The company would have to fire all of them and then hire them back as scabs to drop the contract, and that wasn’t worth the trouble (production stopping, etc).

Disclosure: I wasn’t in the union (nor was I ever a part of that particular union), I was a manager with the company.

For my own union experience, I was a member of four unions (well, one union collapsed financially and was absorbed by a larger union…so 3.5?) and they never proved their value for my weekly 1.5% contribution to their bank account.

Further Disclosure: I have never worked in a union in a place like Chicago where they are firmly entrenched and control things like retirements and medical plans, either.

ObamaCare will make them even more obsolete IMO. Health care was one area they were still relevant.

Management was able to sell the idea that unions are ineffective and thereby convince employees they don’t want unions.

The reality is that unionized workers make higher wages and have greater benefits than non-unionized workers in equivalent jobs.

Is that a desirable thing?

Ok; I’ve never been a member of a Union. But here’s my opinion on the matter:

  1. I don’t want my relationship with my management to be confrontational. It seems to be that the Union message is always “us vs them”, but the reality is that both labor and management are responsible for the success of the company, and the success of the company benefits both equally. (Or, at least equally enough.) So why should we be competing with each other instead of our external competition? Sound counter-productive to me; I don’t work under Mr. Burns from the Simpsons or some other cartoon character, I work under smart people I respect.

  2. I’m a skilled technical worker. As any skilled technical worker can tell you, the difference between a good technical worker and a bad one is 10:1 or more. Every job I’ve had, I’ve worked with people who are simply not up to the work, and even though I’ve worked fewer hours I’ve been twice as productive as them. So why would I want to collectively bargain? I’m much better off bargaining on my own, since I’m more valuable to the company than my co-workers*.

  3. I can’t recall the last time I’ve heard of a Union do something positive. They are certainly not in control of their message at the moment. My mother, a member of the educational Union in my State, constantly complained about how useless they were. News stories about small companies being forced to Unionize against their will because of some government lobbying make an impression. Easily debunked Union propaganda like this specimen I took on a few years ago don’t help at all.

  4. All of the pro-Union arguments I hear on various web forums equate to, “Unions got you higher wages! Unions got you safer workplaces! Unions got you more vacation time!” Yeah they did-- 70 years ago. A DC-3 was a revolutionary aircraft 70 years ago. I wouldn’t fly one today.

*) Note: this is probably untrue, but it’s my perception and perception matters as much as fact.

I disagree. The opposite is true: unions haven’t convinced employees they are still relevant or useful.

As for higher wages, that’s true for skilled workers but not so true for retail workers when you look within a single industry.

Benefits really aren’t higher, anymore, either. Benefits correlates more closely to the industry (and the actual job location) they work in rather than union vs non-union.

Unions will become obsolete when either workers can seek redress on grievances as equals with management on their own or businesses stop doing everything in their power to maximize profit.

I don’t see either being likely any time soon.

If that were true, why are unions still strong in other nations that have undergone globalization like Canada or France? Unions in the US have declined (either in whole or in part) because of a hostile attitude towards them from business and politics. Walmart has been a good example of a company fighting to stop unionization. The consequences of union busting are minor, and no political party truly fights for unions.

Also, service sector jobs cannot be outsourced. The role of globalization should not affect unionization of those jobs. Automation maybe, but that is a good thing since automation will lead to a higher standard of living eventually. Endless tens of millions of americans work in permatemp jobs, part time service sector work, low paying service sector work, etc. Those jobs could be unionized. I don’t know why they aren’t. I don’t know if it is apathy or hostility.

When a union was attempting to bring my department in, our management stayed completely neutral. To the extent that I was annoyed to not have any input from them. I don’t know for certain about wages, but my benefits were better than the union staff in other areas. I’ve seen that part of their contract.

Contrarily to some conceptions, France has the lowest unionization rate in the European Union.Which IMO is a shame, really.

Also, Unions in the USA are weird from my point of view. They hold monopolies, and joining might even be mandatory, which I feel is all kind of wrong. Membership in an union (or any organization, really) can’t be made a condition for employment over here, and there are normally several unions in a company (something like 6 or 7 in mine) competing for the votes of the workers (to be legally valid, an agreement must be signed by unions representing the majority of the votes, for instance, chairs in various councils and such are attributed proportionnally to these votes, etc…). I assume this should lead to unions trying to stay relevant since if they’re perceived to be useless, employees will move their votes to the “competition”. Although in fact, as I said, membership in unions is plumetting in France, so it seem they didn’t succeed in demonstrating their usefulness.

I still believe that unions are totally relevant, and will be as long employers and employees will have diverging interests, which means forever. Besides, the right to unionize has been fought for and deserve to be upheld as mush as the right to vote. Finally, solidarity between workers in a company seems an important concept to me. I guess it’s precisely what has been lost during the last decades. People tend to think only in “what’s in for me?” terms (and generally in the short term). This tend to result in people being crushed in detail when bad times come. A lot of people seem to realize there’s an union only when they’re about to be fired.

Well, no, it isn’t, not “alike.”

I agree with nearly everything you’ve said but you can’t have it all at the same time.

For a Union to be relevant and useful it needs collective power, if it’s successful individuals no longer see a need for it and drop out whereby the union loses it’s collective power.

But there are two problems with that.

First, you only need “Collective Bargaining” when you are at the negotiation table such as when you have grievances to be fixed or when a contract is up for debate. You don’t need an entire management structure of a traditional union for that. Medical benefits, time off, raises, and grievances are all generally handled by the company, anymore. You can, of course, find WalMarts that try to do none of these, but most people avoid working for WalMart unless it’s the last option they have.

Second, in the US it’s rare to find a company that hires people on contract (outside of high level executives). Generally, the rank and file is hired “at will” and you serve until they throw you in the garbage can. Even if you are on a “union contract” that contract tends to govern payment. Companies are sharp on keeping the at will component to their labor practices as it lets them quickly shed people without penalty. This, of course, isn’t the same in all unions, but is fairly similar outside of union stronghold areas.

Now, I wouldn’t mind having this employment contract homogenized by law at the company level (poor e.g.: if you hire a CEO with a contract that has a golden parachute that same contract has to govern the plebians, even if the amounts are smaller, but all options have to be in the same proportions) but I could see that option barely getting out of a congressman’s mouth before they inexplicably woke up three days later with a sexily dressed horse in a motel room and a news crew filming the scene.

…What? Horse heads are so cliche.

What happened to unions was evolution. Unions lower the profitibility of firms that employ them. Higher profit firms are better able to survive downturns. Thus over time firms that are unionized go out of business at a higher rate. When a unionized firm goes out of business their non-union rivals take over the market share. The auto industry would have been a good example. There were non union car makers and unionized car makers. When the financial crisis hit the unionized firms had to go bankrupt because they had expenses the non-unionized firms did not have. In that case they got Uncle Sugar to kick in a couple score billion dollars, but most firms do not have that kind of political clout and when they go bankrupt the non-union firms take over the industry. The dinosaurs found out you can’t fight evolution and so have unions.

:dubious: The dinosaurs were wiped out in a cataclysmic event. Cataclysmic events are, by definition, evolutionary disruptions.