Do unions have any say in what they make? Does it spread accountability?

Factual Questions
1

I was listening to some discussion on NPR about the auto bailouts, and at one point a caller, who came from a family of auto workers, said something along the lines of “the union’s angry because they didn’t have a say in what they were making, all these decisions were made by others and the unions were forced to give up some of their benefits for decisions that were made by others.”

NOTE: this is not a discussion about the validity of that statement regarding what the unions did or didn’t give up.

What I got to thinking is, first, does the union have any say in the kinds of cars they’re making? Second, wouldn’t giving them a say be a way to spread accountability throughout the system. I was asking myself, what if the car companies created channels for their workers to give input, to vote on issues (for instance, a way to say, we want to make less SUVs and start making more efficient cars)? If companies found a way to do that, wouldn’t it diffuse both the rewards (in good times) and the accountability (in bad times) for these decsisions. Which is to say, in bad times, wouldn’t these negotiations be a lot less difficult, because, clearly, the fault would lie with everyone.

2

There are too many union members for all of them to negotiate. Instead, the company has a negotiation team, and the union has a negotiation team (bargaining committee). They iron out the details. Then the union presents the contract to the rank and file for a vote. They can vote to accept the contract, or vote to refuse the contract.

Before every contract, the company asks salaried employees what changes might be good to push for, and the union asks their rank and file. Obviously not everything can be discussed.

So, no, the normal rank and file don’t get a direct say in the contract. But they have the option to turn it down. When that happens, the union will go back and try to figure out what went wrong, and eventually negotiate a different contract.

In the long run, if the union membership doesn’t like their leadership, they’re free to not re-elect their bargaining people, or decertify the union entirely.

3

But does any of that have to do with what exactly they’re making, or does it have more to do with their healthcare, hours, etc.? Could the union’s bargaining team come to table and say, “We want to make greener cars.”

4

There is a union hierarchy. There are locals. Each local has elections to determine its leaders. It is kind of like the House of Representatives. The local leaders are tuned in to local problems and can convey them to the next level. Some unions have a complex hierarchy because they are large. But at each step local concerns are addressed.

5

In general, no. US labor relations law preserves management’s rights across a fairly broad spectrum of direction-setting activities. Labor’s rights are in the areas of bargaining about working conditions.

This example is from a university, so public sector rather than auto industry, but describes management rights reserved including missions, programs, activities, etc.

http://www.washington.edu/admin/hr/laborrel/contracts/uaw/contract/a17.html

So a union would really be swimming upstream to ask for the types of changes you are mentioning. They don’t have the legal right to influence those decisions, and in negotiating they would have to give something up in the domain where they do have rights, working conditions, to do so.

I believe that unions in Europe do get more involved in that type of decision. Maybe a European Doper can weigh in on whether that works in the shared accountability way that you are asking about. I think many US businesses consider it to be expensive and burdensome to have the additional union involvement in Europe. But they have no reason to consider the full social picture, either.

6

Living a couple of miles from a Ford plant, and having heard a lot of talk like this, I think the OP (or that caller) is not clearly explaining the union complaints. Basically, it goes like this:

Looking at it that way, it’s a reasonable complaint.

(Though it ignores an additional part of the problem – poor quality assembly work in some auto plants. This part is mostly the fault of the union workers. But it’s generally a much smaller (and fixable) part of the problem.)

7

It also ignores another important part of the problem: severely high costs for retired workers, which had no realistic prospect of being met during an economic downturn.

8

The automakers have been whining about this for years. Even when times were good and SUVs were flying out of the showrooms, they were whining about pension obligations.

9

I’m not sure how this addresses my question. First, I didn’t say the complaint wasn’t reasonable. Second, I also don’t understand how your summation of the complaints is all that different from mine (or my paraphrase of the caller’s, rather).

Furthermore, my questions isn’t about whether or not the complaints are reasonable, its about the possibility/feasibility of shared rewards/accountability in the existing system.

10

It’s really simple. If it’s negotiated into the contract (per the process above), they have say in the matter. If it’s something that’s not important to them, then they don’t make it a point to negotiate it into the contract.

Do they have say in the daily operations? No, they don’t. They never bargained for that power. Could they have? Sure they could have. Is there any reason they’d have been any more prescient in their decisions than management was if they had had this power?

11

No doubt because those obligations were high. You’ll note that in the current negotiations over things like Chrysler’s bankruptcy, pension obligations are receiving an enormous amount of attention.

12

Bad decisions were made in this regard, but the real issue was that they’re bad market timers. There was a time when customers wanted nothing but gas-guzzlers, but auto makers didn’t know when that demand would end. So they kept building them until it was too late. So just like regular people, the company was bad at market timing. Nothing new there.

13

Generally no.

I was on the negotiating committee at one time where the company was crying “we can not pay that may as well close the doors”. Our answer was prove you can not pay it, show us the books. Needless to say they said no.

Normally the company will not let a union become involved in the operation of the company.

There are excemptions.

One I know of. the employees were asking for too much at too high of a cost. The employeer insisted if he signed the contract he would have to close the doors. The members would not back down and were willing to strike. The owner signed the contract then handed the union its notice of going out of business.

The unions resonce was Ok we will put the new contract on hold if you will show us your books and give us some time. The employeer gave the union their books.

A week or two later the union returned to the employeer and agreed that he was right. They handed him a new contract with the coments herre is what we are going to do. The employees were going to take a pay decrease, and a cut in benifits, with a right to check the books later and increases if the company got back on its feet again.

Then the union’s coment was here is what you are going to do. And gave him a list of changes in the way he did his business. One was on pricing parts. If a customer bought parts over the counter there was a discount, if a mechanic repairing equipment in the shop need parts there was a 10% sur charge. The unions contract was a discount for parts that went to the shop and full price over the counter. there were other changes to help business.

The end results.
Employeer stopped laying off employees, and had to start reemployeeing mechanics. company started to expand and is now a major player in the area.

But normally a union will not let a union become involved in the operation of the company.

14

But the major cost for retired workers (and the only one that has been increasing significantly) is the medical care provided under their contract. Which is now costing them way more than auto companies in countries where they have a better health care system for the whole nation.

(But that is getting into a discussion of the whole health care ‘system’ in America, which is another topic. Or maybe not – it’s been said that the best ‘bailout’ we could give to the american auto companies (and other american businesses) would be a decent single-payer national health care system.)

15

Except that their competitors, like Toyota & Honda & VW etc. all seemed to avoid that problem. Are the Japanese or Germans really better at predicting what American customers will want than American auto executives.

16

There’s an example – in some of the airlines, the unions negotiated to get a seat on the Board in exchange for cutbacks in their pay & benefits.

And I don’t think it’s a matter of being prescient, predicting the future. It’s that they have a more accurate picture of the present situation than management. Because they are on the factory floor every day, and then go home & deal with neighbors in a similar economic situation – people who are their customers.

In almost every situation, I’ve found the troops on the front lines know more about the actual status than the commanders back in headquarters. It’s been true in many corporate areas where I’ve worked, and it was true 40 years ago when my cousin came home from a year in Vietnam and said “we’ll never win that war over there”, while the Generals were still telling Congress that we would win, if only they would just give the military more men & more money. (And wait – wasn’t Robert MacNamara, the Secy of Defense then a former auto company executive?)

17

I was a consultant to Ford on one of their quality initiatives in the 1980s. Granted, my knowledge is from 25 years ago, so take it for what it’s worth.

At that time, both managers and union workers grumbled that they could have made better quality cars, but senior management had made the decision that it was cheaper to fix problems under warranty than to make any changes on the assembly line. Given that was the same management team that decided it was cheaper to defend the Ford Pinto in court than fix the design flaw that caused the lawsuits in the first place, I didn’t doubt what they were telling me.

And it’s true that new car quality improved when assembly line workers were allowed to “Stop the line” so that manufacturing flaws could be fixed before the cars were sent out the door.

As for the unions having a say in what they would be building, nope, no, absolutely not. That plant builds what it’s told to build, in the quantities it’s told to build them. The unions have absolutely no say in that.

But in defense of the auto companies, when the Ford Taurus and Toyota Camry were battling for something like 20 straight years for the title of “best selling passenger car,” Ford and GM were telling anyone who would listen that the best-selling vehicles were actually the Ford F-150 and Chevrolet C/K lines of pickup trucks; that Toyota started building the Tundra pickup in the U.S. to get a share of those sales; that the original business model for the Taurus called for 60% of the production to be with 4-cylinder engines and 40% with V-6, but that from day 1 customer demand for the V-6 far outstripped the 4-cylinder models, etc. In short, that American buyers wanted bigger, more powerful models even when the companies offered alternatives.

18

In almost every situation, I’ve found the troops on the front lines know more about the actual status than the commanders back in headquarters.
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But that assumes that only the union workers are in this situation. There are also salaried workers. The actual designers (for example) aren’t high-level executives; they’re in the same socio-economic scale as the union workers(*). They work hand-in-hand with hourly workers (clay modelers, for example). They report to people who are only a rung above them in the ladder of society, who in turn keep reporting upwards.

(*) Yeah, really. When you consider overtime and benefits, there’s not much of a difference. When I supervised, they routinely made more than I did. One guy I brought into the salaried fold went back after three months because he hated the pay and hassle. There are salaried and hourly and retired all in my (good) neighborhood. Hourly people aren’t lowlifes just because they have the hourly label.

Real life example: At a truck plant where we were building SUV’s, which are very high margin, everyone was fat and lazy (in the economic sense). Unlimited overtime, money for programs, weekends, and hourly people were easily clearing six figures. Not too bad when most of the country considers “working class” as just kind of scraping by. No one had any complaints. None of them had second thoughts about where the country was going. They didn’t care nor notice that the SUV craze was going to end. The biggest reason why? They all lived in neighborhoods with other well paid, successful people. They’re just as out of touch as the rest of us.

These days, they can actually be disciplined for not raising quality issues when discovered. How times have changed!

19

Absolutely true. For decades, the real question was, could Detroit make cars that were cheap to fix – the default assumption was that cars would break down and the only thing to worry about was how easily and inexpensively they could be put back into usable condition. As I suggested upthread, the plant managers were more responsible for (and concerned with) meeting productions quotas than with building better cars.

It wasn’t until Detroit decided that a) they were losing sales because of quality issues AND b) that they could improve quality relatively inexpensively, (and one way to do that was by involving the hourly employees and managers who actually knew how the cars were being built) that they began to focus on quality.

20

About those poor decisions made by car company execs.

The was lots and lots of argument on these boards over the implementation of the Kyoto protocols, with the right wingers on these boards full of praise for US FREEDOM because US car companies were choosing to make even larger road vehicles, rather than the smaller ones just about everyone else in the world was making.The arguments centred around choice, seems the right wingers made their choices and its bail out time.

Part of this centred around the tax that was applied to cars and not to vehicles designated as trucks. The US auto makers simply redifined the term truck so that they didn’t get hit be the new vehicle tax and continued making gas guzzlers.

Meantime, the more left leaning posters got loads and loads of flak ‘why do you hate america’ sort of stuff when they pointed out the short sightedness of the US auto makers approach, there was a stretch of time where there were constanly running anti-SUV threads, day in day out, it all got very heated.

Yet now I see that the US citzenry suddenly find they are less interested in FREEDOM and much more interested in gas mileage, so many of those absolutely essential SUVs and gas guzzlers turn out to not be quite so essential after all.

The Japanese manufacturers also made gas guzzlers, but they also make a far wider range of vehicles than US auto makers, and when the proverbial hits the fan, its diversity that is most likely to win out.

This is typical of the short termist business practices of the US/UK, don’t ever imagine there could be a downturn, every day will be boom time, it’ll never end - except it did.

Now who do you think is making serious noises about buying out Chrysler? That bastion of state subisidised socialism - Fiat. I can well remember companies such as Renault, Peugeot, Fiat being state supported throughout the 1970’s at huge expense to the taxpayers of those countries.This was held up by the non-interventionist FREEDOM LOVERS as typical pinko socialist failure.

We in the UK stopped state subsidy of our home grown car industry during the 1980’s under Margaret Thatcher. We ran our bike industry into the ground only 10 years before , by short term capitalist non-investment - instead we only sought for maximum returns, whilst the Italians supported thier bike industries. This should have been all the warning our car industry needed

You may notice that in the UK we no longer have a mass auto producer or our own, nor a significant motorcycle manufacture base (Triumph is tiny in terms of world sales).

The US followed this model of Thatcherite short termism which works great when times are good, but capitalism gets fat, lazy and complacent. The public gets what the public wants and the public wants what the public gets.

Before Bush it was obvious to the whole for the auto industry that things had to change, the collapse of US auto makers is just one legacy of the Bush years, when there was one last opportunity to improve things, it wasn’t taken - short termist capitalism and its natural consequencies.

Thing is a stripped down, lean and alert capitalist system ought to be able to outperform some state supported inefficient industry- seems to be thats how is should be - odd how it has not worked out for US auto makers.