Nobody is forcing airline executives or stockholders to stay in that business. If working with unions isn’t profitable enough, they are free to take their capital elsewhere.
When you go to the store, you are already choosing one collective bargaining unit (in this case, a grocery store) over another collective bargaining unit (it’s competitors). Toothpaste is indeed purchased by a collective (the grocery store) and then re-distributed to individual consumers. There are also buyer’s club and co-ops that people put together in order to purchase items at a discounted rate, such as Sam’s Club and Costco. You are free to enter into one if you wish, and would likely get a better price on your toothpaste than a regular store will offer you.
Or did you think that the grocery store, Wal-MArt, 7-11, etc. all sold for just a few cents more than they pay for stuff? They utilize the power of their mass of customers to purchase things at a cheaper rate than you or I could as individuals.
Collective bargaining works.
In most instances the union has goals and the company has goals and the two are not necessarily shared. The difference in my opinion is that if the company prospers everyone (including the union members) will see some gain. Unions tend to look after their own first, sometimes to the detriment of the company.
My :dubious: union tries the argument “XXX executive makes as much as 50 union employees”. My argument has always been that someone in that position has the ability to improve the bottom line of the company much greater than a single union member, and in many cases more so than the 50 fictional members that comprise his salary. That is why they are paid what they are, but there is no safety net under them if they screw up.
The distribution of wealth in a corporation need not be a zero sum game. Let the company do what needs to be done to make a profit (within reasonable guidelines) and everybody wins.
As I have only dealt with nationwide unions, maybe my experiences are atypical, but unfortunately in my dealings with 3 different unions on both sides of the fence the union wants to be more involved with business decisions than with negotiations and continued support of the agreed upon CBA. I certainly don’t want to see unions abolished or powerless, but in my opinion they need to limit their scope. If the union officers want to make business decisions then they should become management. Otherwise negotiate for the members, ensure the contract is upheld, and leave everything else well enough alone.
Well, yeah… that’s what unions are there for, to look out for the interests of it’s members.
I beg to differ. Most executives have a very comfortable cushion to fall on if they screw up. Many large corporations offer 6 months severance pay, and some upper-level execs have that “golden parachute” clause in their contract that sometimes stipulates YEARS of salary be paid if they are dismissed from their positions. No union member has ever recieved $20,000,000 when they got fired.
I didn’t realize I had implied otherwise. Obviously, it does the workers no good for the company to slip into bankruptcy.
Look, I don’t deny that business owner’s deserve more money than the line workers. That would be foolish. They took the risk, had the bright idea, whatever it was that started the company in the first place. They deserve to be rewarded in proportion to that risk, that idea, etc. All I’m saying is that we cannot trust every employer to treat the people working for them equitably, hence the need for unions.
Without our faculty associations in the community colleges where I’ve worked, the part-time faculty would never have had a pay raise, any benefits, protections, office hour pay, or a number of other things, even though they do the same kind of work, with the same degrees and experience, as full timers. Collective bargaining was the only way to obtain anything. The district administrators and trustees would not simply have “done the right thing.”
For that matter, the full timers and the classified staff need their agreements in place as well, for similar reasons.
There is simply no alternative, since we are not allowed to go to human resources or our deans and demand a raise even if it’s deserved. It doesn’t work that way in colleges.
If someone has a better idea, I’d love to hear it. But I never have.
Exactly the reason I joined the union at the chemical plant despite the fact that, in a right-to-work state, I didn’t have to. Our contract, too, had the “seniority prevails except in cases of significant differences in ability” clause. Dedication over time was recognized without alienating younger workers by making them feel they needed to put 10 years in or hope someone died or retired before they could see a promotion.
Favoritism abounded in the supervisory ranks, which were non-union. Every so often the secret list of salaries leaked and people who had worked the 12s and 16s during equipment and power failures found that they were making less than the fuckoffs who hid from the phone but played golf with the higher-ups.
I saw how the supervisory personnel had vacations yanked away from them if some member of the family happened to answer the phone at the wrong time. Our vacations were inviolate. And once we were off the clock, they could ask, but not demand,our return before our next scheduled shift.
We also got paid every week–not every month. We got paid from the very first minute we worked past 8 hours in a day. Supervisors got paid 1 1/2 after 12 hours, not 8. ( Many considered this an improvement over the mandatory comp-time that they could only take upon an approval that was rarely forthcoming.).
The plant was closed in 1999, but it was never claimed that an “intractable union”
was what did it in. In fact, the union was never given a list of proposed concessions, thus we couldn’t be “intractable” over something non-existent.
I’ve always suspected that the Canadian outfit that bought our company only wanted select bits and pieces, of which we were not one, and that even offering to accept third-world wages and working conditions wouldn’t have saved us.
I did not mean to imply you did. I am not against unions on principle, I however have had bad experiences with three large unions. As I stated earlier too much focus on overall business strategy and too little on contractual obligations. An example would be the focus in my shop about the outsourcing of telecommunications sector jobs. While I disagree with the outsourcing, the jobs being lost at my company were not union positions, and the union had no interest in organizing them when given the opportunity. Many legitimate issues such as abuses on the overtime rules are ignored, but this topic is consistently emphasized.
I believe it would be in the unions’ best interest to take a step back and re-evaluate their tactics. Otherwise I’m afraid the government might end up getting involved (ie. Reagan and the ATC, or more recently, MLB and steroids), and I don’t believe that would serve the interests of either the unions or the businesses.
As to the executives’ compensation I agree that the severance package is usually generous, however a major blunder from someone at that level generally results in a major loss of face and future salary for said person, where a union member has recourse through the grievance and arbitration process, and a much greater chance of re-employment in a similar position elsewhere. Admittedly anyone at the level we were discussing would be well enough off they really would not need the future income, but it still represents a substantial penalty.
As I am not familiar with the IATSE, do they have a substantial membership? The union I am currently in (CWA) represents over 100,000 members just with my company, and has several other significant membership counts at other corporations. With that membership I can see the temptation to try to wag the dog, and that is what I personally disagree with. It may be that the smaller unions have more of a survival mindset and are therefore closer to my opinion of proper union thinking.
I think it comes down to balance of power. There are industries, and sections of industries, where the worker is seriously underpowered with respect to negotiations. Two groups that come to mind immediately are teachers and actors. Both groups will be more than happy to work for no money under lousy conditions, and neither group has easily transferable skills. Things would get very ugly for these folks without union negotiating power.
The problem you have with unions is in industries where the balance of power is already even or skewed to the worker. Unions continue to act as if their members are the oppressed underclass, fighting tooth and nail for every penny, every advantage they can squeeze from the company. While they are supposed to work for the workers benefit, sometimes that means working WITH the company to help it be stronger and more competitive. Stringent work rules, hiring and firing rules, sky high wages are great in the short term, but it doesn’t help at all when the company closes the plant to pursue a lower cost location. Being flexible, allowing deadwood to be cut, and having competitive wages makes the existing location more profitable, and less likely to be shut down.
WRT executives, generally when you sign a contract for that high a position, you ALREADY have a job where you are doing spectacularly well and are getting big money. You do not give up that job for a new position where you could fail unless you have the security of a golden parachute. These are not people changing jobs because they’re sick of the boss giving them crap every day, they’re changing because you are guaranteeing them major money in their new position.
Yes, please do.
(I meant to say this a while ago… BTW: I scanned the two articles you mentioned but haven’t digested them sufficiently to render an opinion.)
The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employes, Moving Picture Technicians, Artists and Allied Crafts of the United States, Its Territories and Canada (IATSE) has more than 105,000 members throughout the world. My own local has more than 1500 current members, and an on-call list of over 5,000 people. My local is a “mixed” local, meaning we represent people in many different crafts within the technical entertainment industry: stage carpenters, lighting technicians, grips, gaffers, wardrobe people, camera operators, video technical directors, etc.
So to sum up: unions have NOT outlived their usefulness, but arguably have not well kept up with the times. What problems exist are likely to be solved through reform rather than elimination. Any suggestions on what reform?
Mega-unions (or at least cross-industry unions) appear to have a number of difficulties, and there seems to be movement in the direction of breaking them up. I would certainly be in favour of such a move. To the extent I’ve seen in this debate, the CAW would do well to look at the IATSE for guidance.
Some have commented on the “clock-watching-play-by-the-rules mentality” that seems to be prevalent in union shops. Is this an unfair stereotype? I certainly have witnessed it - and to too large an extent absorbed some of it. What is its root and what is the solution?
There has been some mention of how a union sometimes acts in ways that are detrimental to the business, with the risk the business folds and no one wins. How can we solve this problem, to greater couple the success of the company to the success of the unions and ultimately the success of everyone who works at the company - union and non-union employees alike?
The current big dawg of American labor, the umbrella organization American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), is going through some difficult times.
Most union staffers and labor activists agree that American workers are under-organized, with less than 13% of all wage and salary workers belonging to unions (less than 8% in the private sector—down from 35% fifty years ago). And many large service and manufacturing firms and industries are not organized at all, and fiercely resist organizing attempts (e.g., Wal*Mart). Although nearly half of US workers say they want a union to represent them, in practical terms most of them have no chance of actually getting their workplaces unionized.
Labor’s view is that the shrinking role of organized labor has had bad consequences for workers. Real wages for most workers are stagnant or falling, benefits are diminishing, work schedules and job security are becoming more uncertain, even while productivity and profits continue to rise. The average worker has steadily been losing power vis-a-vis the average employer, and the quality of the average job (from the worker’s point of view) is suffering as a result.
Globalization and pro-business government policies, including weak labor law enforcement, have led to substantial abuses by some employers in unorganized industries (illegal sweatshop work, illegal flouting of safety regulations, illegal retaliation against employees who try to organize). They have also diminished the effectiveness of many unions even in organized industries, who can’t stop the boss from moving the plant to Mexico or China, or from routinely violating labor law if he finds that paying slap-on-the-wrist fines is cheaper than complying with the law.
Critics say that many unions, and the AFL-CIO as their representative, have remained bloated and complacent while their base of unionized workers hemorrhages away. Cross-industry union mergers may have actually made unions less effective within specific industries, while making their bureaucracies more top-heavy and less responsive. Unions need to devote more resources to organizing efforts (especially among immigrant workers), to political lobbying for serious labor law enforcement and election of labor-friendly candidates, and to cooperation with organized labor in other countries to bargain globally with globalized capital.
AFL-CIO President John Sweeney recently proposed some policy changes to deal with these criticisms, including cutting AFL-CIO staff and increasing its organizing budget. His critics, including several large unions like the Teamsters, SEIU, UNITE-HERE, and others that together make up nearly 40% of AFL-CIO membership, say that this isn’t enough and want more substantial change, with a more intense focus on organizing. (More radical critics say that even the suggested measures merely represent efforts by union bureaucracies to protect themselves, not to deliver actual progress for workers.)
This group of dissident unions has formed a new coalition, “Change to Win”, that potentially could split off from the AFL-CIO and become a new labor federation. This would be a serious break with the AFL-CIO’s traditional “labor unity above all” policy. Opinions are divided as to whether such a move would stimulate real change and better results for labor organization, or just facilitate a “divide and conquer” strategy by anti-labor business and government interests.
Change to Win has submitted a large number of resolutions for consideration (detailed at the above-linked website) by the AFL-CIO executive council at the AFL-CIO’s 50th anniversary convention in Chicago at the end of July. What happens at this convention will probably have a profound effect on the future of US organized labor.
Bumping this to mention a set of interviews in the current issue of the Nation with leaders of the AFL-CIO and some major unions, laying out some of the issues on which the 25 July labor convention will focus.
These are the interview questions:
Oh, and a short & readable recent article by Nickel and Dimed author Barbara Ehrenreich in The Progressive:
I’ll be back with brief comments on the AFL-CIO convention next week.
Did you post your comments, or did I miss them somehow?
My two cents are that a big problem with unions is that they do not serve a huge segment of the workforce that works for so-called small business. To take one example, it is practically impossible to unionize McDonalds workers because most of them actually work for separate individual franchise owners, and not for the big home office.
My own union sees that same thing, sort of. Here in Las Vegas, the casinos have stopped producing shows. Instead, they essentially hire out the showroom to a show producer. That means my union can no longer sign a contract with the hotel to staff their showrooms; instead we have to try and sign a contract with each show’s producer, and if the show flops, we have members who are out of a job. In the past, if a show flopped, the casino was still comitted to having a show, and the skilled labor was in place for the next performer. It means our members have a lot less stable employment than we enjoyed in the past. 