So in conclusion, is there anything wrong with a business requiring employees to be a member of a union?
I don’t think that works.
You are free, in the first instance to decide who you want to work for. You are not forced to work for any company you don’t want to. Working for that company in the first place is not compulsory.
I disagree with this, I think. A closed shop in US usage is one that only hires people who are already union members. ( Other countries may use the term differently) They have been illegal in the US since 1940 something. A union shop is one where the employer can hire anyone and they must join the union after they are hired - I’m fine with that. Also fine with an agency shop where employees don’t have to actually join the union but do pay the equivalent of dues to the union so that they don’t free ride by getting the benefits of the union without paying (currently illegal for public employees)
My problem with the closed shop is that it perpetuates the same demographics that exist currently - the electrician can get his kid into the union and so on. Which means if the electricians union current membership is disproportionately white , the new members are likely to be also. They might be even in the absence of the closed shop, but a closed shop can only make it worse.
I disagree. Employers do not have all the power.
I disagree, for example I support a football team and I also support the financial fair play systems put in place that weaken their ability to do exactly what they want (e.g. spend wildly using petrochemical dollars). The reason for supporting such restrictions is also to ensure some degree of balance.
I also think that employers should be compelled to allow workers to unionise and should not be able to refuse the hiring of union members. Am I not weaking the employer’s position there as well?
Compulsory union membership should not be permitted as a condition of employment. As indeed is the law in many places.
They should not be allowed to make membership or non-membership a condition of employment.
What do you mean by “union contract” in this context, can you describe what that would look like?
As long as union membership is not a requirement of employment I’d have no problem with that, they’d be acting in the same way as any other employment agency.
Ah – I am apparently using the term incorrectly. Thank you for the correction! I do mean union shop, not closed shop, according to what you were saying.
Where I work is so far from either that I confess some unfamiliarity with them. Where I work, any contract agreed on between my union and my local government is legally unenforceable, according to state law.
Except that that usually isn’t the case. In my experience, the typical setup is that membership in the union is optional, but paying the union fees is mandatory. This is usually defended on the grounds that the union is required to represent all of the workers, but why should that be? Why not let the non-union workers represent themselves? If they can get a better deal by joining the union, then they’re free to do so, but they shouldn’t have to. Heck, it should be possible to have multiple competing unions at the same workplace (though I expect that such a situation wouldn’t last long, as one would outcompete the other).
The purpose of unions is to protect the worker from the management. And that’s a valid and very important purpose. But all too often, the union becomes itself just another layer of management, and who’s to protect the worker against them? For a union to work properly, it’s essential that each and every worker have the freedom to have nothing to do with the union.
First of all, thank you for starting this thread to prevent any ongoing hijacks in the other one. Some of these points (of which this is just one) seem to have arisen from my comments in the other thread.
Your quoted context here is incomplete, though. In the context of the garbage strike, it wasn’t only about freelance garbage removers being beaten up. It was also about private citizens, seeking sanitation in the face of the garbage strike, attempting to deliver their own garbage to the transfer stations, and effectively being denied access by union thugs.
To be fair, access wasn’t totally denied, but it amounted to the same thing – it was more a matter of very, very significant intentional delays, to maximize inconvenience to the point that many people either gave up or got into confrontations with the picketers, or just threw their garbage into nearby fields, the end result being the same – that sanitation and health in the entire city was at risk.
Sometimes, sure. But my garbage strike example may be illuminating. Recall my comment above about citizens just trying to properly dispose of their garbage during the strike and sometimes getting into confrontations with the strikers. Police were sometimes on site. So now they’re making judgment calls – “I just want to take my garbage to the landfill” … “No, you don’t – that’s our job and we’re on strike”.
Well, around here, anyway, police have very strong unions (as does apparently every other public employee). Who do you think the police were most likely to side with in these sorts of discretionary confrontations? Yeah! Cross-union solidarity FTW! 
That doesn’t meaningfully distinguish between “inconvenient” and “dangerous”, as in my garbage-strike example above. The other key point here is that the union was not only withdrawing the services that their members provide, they were also explicitly preventing individuals from doing those things themselves.
Sure. The problem – around here, anyway – is that in our liberal social democracy governments cave all too readily to public union demands, and have now created monsters that are virtually unstoppable – the masters of all they survey. We have cashiers at government liquor stores making more than research scientists, and garbage collectors able to hold citizens hostage to dangerous filth in hot summer heat.
I’m totally with you here, my friend. You’re trying to do a good job in a state with shitty politics and a shitty government, and all the power to you for what you do. You need unions. That doesn’t change my other arguments in other contexts, though.
No, nothing wrong in general. Whether it’s economically useful in a particular situation is for the parties themselves to decide, and not anyone else.
This is good to hear, because bringing it up in the WGA thread is non sequitur at best and carrying water for anti-union demagogues at worst.
An agreement between a business and a union based on employee pay and other terms that requires the business to only hire union members.
Thank you for answering my questions. Your position is clear.
So…you’re free to decide who you want to work for, but you’re not free to decide who you want to work for? If you don’t want to work in a closed shop, you’re free to work somewhere else.
I think you are manufacturing a paradox where none exists. There are always competing freedoms that come into conflict with each other. That’s called society.
There are and should be restrictions on what constitutes a valid contract of employment. You are free to work for whoever you choose but there are restrictions on how you work for them, i.e. what conditions you work under and what can legally be included in a contract.
For instance, I’m accused of undermining workers rights but I would personally do away with the USA concept of “at will” employment., It is already not allowed in the UK and you are not free to contractually sign away a employer’s obligation to adhere to that or your own employment rights that govern unfair dismissal etc.
Closed shops are illegal and I am of the opinion that that is a good thing. Union membership status should play no part in an employment contract other than to state its voluntary nature.
I’m not coming up with any massively outlandish statement here. The legality and validity of closed shops has been a topic of debate for decades and the arguments for and against are well-worn.
My point in bringing it up in the WGA thread is one that I’ll reiterate here: it’s that unions exist for the purpose of engaging in collective bargaining for their members, and if those negotiations fail, their only legitimate recourse is to withdraw the services of their members. Harassing and threatening the employer or its customers is not OK, even if it feels good to impassioned union members. Needless to say, the employer harassing and threatening the union isn’t OK, either. This is simply about civility and the rule of law.
You would like the part of the contract that says “we require employees in this job role to be members of the labor organization with whom our company negotiated a labor agreement” to be illegal.
However you do not want “we require employees in this job role to be members of the labor subcontractor with whom our company negotiated a service agreement” to be illegal. Nobody wants THAT to be illegal.
Why is one a bog standard business practice “all our Security guards are from XYZ Security because we signed an exclusive contract with them” and one a violation of worker’s rights “all our Security guards are members of XYZ Security Guard Union because we signed an exclusive contract with them.”
It isn’t clear to me why these are so different unless one has a “Unions Bad” bias applied over top.
yes, not only do think that should be the case, those are the labour laws in many places. As an employer, such a restrictive contract and agreement would not be allowed in the first place.
If you aren’t directly employing people but rather you are doing it through a subcontractor then the restrictions I mentioned above apply to the contract drawn up between subcontractor and employee
I don’t have a “unions bad” bias, I have a “compulsion to join a union bad” bias
I disagree. (Non-violent) protesting such as picketing in public spaces or calling for boycotts is also a legitimate activity. That’s not harassment, as far as I’m concerned.
In private life, we recognize this as an untenable construction. If Bob and Lucy decide to go steady, and if David suggests that’s a limit on his freedom to enter into a relationship, David’s a creepy incel. An exclusive agreement between two individuals is not a limit on anyone else’s freedom.
But business isn’t private life. So we should look at examples from the world of commerce.
(Edit: One note that should be clear: exclusivity doesn’t “impose association.” That’s straightforwardly an incorrect description. At worst, it imposes an additional job requirement for anyone that wants that job. Unless a person is compelled to take a specific job–which is called slavery–there’s no compulsion, no imposition, involved)
Pizza Hut has struck an agreement with Pepsi that Pepsi will be Pizza Hut’s sole provider of soda. If I want to get a job delivering soda to Pizza Hut, I must get a job with Pepsi. Is requiring me to associate with Pepsi in order to do this work an imposition on my liberty?
The Olympics Games have exclusive arrangements with NBC to air the games in the US. Is this an imposition on ABC or Fox?
Chartwell Catering has exclusive arrangements with a local university to provide all their food, to the extent that a department secretary may not pick up donuts from Krispy Kreme for a staff meeting. Is that an imposition on the secretary’s freedom of association?
Exclusive arrangements are a cornerstone of business contracts. They happen all the time in all sorts of settings. They’re uncontroversial for the most part. If we’re going to carve out an exception in the law for exclusivity with unions–i.e., the union is the sole provider of laborers–there needs to be a damned good reason for that exception. There needs to be a very real social good for it.
There isn’t. Instead, there’s a very real social harm: by preventing an all-union shop, in practical terms it weakens the union’s power to protect workers. I don’t think this is a debatable position, we have decades of real-world proof that it’s true. It shifts the balance of power toward the owning class and away from the working class. It concentrates wealth, depresses wages, and limits safety standards.
It’s theoretically possible that limiting everyone’s freedom by preventing this sort of exclusivity is a good thing. But in reality, this limitation on freedom–to be clear, limiting the right of a business and a union to agree to exclusivity–is terrible for workers.
I’m not going so far as to say that anyone who wants to limit freedom in this way is anti-union in intent; I think it’s very possible folks are arguing from a theoretical rather than real-world perspective. But in effect, it’s an anti-labor approach.
I agree with your comment, and I didn’t mean my observation to be quite as restricting as it may have sounded. What I meant was that the union has no right whatsoever to harass the employer or its customers. If, for instance, a store can continue to do business despite the strike, the union members have the right to picket in front of stores, but not to harass or intimidate customers entering the store.
The most egregious example of this kind of abuse was the garbage collectors’ strike I cited earlier. They were on strike, so no garbage was being collected. Fine. But it has always been the recourse of citizens to take uncollected garbage, bulk items, hazardous materials, and whatever else to the nearest transfer station in the municipal jurisdiction in which they pay municipal taxes. That the union was blocking that, too, and endangering public health in the process, was just pure thuggery. The union in question is one of the biggest public unions in the country, and has long been notorious for extremist and illegal actions, some of which have been violent.
That specific exception is already well reasoned in many places and the union practices you approve of are outlawed. i.e. you cannot have the union dictating who can and cannot be hired.
The social good is the wider freedom of employers to employ non-union workers and for non-union workers to more freely choose where they work.
Does that necessarily weaken what powers a union has? yes. Does it eliminate their most important powers? no.
I feel it is a perfectly reasonable compromise. You clearly don’t.
And yet thousands of businesses thrive and offer great conditions and benefits without recourse to closed shops or even to a union.
How is that possible if that scenario is so terrible.