On the topic of strikes, it’s possibly worth pointing out that they are typically the option of last resort.
They impose great costs on the workers and they can and do fail. And when they do fail, the consequences for future negotiations are significant. As much as anything else, people do not in fact like being in an antagonistic relationship with their employer, and they certainly don’t like uncertainty.
So it might be worth considering that at the point strikes are happening, something has already gone badly wrong between employer and employee, and that something needs fixed.
I think that Longshoremen unions and employers use the “hiring hall” method, because of the extremely fluid nature of the job - a ship comes in, the dock employer notifies the union how many longshoremen they need, the union runs a hiring hall and assigns workers to the particular job that day. In that setting, it makes sense for the union to handle the payroll, since they’re the one that assigns work to individual workers, and keeps track of the hours worked.
It was a 99-day strike of autoworkers in the UAW against Ford in Windsor, Ontario. Justice Rand’s solution was a compromise that sought to respect a worker’s right to object to union membership, especially on religious grounds, while protecting the union from “free riders” who would benefit from the gains the union fought for without having to pay dues.
The union hiring hall was fought for by longshoremen to ensure work was spread out more equitably rather than letting employers pick their favourite workers or those who bribed the employer for work in a system called the “shape-up.”
Right. Years ago, I worked in a union shop, and it was explained to me when I signed on that it was a union shop, but that I could opt out under something called “the Rand formula.” I had no idea what that was, at the time, so it was explained to me that I could either pay union dues to the union, or I could pay the equivalent back to the employer. But either way, I wasn’t going to see that money. Since there seemed to be more upside to joining the union than downside, I joined.
Many years later, I studied labour law in law school; and sure enough, we studied the Rand formula. Having had a bit of experience with it, I understood it totally, but some of my younger classmates who had never worked in a union shop, had some trouble understanding it.
I’m not invested in this issue at all, but my first impression (this thread) is that what you describe is good policy. None of the public policy reasons I can think of which make unions a good thing seem to apply in the public sector.
The discussion has mostly been about mandatory dues, but I’m mostly interested in strikes. As the title indicates.
For example, your analogy to Pizza Hut’s exclusive agreement with Pepsi cola breaks if a) Pepsi cola retains the right to interrupt service as a negotiating tactic, b) Pizza Hut has a state monopoly on the provision of soft drinks, and c) good public policy will not tolerate interruptions in the availability of soft drinks.
In fact the more I think about it in the abstract, the more I feel my opinion cementing that public sector unions are basically political parties with superpowers. And this is, I gather, not the takeaway I should have from this thread.
Consider if a local government is elected on a ticket to cut the police budget. Maybe spin some of the funds off into social services programs. The police threaten to go on strike. My thinking is, that approaches extortion. The police actually go on strike. Why isn’t that obstruction of government?
And it’s not like Pizza Hut. People who are in need of police services cannot call some second municipal police department that isn’t dealing with a strike. Public policy will not permit an interruption in police services like it does for Disney programming or Olympics coverage. Under our system of government the state literally cannot enforce its laws without police. In theory the national guard / military could be called in but that means martial law.
Now, I think the situation is less dire when it comes to teachers. But my initial impression - as I said before, I’m not invested - is that I think it’s bad public policy to allow even a teachers’ strike. There are private schools but they aren’t always accessible to the public, certainly not if there’s a sudden strike. You can’t expect everyone to immediately enroll their kids in a private school because the public schools are on strike this week. Besides, here the state guarantees the right to a free full education and the people rely on that as meaning the state will watch the children during school hours, and even feed them in many cases. I think the grounds for a justified strike would have to be serious hazards to student safety, maybe lead poisoning or disease outbreak or severe weather or something similarly grave.
I cannot stress enough that this is all my initial impression on the topic. I don’t work in public sector and during my couple years in the workforce have had no other occasion to think about unions. I don’t see anybody making the points I’m making, except possibly wolfpup wrt trash collection, so maybe I’m missing something obvious.
I mean we’ve had public sector unions for a hundred years, the things you mention have mostly been addressed long ago. Maybe it’s different in the US, but in Canada essential services like police are prohibited from striking. They can do limited strikes where they might, say, reduce outreach programs, but they must fulfill their core job duties. Even the limited strike actions are usually negotiated with the government and an arbitrator. Similarly, teachers may strike for a short period of time (maybe a week), but then usually must return to work. Their work action is then ‘working to rule’, where they fulfill only the core duties defined in their contract. That would mean school is in session, but extra curricular activities are not, teachers work only their contractually obligated hours, etc.
These unions also generally don’t want to strike for a prolonged period. They are very aware that they are inflicting pain on the public, and prolonged strikes turn public opinion against them. That’s particularly important when an election is near, as people might vote in a government that’s more strongly opposed to the union.
Unions do not always have the right to strike. In my state, it is illegal for public sector unions to strike and the penalties ( to the workers and to the union) are severe enough that strikes are not common *. But unions still serve a purpose without strikes. When I was a union public employee, the government had to negotiate with my union. The contract was a legally enforceable contract - if the governor decided not to pay a negotiated wage increase , the union could go to court to enforce the contract. Later, I took a management position. In 2008 , the government decided we would get the same raises as the union employees for the length of their contract. We were allowed to sell a week of vacation time back for cash. Then the housing bubble burst. The sale of vacation time was cancelled two weeks before we were to be paid. We didn’t get the raises. We couldn’t do anything to enforce the contract. Eventually, around 2015 we were paid the raises retroactively over 26 pay periods ,meaning it was nearly ten years before we got the money we were “owed” ( which we weren’t legally owed). The union employees got their raises when they were supposed to and could have sued if they didn’t.
* A loss of two days pay for every day on strike, ending the deduction of dues by the employer ( good luck waiting for members to send a check) , fines for the union and the union leadership can be jailed. It hasn’t prevented all strikes - but there have only been about six public sector strikes since the law was passed in 1968.
A strike is the conscious, collective withdrawal of labour to put economic pressure on the employer to improve wages and conditions. (It is more complicated in the public sector, but that’s for another post.) Without the capacity to strike, workers are subject to the dictates of the employer. That’s great if you’re the employer, but pretty hard on everyone else.
Whether strikes are legal is a matter of law and struggle, rather than natural justice and principle. Often the legal right to strike was won only when workers broke the law and engaged in illegal strikes. In Canada, where the right to join a union and strike is broader than in most of the US, 95%+ of labour negotiations are settled without strikes.
Fun fact: in Canada and the US, union density and strike activity have declined precipitously since the 1970s, while wages and working conditions have also declined. Correlation or causation? Well, if you don’t fight back, you will certainly lose, and working people have not been in a position to fight back effectively for a long time.
The flip side of “the public doesn’t get a choice in schools” is “the staff don’t get a choice in employment.” The government has very close to a monopoly on school jobs. To my mind, those two factors balance one another out.
And while theory is fine when it comes to whether strikes should happen, historically they have been important for public education. Because public education tends to be a major (in some states, the major) expense for local or state governments, it’s very easy to balance the budget by chipping away at school funding. It’s a “frog in boiling water” scenario: if the chipping away happens slowly enough, or if funding is just not raised sufficiently to account for needs, locals may not realize what’s happening.
That’s what’s happening where I am. I was hired in 2007, with a salary schedule showing me what my raises would have been. If there’d been no changes to that salary schedule except for adjustments for inflation, over my 16-year teaching career, I would have earned more than $80,000 more than what I’ve actually earned–about a year and a half’s worth of income at my highest level. But most years the schedule has either been frozen, or raises have not kept up with inflation. My local school district has seen one of the highest cost-of-living rises in the nation, due to AirB&B and its ilk taking up about 3% of all housing, and housing costs consequently shooting through the roof the houses that people can’t afford. But our local district’s raises have been pitifully small, completely inadequate to compensate for the cost of living. Student needs have increased, especially post-pandemic, in a way that’s thoroughly unaddressed by funding.
Strikes are a way to cut through the bullshit. They are dramatic awareness-raisers. Consider the Chicago Teacher’s Strike: after years of failed negotiations, the strike earned staff a 16% raise, and earned students things like smaller class sizes, more support staff like nurses, and more.
Rare strikes by public sector staff can bring about positive changes. I encourage you to read more about their practical history, rather than just going off your initial impressions.
In the end it comes down to ownership. The laws strongly support the rights of owners of businesses to control their business. Unions are necessary so workers have the political clout necessary for laws that allow them to control their own labor in the same manner.
I’ve yet to hear the any of the anti-union logic applied to business ownership. Would it be unfair if business had to share their profits with non-owners because non-owners have a right to profit as well? Would it be unfair if businesses could not shut down if they become unprofitable because their employees still want their wages? I don’t think so myself, but apparently there is some sort of argument that fairness is only a concern for one side of the equation.
Fair enough; my point was really a bit tangential to that discussion. I appreciate that unions have the same legitimate right to negotiate exclusivity deals with the employer as corporations have to negotiate such deals with each other.
My tangential point, however, is also a strong one in its own right, and it is that unions often use exclusivity to extend their power far beyond the bounds of what was legitimately negotiated, and indeed beyond the bounds of reason. I already cited three examples.
The first was when striking garbage workers went far beyond their right to withdraw their services and their legal right to be the only workers to provide such services, by blocking access to dumps and harassing ordinary citizens just trying to deliver and properly dispose of their own festering garbage. This really shocked me but it shouldn’t have, as unions harassing customers – sometimes aggressively and even violently – who are just trying to do business with their employers seems to be a long and unsavory tradition.
Which was also illustrated by my WGA example in the other thread; it often seems that striking unions will be satisfied by nothing less than bringing their employers’ entire business to a total halt, even if it’s a diverse business with many facets that have absolutely nothing to do with the union, its members, or its mandate. While some might take the empathetic position that you can’t blame the union for doing everything that it can to advance the interests of its members, my position is that when they start exceeding their mandate and disrupting the business in ways that are beyond the scope of the negotiated agreement and maybe even illegal – which includes harassing the public – the law should come down on them hard.
The third example was more comical than anything else, the case where I wasn’t allowed to move a computer from one office to another, a process that might have taken all of five minutes, because some union within the plant had exclusive rights to move things. To me it cast this union as an avaricious bunch of hyper-bureaucratic drones devoid of human reason. It set back parts of our project half a day and wasted the time of a lot of high-priced help to the benefit of absolutely no one.
You appear to be suggesting that public-sector unions shouldn’t be allowed to strike. This I cannot agree with at all. While it’s true that around here public unions are typically very powerful and often egregiously extremist, in most other places – especially red states in the US – they aren’t, and need all the negotiating tools they can get, including strike action. The government is a very powerful monopoly. Without that ability, unions and their members would be at the mercy of unscrupulous politicians catering to the Trumpists and rednecks in their constituencies. And since you mention teachers, I think this is especially true of teachers’ unions, because rednecks tend not to be fond of education.
I’ve not addressed this example because we don’t have cites to look at, and we don’t have enough details. In general I’m opposed to strike actions that endanger people, and not as opposed to strike actions that inconvenience people. This one is right on the edge, and where I’d come down would depend on the cited details.
This, however, I disagree with. The fact that a business has facets unrelated to the union doesn’t matter, as long as the business has facets related to the union. When a guild strikes a production involving a script written by its members, it’s well within its wheelhouse.
Again, without cited details or the union’s side of the story, I don’t have much of an opinion about this incident. Unions, like any other organization, can be reasonable or unreasonable. This may be an example of things being unreasonable; but it may also be the consequence of administration shenanigans designed to weaken the union, and a contract that has strict terms to prevent that from reoccurring. I’d need more details before I’d have an opinion, and those details would need to include the union’s rationale for the rules.
I’ve been told similar stories from people I have no reason to not believe. I think one example was a place which had a union that had to move items from one research lab to another. When a scientist got tired of waiting around for someone to move a piece of equipment across the hallway and did it himself, the union member that spotted it the next day got paid something like a full hour at time and a half as “compensation”.
Again, it’s possible it’s dumb–I don’t think there’s a special thing about unions that makes them immune from criticism. But without the union’s side of the story, it’s not worth forming an opinion about the case.
Unfortunately, many of the incidents I recall reading about were published 14 years ago and have been archived and paywalled and otherwise not findable by me, and other incidents were reported on the news and hence also not available.
But here are a couple that illustrate the general flavour of events. I had forgotten that in order to deal with the massive influx of garbage, the city set up temporary dumps in parks and other facilities. I specifically recall that the strikers were intentionally making it as hard as possible for homeowners to use these dumps as well as interfering with access to the permanent transfer stations, but the way they did this was uncoordinated and wildly variable, sometimes letting people in after a few minutes’ delay, other times blocking access long enough to create long lineups while yelling abuse at drivers, and causing some to give up and throw their garbage into a field.
This link is paywalled but I managed to grab a screenshot before the paywall splash screen obscured everything, and this is a quote from the first paragraph that gives a sense of the chaos the union created:
Toronto residents who braved the picket lines Tuesday to deposit their garbage at the city’s designated drop-offs were met by a mish-mash of conflicting rules, parking hassles, threats of fines, and at one transfer station in Scarborough, verbal abuse. Confusion and abuse mark garbage strike's second day - The Globe and Mail
An example of blatant and illegal union interference in access to the garbage sites:
On July 9, 2009, Ontario Superior Court Justice Mary Anne Sanderson granted an injunction to Wasteco, a waste disposal and garbage collection firm, preventing strikers with the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) from obstructing access to its Toronto and Brampton locations … Justice Sanderson said that union members will be allowed to engage in informational picketing outside Wasteco but that they will not be permitted to delay trucks entering or leaving the premises for more than five minutes. In an unusual move, the judge also ordered CUPE to pay legal costs, the figure to be decided later. https://www.fasken.com/en/solution/clientwork/2009/07/ontario-superior-court-issues-injunction-against-picketing-union-workers-and-orders-union-to-pay-leg
In another case that was potentially even more shocking because it directly impacted public health, the city took out an injunction against the union because union goons were blocking pesticide sprayers from entering the temporary disposal sites to control rodents and flies.
It was an unusual Sunday morning scene at a park, but just the latest twist in Toronto’s bitter civic workers’ strike when a police officer showed up at Christie Pits yesterday and read out from a court injunction to a handful of union pickets, ordering them not to impede passage of pest-control trucks. Court orders spray at garbage site - The Globe and Mail
The point here being that is a powerful and radical union whose strikes are often acrimonious and occasionally violent, and they have no compunctions whatsoever about doing things that are blatantly illegal.
So if I’m Ford or GM, by that logic a union is entitled to shut down all my assembly lines just because one of them uses floor mats from a supplier they’re striking against. And by that same logic, they’d be entitled to shut down my entire operation even if I wasn’t actually buying the floor mats at the time (since the union has shut down production) but merely using existing inventory. OK, but we’re going to have to disagree.
I thought this was a straightforward enough incident to not need “the other side”, but I get your point. All I can tell you is that I’m not embellishing it in any way; the computer move was completely trivial and the union edict interfered with a major project on a tight timeline while not helping the union in any discernible way at all. The manager literally did yell at me, but not out of anger – more out of sheer shock that I would do such a thing in a “union shop”. He offered no particular excuses on behalf of the union, except that, well, they’re a union, and this what unions do. The company seemed like it had reasonably liberal management, but perhaps the blue-collar workers were treated differently.
I’ll just throw in one further comment. The company was investing something well north of $500 million (and this was decades ago) for major plant modernization and automation. The automation plan was comprehensive and intended to integrate everything from long-term planning to real-time materials movement. The technical challenges were big, but they weren’t our biggest problems. The biggest problems were caused by the major union, who fought the automation plans tooth and nail, because … union reasons.
The plant eventually did get partially modernized, but not nearly to the extent that management had intended, with not nearly the attendant cost savings. I was long gone by this point, but I did read years later that because of operating costs, the entire plant was being shut down. So everyone lost their jobs, including all the unionized workers whose interests the union had so strenuously and counterproductively tried to protect. Similar things have happened in the auto industry.
TBF, if the garbage workers have the right to be the only workers providing garbage services, then the ordinary citizens were actually just trying to do those same garbage services without the garbage workers.
And a great deal of this has to do the relationship between union and employer. I’ve heard tales of Shop Stewards jumping into machines to do work because the place was just that busy, as well as tales of non-union employees being told not to speak to union members directly, all work direction is to go through the various foremen. Same industry, different union relationship.
You are neglecting a key point. Yes I work for an elected government (State of Colorado) and am managed by a local government (School Board) but the actual running of the schools and contract negotiations are by hired managers (Superintendents, Principals, et alii) that can be every bit abusive as private-sector employers. If I’m so needed as a teacher that I should not be allowed to strike, then I’m so needed that you should not be allowed to treat me and my peers like shit.
Sometimes a particular application of that sort of rule is dumb/unreasonable but the reason for the rule is so that an employer can’t have other people do the union employees’ job - for example have teachers empty the trash and vacuum the carpets which allows a couple of union cleaner jobs to be eliminated. If the rule is being applied in ridiculous situations, chances are there is a reason - maybe the union that had the exclusive right to move things had some sort of unrelated disagreement with management and that’s why you weren’t permitted to move the computer.
And sometimes people exaggerate - I’ve often heard that because of union rules, a particular convention center doesn’t let exhibitors do anything remotely electrical , not even change a light bulb or connect a keyboard to a computer but that’s not really true. You don’t need an electrician to change a light bulb and while you do need to use the convention center electricians to perform certain tasks, it’s not necessarily part of the convention center’s contract with the union rather than the center itself imposing that requirement on the exhibitor. Because after all, the center is going to charge the exhibitor for using the electrician.