Is there any reason why there aren’t more of these? And if there are legal obstacles, then is there any reason why there should be?
ISTM that as more and more of the wealth produced by large corporations is absorbed by fat cat CEOs, what’s needed more than ever is some organized resistance by the proletariat. And this applies to lawyers and accountants as much as it does to electricians and plumbers.
What are the obstacles to setting up such unions, and should these exist (if they do)?
[The first half of this is more of a GQ and the second half is a GD. I put it here because I think this is the greater concern, but a mod can move it if otherwise.]
The main reason white-collar professionals don’t have unions is probably that they just don’t need them. The whole point of a union is that any single employee is relatively easy to replace, and so they only gain bargaining power in a group. Professionals, however, are more highly specialized and skilled, and are thus harder to replace. This gives an individual professional greater bargaining power. Also, white-collar professionals often belong to professional groups that perform some (though not all) the functions of a union. Bar associations, for example, are formidable advocates for lawyers.
The only thing I would add to this very complete answer is that unions are based on the notion that management and labor are two separate and distinct entities. Once you hit the professional level, the lines start to blur a lot more. In my last job, I wasn’t a manager and had no direct reports, but I was in charge of setting the agenda for a small team. It’s not really clear where that sort of position falls in the management/labor divide.
I disagree that this distinction exists between white collar professionals and blue collar professionals. You can’t just drag some guy off the street and have him weld something.
If some law/accounting/consulting firm announces that there are no pay raises this year and/or the pension or health plan is being gutted, and/or the workweek is being increased etc., what recourse does any individual have? Very little, which is why these things are happening all over the place as I write this.
In fact, it’s possible that white collar professionals have even less leverage than blue collar ones, as they may tend to develop more and more into very specialized niches over the course of their careers to a greater extent than BC ones, and it’s harder for them to find alternative employment.
What exactly will or can the bar association do in the scenario outlined above?
Engineers at the big 3 were given every item the unions had won in their contracts to keep them from unionizing. Why start a union when you are getting the benefits for free?
Because what is given can be taken away. What is negotiated for and agreed upon and formalized in a binding contract cannot be taken away. Or at least not taken away easily.
I’m actually a professional (engineer) who is a member of a union, working for a public water/sewer utility. It is a mandatory requirement of the job for me to be a member of the union.
Prior to taking this job, I worked for two engineering consulting companies. I was not in a union, nor did I see the need for one. My retirement consisted of a 401(k). Being a Professional Engineer with specialized skills, I could easily get work with any of several dozen competing firms, and my 401(k) transferred with me.
The downside of my previous jobs are obvious–less job security and my 401(k) was subject to market fluctuations.
One of the advantages of working in my current governmental position is that there is a pension plan. However, I am not vested in the plan until after several years of employment. During this time, I am gambling that my employer will not terminate me or alter the terms of the pension plan–and for this reason, being a member of the union is valuable.
Basically, pension plans and unions seem to go hand-in-hand. Short of an employment contract, there is no other way for me to safeguard my pension over the course of years of employment without union protection.
If I didn’t have the pension to safeguard, I wouldn’t see the need for a union. My skills are still easily transferable.
A good blue-collar worker can maybe find a job working the same amount. Fire a good white-collar worker, and he can quite possibly jump ship, take your best secrets and organization attributes with him, and get a promotion and a substantial raise.
Second, you’d be negotiating with yourself. Even if you’re not quite management, you’ve got an investment account, probably own stock in the company, and in any case may not be able to join a union at all. Unionization laws require that workers be in a substantially similar occupation, and it’s not at all clear that “analyst” or “manager” would do.
Finally, there’s simply a lack of any point. Unions are not going to get you anything better than you can get for yourself. You’ve spent a lot of time investing in your skills and education: why join organizations legendary for slow, obnoxious “merit” increases which are wholly based on age, and which nail down job categories to reduce flexibility? You’d be cutting your own throat, because flexibility is your buggest asset.
That said, I have been pondering the idea of a League or Guild for white-collar workers at major corporations. The concept would be that any worker in the right profession could buy into the League. The League would run certain plans for the benefit of its people if they wanted, and might even take over healthcare from the employer (federal law permitting). But primarily, the League would own stock in its corporation (its primary asset), and would therefore have a vested interest in making sure operations went smoothly. The goal would be to get the company working as effectively as possible, while acting as an advocate for employees in any kind of dispute. It would not run contract negotiations, but might put out evaluations of employees and executives itself.
Unionization in the United States is principally governed by the National Labor Relations Act (wikipedia, text of the Act at the NLRB website). The Act contains a provision (Sec. 9b) which forbids designating a group of professional (defined at Sec. 2(12)) and non-professional employees as a single bargaining unit unless a majority of the professional employees consent. Thus the original drafters of the Wagner Act appeared to contemplate the existence of professional employee unions.
And there are some: the teachers’ unions (NEA and AFT), the Newspaper Guild (now a part of the CWA), the pilots’ union (ALPA), the Fraternal Order of Police, and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) all contain workers who might be classified as falling within that very nebulous term “professional.”
It is, nevertheless, tough going. As a poster above noted, it can be difficult to determine where to draw the line between labor and management. The NLRA, which hasn’t changed in any significant way since the Taft-Hartley Amendments of 1947 (over sixty years ago), draws the line at supervisors. The Act defines supervisors as follows:
[Underlining mine]
The most recent case on this point, NLRB v. Kentucky River Community Care, 532 U.S. 706 (2001), considered whether nurses who oversaw the performance of nurse’s aides by virtue of their training in nursing and not as managers within their employer’s organization were supervisors and thus outside the ambit of the act.
The NLRB noted that it appears impossible to have an employee who is both a professional and who also does not apply independent judgment in his work. As explained above, the NLRA seems to contemplate the existence of professionals in unions (although, the language regarding professionals was in the 1935 Wagner Act, the supervisor exception came about in the 1947 Taft-Hartley Amendments). Additionally, the supervisor exception came about precisely because of those labor-management balancing concerns and the perceived mischief that allowing employees who direct other employees on behalf of the employer to also have collective bargaining representation. Accordingly, the Board attempted to separate out “ordinary professional or technical judgment in directing less-skilled employees to deliver services in accordance with employer-specified standards” from what might be called business judgment. This, it would seem, would preserve the possibility of professionals organizing without upsetting the labor-management balance.
The Court didn’t buy it, finding it to introduce an exception with no basis in the text of the statute. Kentucky River gives a good account of the development of the “supervisor” notion in American labor law. But the takeaway remains this: unless we update the law’s sixty year old conception of the structures of American workforce management, it will continue to be very difficult for a large majority of professionals to organize.
A former girlfriend was in a white collar union, she thought it was great. Then she got promoted to management and a lot of workers thought she took a job from them. The union proceeded to make her job hell and so after a few months she quit. After that she didn’t have such a great opinion of unions.
“Professionals” does not mean the same thing as “management”.
As above, I’m thinking of your regular worker in a white collar firm, lawyer/accoutant/programmer/management consultant/insurance underwriter etc. This guy is not any more likely to be management than a guy in a blue collar profession.
Anything is “quite possible” in a given instance. But there’s no reason to assume a white collar guy can get a better job elsewhere easier than a blue collar guy.
The only engineers I’ve ever seen with an employment contract are managers.
The people in the worst position, IMHO, are the so-called “Principal Engineers.” They are basically in middle management, but are NOT formally classified as managers. They are not in the union, and don’t have employment contracts. The utility I work for can terminate them at any time, for any reason or no reason, even if they are just a few months shy of vesting in the pension plan.
I worked for about 25 years as a librarian in various universities in Australia, and for most of that time was an active member of the trade union covering my position. Particularly in the public sector (which includes universities), people going right to the top are often members of trade unions. (I would expect that the Prime Minister of Australia and the Premier of New South Wales are currently members of trade unions, and that the Governor-General of Australia and the Governor of New South Wales are former members of trade unions).
Often at this level, membership is just a formality. At a lower level, while a human resources manager might be a member of the trade union, he or she would not take an active role for obvious reasons of conflict of interest.
For part of my career I was in a supervisory position, but that was not seen as a problem in terms of active trade union membership, and at times I was a union delegate arguing for higher pay levels for library staff working at lower levels than I was. What would have been a problem would have been if someone reporting to me had a problem with one of my decisions. That never happened with me, but if it had, they could have gone past me in the trade union hierarchy, and had their grievance dealt with by another trade union official (honorary or paid).
But this happens because there’s much more acceptance of trade unions as being a normal part of the workplace in Australia than there is in the US.
BTW, the story I posted above about my ex girlfriend having trouble with a union was in Australia, she worked for the Census bureau there. I was surprised when she told me she was in a union because of the work she did.
Yes, in a federal government department in Australia, you can have trade union membership going right on up to the permanent head and the minister. Of course, it can cause roblems of conflict of interest, but usually people work out ways to avoid that, by having senior administrators taking no active role in the trade union.
The full story was that she worked in Canberra and then came to get her MS degree in the US. When she went back she wanted to work in her hometown of Sydney so she got a job in management in that office of the census bureau. The Sydney locals were very upset that she was picked for the promotion over them so that’s why they caused her so many problems that made her leave.
No, you can’t - but you can train him, in-house, and in a few weeks (maybe months), you’ll have a competent welder. Not brilliant, perhaps, but good enough for most work. On the flip side - it takes seven years of post-secondary education (college and law school) to produce an attorney, plus the bar exam. This isn’t something you can replicate in-house. And that’s just to get someone who is legally able to practice law - for most people, it’ll take a few more years on top of that to become really good at what they do.
Well, specialization can be a real problem, of course. But as a general rule, professionals are going to be better off, even in bad situations, than similarly situated blue-collar workers. Pay cuts still leave us with more money, benefit cuts still leave us with better benefits, and so on.
It can issue guidance in some cases - but you’re right, this isn’t something where a bar association can really throw its weight around. What bar associations do tend to be good at is lobbying state legislatures.
I turned down an AFSCME job - I’d been doing the job for a while as a contractor and they offered it to me. I was a systems admin at the time. The problem was that they’d classed secretaries with systems admins so that the secretaries would get paid more (nothing against secretaries, I’ve done that job too) and I’d have had to take a pay cut, PLUS pay union dues. And I’d have an AFSCME approved career path - which was not necessarily the career path I wanted.
Unions are best at looking out for the many. Sometimes this comes at the expense of the individual. A lot of white collar workers see themselves as the individual - they aren’t willing to sacrifice their potential 5% raise for 2.5% for everyone. They aren’t willing to accept a seniority system for layoffs if they are the one performing, but have low seniority.