I must be missing a basic concept about union labor; it seems to me that companies who employ union labor open themselves up to a ton of hassles like strikes and finicky union mandates, as made mainstream by this whole Hollywood Writers Strike.
But what do they get out of it? Why not just work with non-union labor?
Well, that’s obviously most companies preference. It isn’t usually something they opt into voluntarily but because their work force decides to organize and the companies are unable, usually desipite their best efforts, to stop it.
Right. Most unions depend on a combination of cornering the market on a fairly specialized skill (e.g. flying passenger jets) or, especially when the skill is not so exclusive (e.g. garbage collectors), exerting pressure on people not to cross the picket line.
I’m not an expert on the issue, but I believe it comes down to two things:
Historically speaking, lots of unions had ties with the mafia and/or acted like it themselves, so anyone who went to work for the company in place of a union worker had a chance to get roughed up. So even though unions might not do such a thing today, there probably still is some amount of mental inertia to not go around the union.
And simply you can’t just hire anyone for lots of jobs out there. You need people who have experience and/or talent. And if all of those people realise that they’ve got more to be had by joining up with their fellows and keeping the union going, then the only people not unionised are going to be people who have no experience and/or no talent. Going with those people could cost more in terms of revenue than going with union workers adds to the bottom line.
There is also the National Labor Relations Act, which gives employees certain rights to organize, and employers face penalties for failing to respect those rights.
Actually, I’ve known a number of manufacturing-type businesses that really like unions. One bargaining unit, one contract, one set of standards, etc.
Granted they may occasionally be inconvenienced by the union, or feel they had to give up too much in a negotiation, but they figured they got it back at some other time.
Imagine you own a successful widget company, with more than 1,000 widget makers. Would you rather negiotiate 1,000 agreements with your workers, or one? And, since your union contract is probably going to be close to the industry standard, you’re much less likely to have your best widget makers hired away by your competitors with the promise of more money.
My father-in-law was a union carpenter. His health insurance and pension are paid by the union, not by any of the companies he worked for over the years. Those companies paid more for union help over the years, but some of that went into the union insurance and pension funds. Those companies don’t have to worry about rising insurance costs or possibly losing employees when they change the pension plan.
I don’t know if the Writer’s Guild of America handles benefits for its members, but I know some other show-business unions (AFTRA and SAG) do, at least in some cases.
Here in Australia we’ve just thrown out a government that was trying to get all workers onto individual contracts and away from collective bargaining (ie unions). Some companies liked that idea but many, especially small and medium businesses, found that having to individually negotiate a contract with every single worker, one at a time, to be a huge hassle and very expensive - potentially more so than just paying them a reasonable wage and putting up with the unions.
I don’t see the relevance to “individual bargaining.” Most of the unionized workforce by number aren’t people that would otherwise have a contract at all, i.e., what we’d call “hourly labor” – either skilled, semi-skilled, or unskilled. Pay and benefits aren’t negotiated on any level; they’re set into a scale, with possible bonuses due to longevity, non-absences, blah blah blah, but basically the same for everyone. Kind of like things that union contracts spell out anyway. The advantage to this is the ability to promote based on merit, whereas the vast majority on union contracts don’t recognize merit at all (which, if your perspective differs, is the chief disadvantage).
Obviously a company would normally prefer not to have a union contract interfere with its ability to manage its business. For example, times are slow, and you may not be able to lay people off. Times are good, and so the union demands more handouts during contract negotiations, but then times become slow again, so what can management do? (To their credit, the UAW has been awfully understanding to the Big 3 these last three years, relatively speaking.) The union perspective, of course, is they want stability against this.
Magna is a huge company that just recently decided to willingly invite the union in. In some cases, these decisions are politically motivated, or make sense due to other business reasons. In Magna’s case, it already had a lot of union shops, so it was just easier to allow in the CAW. It’s rather more complicated than that, but Google News has plenty of the back story available.
By and large I agree with your point, individual contracts aren’t relevant to most US workers. But pay is definitely negotiated quite a bit. Yes, many companies have scales and pay ranges and such, but there is a lot of negotiation that goes on in a nonunion environment. Salary negotiations at hire, sign-on bonuses, and matching competitive offers are just three common examples. Plus, management has the ability to direct merit pay raises based on performance the way they define it without relying on an entrenched system.
Like most things it depends on the company and the situation. Each company will make its own decisions based on financial benefits, PR impact, and their own political/moral implications. Some companies don’t work with unions unless they absolutely have to (e.g. Wal-Mart), others embrace it, some are indifferent and will work with whoever they feel can help them best, others have little choice because of where they are or what they do. If you are making cheap sneakers it’s third-world sweatshop labour if you want to stay in business, if you are running a sitcom series its expensive union scriptwriters whether you like it or not. For more mainstream cases, it depends.
But you surely mean for salaried, non-labor jobs, right? I can’t see a widget installer going to a non-union shop and negotiating with the owner for salary, but I’ve always been salaried in a company with union hourly people, and so maybe I’m out of touch with the non-union, non-salaried employee of today. Heck, we negotiate salaries for lateral moves sometimes.
It happens. Someone applies for an entry level job that doesn’t require experience, but they have some experience, so they get a slight bump above the starting salary. Or they’re doing a good job but get a competing offer and get the offer matched. If you are specifically talking unskilled manufacturing labor in large firms, I’d be more inclined to agree with you, but there is a lot more hourly labor than just that–like retail, restaurant, and admin.
You’re kidding, right? Ever hear of Henry Clay Frick?
I’m amazed that you make a historical assertion that shows so much ignorance of the history of unions.
You work 40 hours? You get paid vacations? You get overtime? Why do you think you have these things?
As for why companies use unions, it’s usually in industries where strikebreakers don’t make economic sense. If your business is unionized, you know what your employment expenses will be during the course of the contract.
I hadn’t heard of him, so I looked him up on Wikipedia. Have you heard of Jimmy Hoffa?
Those aren’t benefits to the company, which is what the OP asked for. Besides, I would argue that those things would have come about anyway as the economy changed, just as slavery would have eventually ended even without the Civil War.
Which makes sense because writers and actors are naturally independent contractors, working for many companies. Residuals are handled by the union, at least by SAG, for the same reason.
It is perfectly possible for a production company to go non-union for a job - but then they are totally non-union, and won’t get the better actors and workers. Lower budget advertisements are made this way. SAG members are not allowed to act in these without a waiver. In our experience it is harder to get paid by one of these companies than by a union production company.
Right. Collective Bargaining is often a plus.
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Sage Rat** *“Historically speaking, lots of unions had ties with the mafia and/or acted like it themselves, so anyone who went to work for the company in place of a union worker had a chance to get roughed up.”
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Leaving the Teamsters aside, got a cite for this?
Yeah, great, thanks for that 60 years ago. What have you done today? I don’t get killed at work, thank you very much OSHA and MIOSHA. Non-exempt get overtime after 40 hours, thank you very much federal law. In many jobs, people get vacations/insurance/other perquisites due to the competition for good employees. In crappy jobs with no competition, you don’t get perks and don’t have unions. Hey, I respect union history, but it’s like arguing for the Democratic Party today for what John F. Kennedy did decades ago. What’s the current relevance? Meaning, of course, in the rah-rah terms that you’re espousing?
I work in a non union plant, and I’d say that salary negotiation goes hand in hand with demand. For direct labor, we usually bring in contractors who work for the scale set by the placement agency, but that’s because the market has really settled down. Back in the '90s, we negotiated almost every salary to some extent and hired directly into the company. Salaries for technicians and maintenance are always negotiated due to the variability in skill sets.
One HUGE time savings that I could see with a union contract would be the streamlining of the review process. At one point, our reviews took 2-8 hours per worker every six weeks (This was the old “360 degree” reviews, where everyone had to do multiple reviews.) I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it’s more efficient to give everyone a flat raise based on seniority, but I would go so far as to say that the dog and pony show of some review processes may not be worth it.
Unions were started by strikes and in the face of organized company violence. Companies were forced to accept the unions.It was a bloody and horrible fight. The original reasons for union organization was mistreatment by the company. Many of you are too young to remember pre union days.
I worked with a man whose first job was working at Fords as a shit checker. He had to go to the toilet stalls with no doors and ask the guy to stand up and prove he was dumping and not taking a break.
My grandfather was involved in the union movement in Colorado mining. When my father was being born my grandfather missed a union meeting in a church to be with my grandmother. The front door of the church was blocked and everyone in the building was burned to death.
The need for workers of all levels to remain organised will be with us as long as the pressures on the bottom line make directors examine costs, especially labour costs.
In other words, its ongoing and probably will never end until we have a radically differant system of reward and remuneration.
No business would stay in business long if it didn’t constantly challenge its own operating method, and it is likely to need efficiency savings, perhaps by replacing people with machines, or by ensuring workers have wider skills, or higher levels of training to use new technologies.
Unions and managers who cooperate can reduce staff turnover, by reducing staff sickness which then ensures a more stable workforce and reduces the costs of recruitments and training.
Unions working in partnership with management can actually help, most unions run education and training, and this is at little direct cost to the employer except in terms of time away from the workplace, though very often such training can take place in the workplace too.
Change is better managed through cooperation than through confrontation, but both unions and managers are guilty of being suspicious, adversarial - you could put the blame on both sides.
Any union worth its salt would recognise that there are times when companies need to relocate, or need to cut staff and hopefully will negotiate with their managers to ensure that the best terms are implemented, oftentimes when a company is looking to reduce its workforce it does so first by offering voluntary redundancies, and its usually the unions who can offer the managers the most effective ways of doing this.
According to the UK national safety body HSE (equivalent to OSHA but with some teeth) around 2 million workers have an illness that is caused or made worse by their work.
http://www.hse.gov.uk/press/2006/e06083.htm
http://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/indg355.pdf
If you link to that cite, you will notice that this comes at an immense cost to the UK economy, and the same is true of the US.
Many of those costs have to be borne by the taxpapyer in terms of benefits, lost opportunities etc, in other words unsafe employers often have cheap operating methods that cost you, the taxpayers.
Seems to me that good employers and taxpayers are subsidising the bad ones.
Health & Safety is one area where unions have a crucial role, unionised workplaces have fewer accidents, illnesses and injuries than non-union ones, and again, government does recognise this, along with business organisations such as the Confeederation of British Industry (CBI), and this is the same situation in the US.
http://www.hse.gov.uk/workers/safetyreps/
Employers can be very shortsighted by the costs of safety, if it isn’t on the bottom line then the costs involved in putting in good safety measures can appear to be an unnecassary burden, even with very large companies who you might imagine should know better.
Suddenly something happens, you only have to look at the BP safety record.
Look at those costs that BP have racked up so far,
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/12/16/bloomberg/bxbp.php
Union reps had complained and campaigned for years about BPs safety record, if BP’s management had any sense and had listened they would not be in the position they are in now.
http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/article1876755.ece
The benefit of unions to industry especially on safety is pretty obvious, and yet every year there have been catastrophic events where unions had raised concerns, but you will never hear about those companies that didn’t have those serious events - largely those companies that involved workers in safety.
Unions can literally save industry thousands of millions of dollars, workers do not want to be employed in dangerous circumstances, directors who listen and take them seriously can gain a serious competitive edge.
If you think safety is expensive, compare it to the alternative.
Sure, anyone can point to unions over reaching their power, but you’ll also find huge numbers of senior managers who do the same, but if you really want to know why we should have unions then look at countries are are effectively having their own industrial revolutions, and see how their workers are regarded,
http://www.minesandcommunities.org/Action/press861.htm
http://www.safehaven.com/article-4245.htm
Here in the west we do not have the depressing figures that blight Chinese industry
This is worth a look
Even if you do not trouble yourself to look at those links, you should understand that the companies doing business in thrid world nations, in China, India and other countries that have appalling records on worker safety, are very often the very same companies operating in western countries, and if it were not for worker involvment through unions they would cut costs by compromising safety in exactly the same way.
You might add that the political process ensures that these companies behave themselves, but you also have to realise that its usually the unions who do the politcal lobbying to ensure that laws to ensure safety are enacted, or that huge fines and comensation is paid out when those companies fail in their duties.