Although Wichitans have been focused on the local union battles, there is a national debate taking shape, too. The New York Times reported in a recent article that five labor unions plan to join forces to aggressively increase union membership. The unions involved, which make up one-third of AFL-CIO members, decided to form the coalition because they thought the AFL-CIO was doing too little.
With union membership nationwide down from about one-quarter of the work force in the 1970s to just one-eighth today, union leaders are right to take action. But labor unions have plenty of forces fighting against them as it is. It’d be nice if they didn’t have to fight among themselves, too.
Posted by Melissa Cooley
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5 Comments
Most people have agreed that the Unions are no longer needed in today’s business and work climate. They were a force of change for workers in terms of saftey, wages, working conditions, and work hours. Now that it is regulated by the government, there seems to be nothing more the Unions can really do but to increase their wages and benefits to above market standards.
For instance! The Japanese and German automakers who have built plants in the United States are all non-union. The Unions will build a building right across the street from them hoping to recruit and turned them into Union shops, but they fail all the time.
The people don’t want Unions anymore. They hamper production and force companies to look elsewhere, i.e. outsourcing, even overseas. It is unproductive for a workforce to delibritly scowl at their own employers with threaten stikes and unrealistic demands for pay increases. People are tried of it. Many people just want to work and make a decent living.
You can say the Union shops in Detroit get paid more than the non-union auto factories in the South, but they still get paid very well. You might get paid $40 an hour with GM, and only $25 at Nissan, but people are not complaining, because it is really good pay, and because the Japanese and German auto factories are NOT laying anybody off, they are expanding and building new plants, while GM closes them down and layoff tens of thousands.
The unions need to die off like the typewritter, phone switch operators, typesetters, buggy whip makers, and all other professions and technology that played their part but no longer needed.
Bye! Bye! Unions! You have your place in the history books.
Melissa — You say “With union membership nationwide down from about one-quarter of the work force in the 1970s to just one-eighth today, union leaders are right to take action…” I disagree.
Union membership is down because unions have done very little for the average worker, in recent decades, in return for the high dues they pay. Workers see their union stewards create a hostile work environment and union leaders living large while negotiating poorly for their members. If unions want more members, they need to make themselves useful instead of acting like grasping thugs with their hands out.
Actually, I don’t like to be too hard on the idea of unions because they balanced the brutality of the robber barons in the 19th and early 20th centuries. I have to admire the tenacity and courage of so many early union workers who were beaten, imprisoned, or killed for taking part in the demonstrations and strikes needed to get decent wages. (The union leadership of the time was not often clever or honest, and too many members were needlessly hurt, but the good that was done was necessary.)
Today, however, strikes are terribly costly for both sides, and more so for labor. Workers never get a raise big enough to cover the wages lost in a strike. Furthermore, in today’s mobile environment, companies must have parity in pay scales and benefits or their best people leave. Unions can’t realistically improve on that.
Joe Williams makes some good points, especially that today’s kind of unions need to die off. But I believe that workers still need some form of collective power, mostly because there are a too many bad managers out there (PROOF — 50% of them are below average!). Well, OK, it’s not a rigorous proof, but it’s good enough. The point is that bad managers stifle creativity and productivity, which means that their employees are held back in their careers and their lifetime earning potential.
In the USA, we need unions mostly to insist on increasing worker productivity. It’s the only answer to globalization, which is a permanent fact whether we like it or not. The basic point is that we can keep our high wages in a competitive world market if and only if our productivity increases.
Unfortunately, unions almost always take the other tack, resisting productivity improvements because they fear that jobs will be lost as each worker can do more and more. This is a short-sighted view and it is at the core of the unions’ loss of membership and our problems with outsourcing.
When I worked in Aerospace, I would have loved it if a union steward came into my boss’s office twice a year and demanded to see how much my productivity had increased. He should insist on new equipment and software to mske me five times more productive than the Asian workers getting outsourced work at one-fifth my salary. The steward should raise hell about endless, non-productive training programs with watered down material that wastes days on end. Union leadership should rail at the CEO whenever it falls behind on its overall productivity goals.
Productivity is the key. Only by increased productivity can we maintain our wages in the face of world competition.
One other point. The overseas labor competition we face is grossly unfair. Globalization puts us at a partial disadvantage because many foreign workers are being brutalized the way our workers were at the start of the industrial age. Unions could do something about workers being badly used in developing countries, but it will take a lot of guts. I fear that they’ve lost their guts. But guts is what it will take to get employers to give their workers a decent wage and benefits in countries like China, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Thailand, Ivory Coast, etc., etc….
The time for unions to beat up on USA management for more and more money is over. Instead, unions need to partner with USA companies to create an environment of growth. Overseas, the beatings can continue with good effect. Unfortunately, lives will be lost; but future generations will benefit for all time.
Having been a Union member for some 20 years, I have to agree with points on both sides of this discussion; the Unions as they are need to die off, but as the Phoenix of fable, resurrect as a new and different entity. Union leadership has become more a hindrance in some instances then a helpmate. The government regulates many aspects of the work place from overtime allowances and pay to safety. I’d like to see Unions fight for equality in the work place, not just between the sexes or races but between management wages and the wages earned on the floor. If the board of directors for most companies would stymie the greed exhibited by CEOs and other upper managers returning those millions of dollars instead to the work place in the form of technology, updated facilities and tangible benefits I truly believe the United States work force would be unmatched in global arenas. The unions should rethink their strategy, focusing on the board of directors and the stock holders instead of immediate management. By bringing ideas to the forefront, ideas such as cutting Managements wages and redirecting those funds into the company American industry would surpass any and all manufacturers from any nation in the world. But by allowing exorbitant pay and benefit packages for upper echelon individuals whose decisions are made primarily by committee and not by one person stepping forward to accept the onus of being right or wrong, the Boards and the Stock holders are the ones bring American production and productivity down. Therefore I think unions should be negotiating with the decision makers that have direct control over wage and benefits for “Mahogany Row” as well as with corporate management over basic wage and benefit packages for their membership.
The CEO of WalMart makes more in two weeks than a floor worker makes in HER ENTIRE LIFETIME.
The “robber barons” didn’t have it this good . . .
Cognosoti,
Someone once sagely said that the the trouble with socialism is socialism, and the trouble with capitalism is capitalists.
Indeed, the pay scales at the top are beyond the pale. But it does no good to play the class envy card. If the CEO’s excessive wages were split up among all the employees, how much would we all get? Yes, it would probably be a nice little sum; but it wouldn’t let me quit my job, or even buy a cheap car. So all I get out of comparing my wages to the CEO’s is a tight ball of helpless indignation in my gut — something doctors say will shorten my life.
My point is that measuring ourselves against the greedy CEO in this way seems to diminish us more than him.
Tj Ewertz has some excellent points, including the idea of unions negotiating with the Board as well as management, and spending money on productivity improvements, instead of excessive officers’ salaries.