One consequence of the steady decline of unions in America is that we’ve forgotten what little we used to know about what organized labor even means.
Union members are often depicted as lazy and overpaid, and job actions as a threat to the livelihoods of average Americans.
These points would be a lot harder to make stick if union representation today still reached 23.3% of all private and public workers as it did in 1963 (according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics), rather than 12.3%, and if union members were still 16.6% of the private workforce, as in 1963, instead of 6.6%.
It certainly would be a lot harder to depict union members as outsiders at war with society. USA Today,for instance, observed in an editorial that “the longshoremen who are causing so much grief to workers and businesses around the country are among the nation’s best-paid blue-collar workers.” It noted that a contract with raises of 2.8% a year for five years “seems reasonable,” since the average full-time longshoreman makes $147,000 a year (according to the employers; the union says it’s much less than that).
The editorial counseled the port workers that it may not be “worthwhile to rock the boat so much” because “things are very good for them.”
But how poor do unionized workers have to be for them to be eligible to bargain for raises?
The subtext is that unions are on their way out, and that taking actions like agitating for pay and benefits will only hasten their disappearance. Recent events, however, are pointing in the opposite direction. Labor organizations are starting to show new creativity and militancy in attaining their goals.
Some 6,500 members of the United Steelworkers are now on strike at 15 refineries across the country, including the nation’s largest. Refinery owners say the issue is about preserving union jobs, but for the union it’s more about safety: “Onerous overtime; unsafe staffing levels; dangerous conditions the industry continues to ignore,” a USW statement says. That’s bound to resonate when explosions and fires at refineries remain frequent occurrences — including a big blast Feb. 18 at Exxon Mobil’s Torrance refinery. As my colleague Tiffany Hsu has documented,overwork and employee fatigue are rife at Tesoro Corp.’s Carson plant.
Unions are mobilizing even for workers who aren’t their own members. The Fight for 15 movement for a $15 hourly minimum wage for fast-food workers was launched by the Service Employees International Union in 2012, even though few are unionized. But the movement, and other union pressure to raise the minimum wage in the restaurant and retail industries, plainly has helped place higher wages for low-income workers on the agenda for politicians and labor-intensive companies including Wal-Mart. The retail giant’s decision to increase minimum pay to $10 an hour by April 2016 already has been followed by TJX Corp., the owner of T.J. Maxx, Marshalls and other retailers.
The Fight for 15 is “significant in two ways,” said Thomas Geoghegan, a veteran Chicago labor attorney and author on unionization topics. “It shows there’s some point in going out and disrupting, and it builds morale, even if it hasn’t brought in a lot of dues yet.”
Unions are proving more nimble at snatching victory from the jaws of even major defeats, such as the United Auto Workers’ loss of a hard-fought organizing vote last year at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn. The loss was commonly described as a“devastating” setback in the UAW’s effort to organize auto workers in the South. Yet today the UAW is negotiating with Volkswagen over a voice in work conditions at that very plant, where it still represents at least 45% of the workers.
The union defeat made nationwide news, but its success at bringing Volkswagen to the table has stayed under the national radar.
Attacks on unionization rights have been proliferating. The most recent example is thefast-track passage of a “right-to-work” measure by the Wisconsin Senate. The bill, which will come before the state Assembly this week and is expected to be signed by Gov. Scott Walker, a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination, would bar labor contracts that require workers to pay union fees.
Geoghegan argues that the Republicans’ anti-union campaign could backfire, by raising the profile of labor rights as a Democratic issue. “I can tell you with absolute certainty that the right has not given this a lot of thought,” he said.
Last year Democratic Reps. Keith Ellison of Minnesota and John Lewis of Georgia introduced a bill to recognize labor organizing as a civil right. Lawrence Summers, the former chief economist for the Obama White House and a quintessential centrist Democrat, lately has been highlighting the role of collective bargaining in raising wages. In the words of a January report by a Commission on Inclusive Prosperity co-chaired by Summers, “expanding the benefits of collective bargaining in the United States … would help reverse the trend toward wage inequality for U.S. middle- and lower-income workers.”
The presidential election already is shaping up as a test of which party can depict itself better as a friend of the middle class. Republicans tried to claim the mantle during the 2014 midterm elections, and many voters may have believed them. Yet attacks on unionization rights are fundamentally at odds with the interests of the middle and working class. Efforts to undermine collective-bargaining rights and union resources have only one goal, nicely articulated by the former corporate hatchet man Martin Jay Levitt in his 1993 book, “Confessions of a Union Buster”: “The enemy was the collective spirit. I got hold of that spirit while it was still a seedling; I poisoned it, choked it, bludgeoned it if I had to, anything to be sure it would never blossom into a united work force, the dreaded foe of any corporate tyrant.”
It’s impossible to know just yet how far the pushback will go, but something is stirring.
http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-20150301-column.html#page=1
The reality is that the labor union movement is a dead horse that needs reviving if the movement is to significantly benefit its current members financially and attract new members.
Walter Reuther, President of the United Auto Workers, just prior to his untimely death, expressed his open-mindedness to the goal of democratic worker ownership in his 1967 testimony to the Joint Economic Committee of Congress as a strategy for saving manufacturing jobs in America from being outcompeted by Japan and eventual outsourcing to other Asian countries with far lower wage costs: “Profit sharing in the form of stock distributions to workers would help to democratize the ownership of America’s vast corporate wealth, which is today appallingly undemocratic and unhealthy.
“If workers had definite assurance of equitable shares in the profits of the corporations that employ them, they would see less need to seek an equitable balance between their gains and soaring profits through augmented increases in basic wage rates. This would be a desirable result from the standpoint of stabilization policy because profit sharing does not increase costs. Since profits are a residual, after all costs have been met, and since their size is not determinable until after customers have paid the prices charged for the firm’s products, profit sharing [through wider share ownership] cannot be said to have any inflationary impact on costs and prices.”
Unfortunately, no labor union leader since has ever followed through. Nor does Los Angeles Times editorial writer Michael Hiltzik even mention the idea that labor workers should have an ownership stake in their companies. Instead, the entire focus of his column is on jobs and more pay for the same or less worker input.
This is and will not go anywhere! And labor workers, in decline due to tectonic shifts in the technologies of production that destroy jobs and devalue their worth, will further find themselves helpless as wage slaves on the verge of becoming welfare slaves.
Workers need to organize to receive the full property rights as owners of their companies, including full voting rights, not simply treated as beneficial owners with power concentrated at the top of the company, without any accountability or transparency. Unfortunately, at present corporations are structured so that the rights, powers, and benefits of ownership remain concentrated in a small non-accountable elite controlling corporate and financial governance. When the employees are owners, dependent on their income from the company’s bottom line rather than through ordinary labor wages and benefits, the workers’ economic interests are more invested to see that their company succeeds. In this way, each person in the company is empowered as a labor worker and as a capital worker (owner) and inspired to work together as a team to make better operational decisions to serve and maximize value to their customers.
The way to accomplish this objective is for the labor union movement to transform to a producers’ ownership union movement and embrace and fight for meaningful ownership participation in their companies. They should play the part that they have always aspired to––that is, a better and easier life through participation in the nation’s economic growth and progress. As a result, labor unions will be able to broaden their functions, revitalize their constituency, and reverse their decline.
The unions should reassess their role of bargaining for more and more income for the same work or less and less work, and embrace a cooperative approach to survival, whereby they redefine “more” income for their workers in terms of the combined wages of labor and capital on the part of the workforce. They should continue to represent the workers as labor workers in all the aspects that are represented today––wages, hours, and working conditions––and, in addition, represent workers as full voting stockowners as capital ownership is built into the workforce. What is needed is leadership to define “more” as two ways to earn income.
If we continue with the past’s unworkable trickle-down economic policies, governments will have to continue to use the coercive power of taxation to redistribute income that is made by people who earn it and give it to those who need it. This results in ever deepening massive debt on local, state, and national government levels, which leads to the citizenry becoming parasites instead of enabling people to become productive in the way that products and services are actually produced––physical productive capital, which is increasingly the source of the world’s economic growth.
When labor unions transform to producers’ ownership unions, opportunity will be created for the unions to reach out to all shareholders (stock owners) who are not adequately represented on corporate boards, and eventually all labor workers will want to join an ownership union in order to be effectively represented as an aspiring capital owner. The overall strategy should assure that the labor compensation of the union’s members does not exceed the labor costs of the employer’s competitors, and that capital earnings of its members are built up to a level that optimizes their combined labor-capital worker earnings. A producers’ ownership union would work collaboratively with management to secure financing of advanced technologies and other new capital investments and broaden ownership. This will enable American companies to become more cost-competitive in global markets and to reduce the outsourcing of jobs to workers willing or forced to take lower wages.
