Why we need to revitalize the union movement

12-15-08

Why We Need to Revitalize the Union Movement
By Michael Honey
Mr. Honey is Fred and Dorothy Haley Professor of Humanities at the University of Washington, Tacoma, and President of LAWCHA. He can be reached at mhoney@u.washington.edu.



Sixty years ago, in the wake of Nazi genocide and World War Two’s unspeakable atrocities, Eleanor Roosevelt crafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This historic document, adopted by the United Nations on December 10, 1948, declared that rights adhered to all persons, no matter their place of birth, race, gender, or religion.

The declaration codified rights Americans considered the birthright of all persons: freedom of speech, assembly, association, belief and worship; freedom from torture or cruel and degrading punishment; rights to be brought before a court of law, protected by due process. The Universal Declaration also declared economic and social rights: meaningful work at decent pay and conditions, no indentured servitude or slavery, and economic security. Article 24 explicitly supports “the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.”

One could not help but notice that our own government has violated or ignored most of these articles during the last eight years.

At home and around the world, people are expressing fervent hopes that the Obama Administration will renew American support for human rights and put the Universal Declaration’s principles into practice. Article 24 will come into play immediately in the next Congress in the form of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). The Obama Administration may or may not push for this, because it will stir a hornet’s nest of business and Republican opposition.

The legislation is desperately needed, however. Re-establishing labor’s rights to organize relates directly to the fix we are currently in. Lack of transparency, flouting the rule of law, attacking unions, extreme free market ideology – all contributed to our current economic train wreck. We need to re-establish a robust culture of human rights and labor rights to undo the wreckage of the Bush years.

Human rights advocates have long decried the collapse of labor protections in the U.S. The National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act of 1935 supposedly guaranteed workers the right to organize without interference, but over the last thirty years employer practices and lack of government enforcement have made the law toothless. Workers who try to organize are often fired or otherwise intimidated. Employers mostly get away with it.

Prior to the Wagner act, many Americans lived in fear because they lacked basic citizenship rights at work. Polls show that millions of Americans would join a union today except they are afraid to do so. Whereas thirty-five percent of American workers once belonged to unions, now only twelve percent do. This will not change until the law once again protects worker rights.

So, what would EFCA do? It would allow workers to organize a union when fifty percent or more sign a union authorization card, as the Wagner Act originally provided (court decisions whittled this right away). EFCA also empowers the National Labor Relations Board to require employers to bargain in good faith and would ratchet up the penalties for employers that interfere with freedom on the job. But this is not a free ride for unions. If thirty percent or more sign a petition to decertify the union, the NLRB holds an election, and if fifty percent go against the union, it is gone.

Congress should pass EFCA because workers rights are a fundamental building block for democracy. The lack of an organized, informed movement to counter the greed and power of big money has impoverished our politics and our democracy. As unions have declined, a vacuum has been created and filled by the organized right and evangelical Christianity, and the range of ideas allowed has shrunk in many quarters. Workers need unions, but American democracy needs them too.

The second reason to pass EFCA is economic. Business economists often claim unions impede economic growth, but historians concur that reality is quite the opposite: union wages make workers into consumers and homeowners. Detroit’s autoworkers compared themselves to slaves before they organized the United Auto Workers, which in turn helped to create equal rights laws, health care, pensions and family-waged jobs.

It is not the fault of auto unionists that the US never adopted national health care or pension systems comparable to other countries, or that America’s financial titans ruined the New Deal’s regulatory controls. Legacy costs are killing U.S. auto companies, but they could reduce labor costs by almost half if we had a national health care system.

Absent unions, soaring worker productivity in the last twenty years has not been matched by increased wages, while CEO profits have shot through the stratosphere. Unionization would increase wages and be a far cheaper way to increase consumption than economic bail-outs.

Sixty years since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, citizenship rights on the job remain one key to expanding other democratic rights. In the past, union organizing provided a key mechanism for American workers to right the ship of American capitalism. Strengthening labor rights can help do it again.

Historians are petitioning Congress with this simple sentence: “We, the undersigned historians, support the Employee Free Choice Act.” If you would like to join us, email your name and institution, for identification purposes only, to Joseph Eugene Hower (jeh67@georgetown.edu). For more information, see the Labor and Working-Class History website (LAWCHA.com).


http://hnn.us/articles/58002.html

If I owned a business, and my employees unionized it, I would shut it down, and start a new company. Unions encourage mediocrity; wage increases are not based on hard work, skills, ingenuity and innovation; they are based on longevity. The fact that it becomes almost impossible to get rid of slackers and people that don't work means no one wants to work, why knock yourself out when the guy working beside you is a slack ass, and nothing can be done about it.

Completely agree with Alberta Boy, and then some.

This is VERY interesting .. it is a short video of a new Ford plant in
Brazil.

One look at this and you will be able to tell why there will
probably never be another assembly plant built in the USA.  It will
also point out why more assembly plants will go offshore.

After you watch this, you really need to take the time to write
your Congressman and Senators urging them NOT to support the
proposed bailout of the big three automakers.  It will quite
obviously be another large chunk of our (taxpayers) money going for
a futile cause - because those companies are not ever going to be
able to change enough to be successful until the UAW is willing to
make some huge changes.  And that seems unlikely.

Do not be scared into thinking that Ford, GM, and Chrysler are going
to go under.  They will survive, but their assembly operations in the US
likely won't -- whether we provide a bailout or not.

And keep in mind that a hugh percentage of the cars sold in the USA
are made in the USA today -- not just by Ford, GM, and Chrysler -- but by
Toyota, Honda, and many of the rest.  They are built by American workers
and they are being profitable.  Why, you must ask?  Because they are
non-union operations and do not have the UAW hanging around their necks
like large ship anchors.

Watch the video. Sorry, not sure if it will embed or not, but copy/paste works too.
http://info.detnews.com/video/index.cfm?id=1189

Alberta Boy wrote:

If I owned a business, and my employees unionized it, I would shut it down, and start a new company. Unions encourage mediocrity; wage increases are not based on hard work, skills, ingenuity and innovation; they are based on longevity. The fact that it becomes almost impossible to get rid of slackers and people that don't work means no one wants to work, why knock yourself out when the guy working beside you is a slack ass, and nothing can be done about it.

I disagree. There can be good unions. Not all of them are but look at who they are working for. People making millions off their had work. As a stock owner I would rather see the CEO wages cut rather than the middle class worker. If you did start a company and you were fair and honest the workers probably wouldn't even want to start a union. In a large company like GM it's a whole different ball game.

There are some pretty big differences between smaller independently owned businesses and big corporations like the big 3 Detroit automakers. From what I've read about the history of the auto industry they might not have had the unions at all, if the employers had just treated their employees more fairly in the first place.

My wife works at the local middle school as a paraprofessional. She was forced to join a union. A union that does absolutely nothing for you when you need something, but they are first in line with their hand out for their union dues. Unions are like politicians. They all suck, just different levels of suckiness.

I agree that a lot of unions suck but a lot of employers suck too, as that video about the Ford offshore production plant in Brazil demonstrates. US workers need somebody to represent them, unions are far from being a perfect solution, but they are better than nothing, and far better than for us to trust our politicians to represent us. Without unions many US workers would probably still be working under the same kinds of unsafe working conditions and unfair wage practices that were predominantly the rule before the unions were originally formed. The rapid rise of the unions in the early 20th century never would have happened if they hadn't been so badly needed, and if workers here hadn't been so unfairly treated and badly exploited during the early years of the Industrial Revolution. Without the historical impact of the union movement, we would be a lot worse off than we are now, and I think we would probably be even worse off than a lot of Chinese workers are, worse off than all those other heavily exloited populations of foreign workers worldwide, many of whom presently work under conditions and pay scales that would still be illegal in the US. In the "brave new world" of neoliberal globalization in which we now live, most US multinational corporations are now using as many foreign workers as they can, in every capacity they can, and stuffing the pockets of politicians in order to support globalization and bust the unions. They will eventually leave US workers at approximately the same economic level and standard of living as many oppressed third world workers now "enjoy," as US workers' rights, and pay and benefit expectations, are gradually being whittled away, under the growing competition with non US workers in China, the Mideast, Mexico, and most of the so-called Third World.

Joe, just wondering what you think sucks about the video or about Ford building a state of the art production plant? If it is because it isn't in the US, blame the UAW for that.

Some jobs are just not worth $100K/year, but thanks to the unions, that is what automotive line workers are making these days. That is why it costs American car manufacturers about double per hour as their Japanese counterparts who have plants in the USA. Shall we get the illegal immigrants who work in the fields to unionize too? How much do you want to pay for your head of lettuce or handful of tomatoes?

Ask union workers how they like going on strike, how they pay their bills when they are on strike for weeks or months at a time. Employees are still treated badly, but now they have the unions to treat them badly as well as their employers. I've worked at enough jobs where I got treated like crap and I left those jobs and found something better. No union needed. There is that thing that most Americans have lost formerly known as being responsible for yourself. Instead of making things better for yourself it is easier to sue someone or have someone else fight your fight. Why stop there, just collect welfare and let someone else work for you. That's the way of the New American. The Americans who built this country are probably rolling over in their graves.

Dumbo wrote:

Joe, just wondering what you think sucks about the video or about Ford building a state of the art production plant? If it is because it isn't in the US, blame the UAW for that.

Some jobs are just not worth $100K/year, but thanks to the unions, that is what automotive line workers are making these days. That is why it costs American car manufacturers about double per hour as their Japanese counterparts who have plants in the USA. Shall we get the illegal immigrants who work in the fields to unionize too? How much do you want to pay for your head of lettuce or handful of tomatoes?

Ask union workers how they like going on strike, how they pay their bills when they are on strike for weeks or months at a time. Employees are still treated badly, but now they have the unions to treat them badly as well as their employers. I've worked at enough jobs where I got treated like crap and I left those jobs and found something better. No union needed. There is that thing that most Americans have lost formerly known as being responsible for yourself. Instead of making things better for yourself it is easier to sue someone or have someone else fight your fight. Why stop there, just collect welfare and let someone else work for you. That's the way of the New American. The Americans who built this country are probably rolling over in their graves.

What do you want the whole country to work for minimum wage? And the unions are big on keeping working conditions safe. Don't have to worry about that in Mexico and other places. But one thing you can be sure of is I won't buy something make in Japan, Mexico or China.

Quote :

What do you want the whole country to work for minimum wage?

Of course not. But I think if someone is earning $100K they should be earning it. There was one of the news shows on TV that showed a guy who makes that $100K and his job on the assembly line is to close the car door, remove a shock absorber from the trunk and mount one end of it in place on the car using a pneumatic wrench. He figured out that he can let the cars pile up in his area of the line, then quickly do his task on the cars in his area, then take a 15-20 minute break while he waits for the next batch of cars to go through his area. That to me is not a $100K job. Thanks to the unions, it has become a $100K job.

So you think the crop picker illegals should get $100K too? Don't want them working for too little. How about the kid at McDonalds who works harder than the auto line worker above, has probably just as much skill. Should fast food workers who do get minimum wage now be bumped up to $100K?

Under the up and coming administration where they will be "redistributing the wealth", where is the incentive to do better? Why should I work more hours or work to get better paying clients when the more I make, the higher percentage they will take because "I don't need that much". Kind if veering off the union topic, but same thing goes for unions and their affect on work ethic. Unions drive a wedge between the company and the work force. Instead of working as a team to become the most efficient possible, it is all about doing as little as you can for as much as you can get.

Quote :

And the unions are big on keeping working conditions safe. Don't have to worry about that in Mexico and other places.

I have worked in a hazardous industry where limbs have been lost when accidents happen. Union shops were no safer than non-union shops. OSHA covers safety issues of union and non-union operations. Unions also implement stupidity. I've worked trade shows in convention centers where you cannot plug your own lights into the AC power because the union demands that a union "electrician" insert your plug into their socket. Gee, better call an electrician to come to my house and plug in my blender.

Dumbo wrote:

Quote :

What do you want the whole country to work for minimum wage?

Of course not. But I think if someone is earning $100K they should be earning it. There was one of the news shows on TV that showed a guy who makes that $100K and his job on the assembly line is to close the car door, remove a shock absorber from the trunk and mount one end of it in place on the car using a pneumatic wrench. He figured out that he can let the cars pile up in his area of the line, then quickly do his task on the cars in his area, then take a 15-20 minute break while he waits for the next batch of cars to go through his area. That to me is not a $100K job. Thanks to the unions, it has become a $100K job.

So you think the crop picker illegals should get $100K too? Don't want them working for too little. How about the kid at McDonalds who works harder than the auto line worker above, has probably just as much skill. Should fast food workers who do get minimum wage now be bumped up to $100K?

Under the up and coming administration where they will be "redistributing the wealth", where is the incentive to do better? Why should I work more hours or work to get better paying clients when the more I make, the higher percentage they will take because "I don't need that much". Kind if veering off the union topic, but same thing goes for unions and their affect on work ethic. Unions drive a wedge between the company and the work force. Instead of working as a team to become the most efficient possible, it is all about doing as little as you can for as much as you can get.

Quote :

And the unions are big on keeping working conditions safe. Don't have to worry about that in Mexico and other places.

I have worked in a hazardous industry where limbs have been lost when accidents happen. Union shops were no safer than non-union shops. OSHA covers safety issues of union and non-union operations. Unions also implement stupidity. I've worked trade shows in convention centers where you cannot plug your own lights into the AC power because the union demands that a union "electrician" insert your plug into their socket. Gee, better call an electrician to come to my house and plug in my blender.

Where I worked the union would point out safety hazards and the company would fix it before OSHA ever got involved.

But stick with no union and work for peanuts.

I earn more per hour then the union workers in my trade do. And the company (General Contractors) I work for gets to bid lower for jobs as well. Why? Because if I need to do something, and there is a task that needs to be done/finished before I can do my work, I do it. I don't have to stand and wait 30 minutes for a labourer to show up and spend 10 minutes doing the task. Liability laws (even here in relatively litigious free Canada) and OS & H fines ensure that the Superintendent, and by proxy his direct underlings, watch and either take action or report all dangerous situations, damaged equipment, or questionalbe work practices that happen on our job sites. We have weekly safety meetings for both the direct employers of the company I work for, and for all employees on site. Whenever a sub-contractor comes on site, all their employees have to have a safety orientation meeting before they are allowed on site, and if any additional employees are brought on site after that they too must have an orientation before they are allowed to work. Safety is always the first concern. Oddly enough, all without ever having to go on strike, pay any union dues, or have some shop steward tell me to put down the shovel or wait for a labourer to carry the lumber. I hate to say it, but one of the most commonly identifiable traits I have recognized in the most stanch union supporters I have personally known, is that they are fundamentally lazy. They carry with them a sense of entitlement, the belief that they deserve everything they can get, not because they work harder then anyone else, or are more efficient, but because someone somewhere else in the world makes more then they do. What they can't seem to fathom is that there are others that are worth more then they are. It is like athletes and performers - people complain all the time they earn too much, that no one should earn that much money. Guess what - if 100,000 people would flock to a stadium or arena, night after night, week afte week, and another 15 million would tune in for 6 hours on Sunday to watch, carpenters would get paid millions to build houses too. But they don't. Since I am not one of the top 5000 athletes in the world, I am a carpenter. I get paid what I earn, not what I squeeze out of someone by threatening their livelihood by going on strike. I get regular raises, not because I threaten my employer with actions which threaten the viability of their company, but by being productive and innovative enough to make them realise they are better having me in their employ then in their competitors employ.

Quote :

But stick with no union and work for peanuts.

OK, go ahead an unionize everyone so everyone makes $100K for doing squat. How far will that $100K go when there is no longer a $1 menu at McDonalds, but it's now a $10 menu? The money to pay wages has to come from somewhere. It comes from the consumer.

I agree that unions have a lot of serious problems but big greedy multinational corporate management also has a lot of serious problems. What about the guys at the top management level who wear golden underwear and pay themselves billions for doing next to nothing, or worse, for doing things that are detrimental to the industry, the community, and even to society at large? The world is full of people who will gladly do you out of $50 so they can make $5, and these people exist in corporate management as well as in union management. I have only worked as a union employee for about one year out of my entire working life, so that is not where I'm coming from, I'm not any kind of a die-hard union loyalist. I don't advocate that union employees should all get 100K a year regardless of what they do, or how well they do at it. But, before the unions came along, a lot of people weren't just being injured on the job, they were getting killed, they were getting poisoned, and whole communities full of people were being exploited and displaced in the mining, construction, logging, railroad building, and other industries. We see that happening now in the auto industry. There is always going to be a very strong tendency for the most obscenely greedy and vicious to be the first to rise to the top and once they get there they will exploit others (not just workers) as much as they can, just like they did in order to get to the top in the first place. That's just human nature and it will always tend to happen in an unregulated or underregulated economy. Politicians have shown that they are not going to represent the average workers, they are going to tend to represent the ones who can line their pockets the best, so, without unions, who does the average Joe or Jane have left to represent them? The unions, or, increasingly, since the union-busting politics of the past 20 plus years, nobody.

My bias is not so much pro-union as it is anti-globalization. The neo-liberals and the politicians in their pockets are just USING the hungry masses from Mexico, China, the Mideast, and third-world countries, to drag the standard of living down for average Americans (US and Canadians) and Europeans, and to drive the standard of opulence up, for the wealthiest 3%, namely, themselves. Big multinational corporations are being rewarded for outsourcing jobs and importing alien workers, finished components, and even sometimes their finished products, and there are fewer and fewer penalties or disincentives for a big corp to patronize foreign businesses who have pay scales and working conditions that would be illegal in this country... what this means IMO is that they are just using out-of-control globalization to avoid US laws when they're afraid of breaking them, wage laws, occupational health and safety laws, and environmental protection laws included. There is increasing justification to the claims that the US is quickly and dramatically moving into a place in history where we can say that it is "no different than any third world country or banana republic" just so a relatively small handful of people can make more money than they will ever live long enough to spend.

joe wrote:

I agree that unions have a lot of serious problems but big greedy multinational corporate management also has a lot of serious problems. What about the guys at the top management level who wear golden underwear and pay themselves billions for doing next to nothing, or worse, for doing things that are detrimental to the industry, the community, and even to society at large? The world is full of people who will gladly do you out of $50 so they can make $5, and these people exist in corporate management as well as in union management. I have only worked as a union employee for about one year out of my entire working life, so that is not where I'm coming from, I'm not any kind of a die-hard union loyalist. I don't advocate that union employees should all get 100K a year regardless of what they do, or how well they do at it. But, before the unions came along, a lot of people weren't just being injured on the job, they were getting killed, they were getting poisoned, and whole communities full of people were being exploited and displaced in the mining, construction, logging, railroad building, and other industries. We see that happening now in the auto industry. There is always going to be a very strong tendency for the most obscenely greedy and vicious to be the first to rise to the top and once they get there they will exploit others (not just workers) as much as they can, just like they did in order to get to the top in the first place. That's just human nature and it will always tend to happen in an unregulated or underregulated economy. Politicians have shown that they are not going to represent the average workers, they are going to tend to represent the ones who can line their pockets the best, so, without unions, who does the average Joe or Jane have left to represent them? The unions, or, increasingly, since the union-busting politics of the past 20 plus years, nobody.

My bias is not so much pro-union as it is anti-globalization. The neo-liberals and the politicians in their pockets are just USING the hungry masses from Mexico, China, the Mideast, and third-world countries, to drag the standard of living down for average Americans (US and Canadians) and Europeans, and to drive the standard of opulence up, for the wealthiest 3%, namely, themselves. Big multinational corporations are being rewarded for outsourcing jobs and importing alien workers, finished components, and even sometimes their finished products, and there are fewer and fewer penalties or disincentives for a big corp to patronize foreign businesses who have pay scales and working conditions that would be illegal in this country... what this means IMO is that they are just using out-of-control globalization to avoid US laws when they're afraid of breaking them, wage laws, occupational health and safety laws, and environmental protection laws included. There is increasing justification to the claims that the US is quickly and dramatically moving into a place in history where we can say that it is "no different than any third world country or banana republic" just so a relatively small handful of people can make more money than they will ever live long enough to spend.

Thst is exactly right. The way I see it the rich get richer as the poor get poorer. If it keeps up there will be no middle class. And you can bet the rich aren't going to pay for your medical and they could care less about the social security system.

I worked in a Union shop for 17 years and when I became aware that I was being exposed to carcinogens by being told to apply paint stripper to hot copper bands on a welding jig at the end of the day,I told my union safety rep. His response was to ask me if he could feel me for "lumps". I informed him sweetly what he could do with himself and that I would no longer be performing that perticular task.The "Union's " solution to this problem was to asign the task to my fellow employee who was not as insubortinate .Do I think we need unions? Hmm,let me think.....

I worked in a non-union shop for 30 days once, a few years ago, and was then terminated without cause at the end of the 30 days, because there was a loophole in the job initiation contract I signed which allowed anybody above me in the chain of command to do that. My immediate supervisor had decided she didn't like me, and even though she never made a pass at me or anything like that, I noticed that other male staff members were very subordinate and subservient in their attitudes and would kowtow to her every word... anytime I said anything, however innocuous, that contradicted the status quo of the shop or could be taken as disagreeing with her expressed opinion I would get looks from my fellow employees, looks like, "Oh my god here we go again.." they knew I was going to get terminated without cause, long before I did...

What I still fail to understand in all of this is how a revitalized union movement would in anyway change the salary structure of top CEO's?

That's a good point. I'm not trying to defend all the views expressed by the author of that opinion-piece in the opening post although I did think that it did a pretty fair job of pointing out some of the problems of unrestrained capitalism and neo-liberal globalization that have arisen over the past 20 plus years of the deregulated US economy since Reagan.

joe wrote:

That's a good point. I'm not trying to defend all the views expressed by the author of that opinion-piece in the opening post although I did think that it did a pretty fair job of pointing out some of the problems of unrestrained capitalism and neo-liberal globalization that have arisen over the past 20 plus years of the deregulated US economy since Reagan.

As a president Reagan sucked. Now we just have a lot of greed.