My Union Solution

Here's my extended post on unions in general, spurred by the doings in Wisconsin:

Public employee unions are most of what the union movement has left.  Currently the US workforce is about 12% union, down from 20% in 1983.  Reliable statistics aren't available to me from earlier than that, but in the 1940s and 1950s union membership was certainly much higher even than it was in 1983- it's been declining since at least the 1970s.

And traditionally unions were formed by blue collar workers in the manufacturing or farm sectors, workers with little control over their work, few skills, and (at the outset of the movement) absolutely horrible working conditions.  Today these unions are gasping for air, their jobs shifted to low-wage third world countries, while public employees make up a higher percentage of the movement.

I've been talking to people who belong to unions, or have family members in unions, over the past few days, and it brings out a real dilemma.  It's tough to mount a full-throated defense of unions when one hears about all the abuses in public sector union rules.  Conservative complaints that it's nearly impossible to fire bad teachers have plenty of basis in fact.  We all drive past road work crews in the Summer and witness more standing around than working.  I read about firefighters retiring at age 50 with massive pensions to be paid in perpetuity.  Certainly union workers have more job security than I've ever had, and they're practically the only workers left who have defined pensions for which taxpayers are on the hook, rather than 401K retirement plans in which the worker has to take on all the risk.

But a little history is instructive here.  America before the union movement was not just miserable for workers.  It was really dangerous to be a factory worker.  Pay was bad, safety rules were nonexistent, child labor use was common, pensions were of course unheard of (and there was no social security to fall back on), and workers who complained were just fired.  If you were maimed on a machine, you were out of luck and out of a job.  Big Business held all the cards.  A powerful and easy read on this is Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, an expose of the meat-packing industry around 1900.  There was virtually no way out for an unskilled worker before the advent of unions.

So unions grew, and supported the Democratic party for obvious reasons- the Democrats supported workers' rights to a humane environment and a living wage, while Republicans were the party of Big Business, which wanted to keep the gravy train rolling.  Workers trying to organize unions were slowed by a myriad of dirty tactics by industrialists, but over time laws were passed allowing workers to organize as they wished (the US is a free country, after all, and if people want to join together to negotiate that's certainly in concert with the American ethos).

But eventually, unions started into decline.  The center of their power was manufacturing, and with globalization manufacturing jobs moved to China, Mexico, and elsewhere where labor costs are much cheaper.  That's nobody's fault- it would have happened whether those sectors were unionized or not, because US workers certainly are not going to compete with Cambodians making five cents an hour no matter how far to the bottom we go.

The new frontier for union organizing here should be and is the service sector of the economy.  That sector is growing faster than others in the US, and retail workers don't control their conditions much more than factory workers did back in the day.  But thus far it's been quite a slog- Walmart, the biggest private employer in the US now, is notorious for its union busting tactics, including the time it illegally shut down its entire meat-cutting division rather than allow seven butchers to organize.  And it's not like you could argue that Walmart workers are better off without a union- they pay is bad, benefits worse, and management ruthless enough to make any of the Gilded Age titans proud.

But unions haven't caught on in the service sector, so the major remnants of the labor movement are left in the public sector.  And they seem to be fighting for the wrong things: teachers don't get paid very well, but it's often very difficult to fire them even when their work is awful.  Police don't have outrageous hourly rates considering the dangers they face, but make enormous sums on overtime details of questionable necessity to the public. 

And of course government workers are practically the only ones left getting pensions, even if their salaries aren't as high as are seen in the private sector, especially for more educated professionals.  But keep in mind that there's nothing outrageous about pensions per se- millions of workers had them in the US for much of the last century, and it went fine for a long time.  The problem isn't that public workers get pensions, it's that private ones don't anymore.  That's great for Wall Street, which gets a steady stream of suckers trying to invest their 401K's, but not so great for workers.

I think that the reason government workers get paid a bit less while getting better benefits is because state and local governments have been willing to make workplace concessions in order to save money or delay payments.  It's cheaper in the short run to pay less in salary in exchange for more job security, even if it's not in the interest of quality.  And in tough budget times, pension funds can always be shorted by creative government budget makers and put off until the good times.  All this is understandable, and not the fault of the unions.

So now we come down to the present day.  It's pretty clear that the Wisconsin budget problems have nothing to do with unions (as noted in my last post), but are the result of a recession and a recent tax cut.  The governor has manufactured a crisis to enact his agenda, which is to destroy the unions in his state, even if those unions are willing to make concessions. 

So what I'd like to see is for governments at all levels in the US negotiate with unions, and push to reform contracts that don't make sense.  If teachers are too hard to fire, change the rules in the next contract, and if the Teacher's Union refuses, then deal with strike threats and the like.  If we can't afford to pay firefighters the salaries we're paying, then tell them at the next contract negotiation and work to get the public on the side of the cities and towns.  Yes it's ugly, and it's going to lead to strikes, but compared to Governor Walker's solution, it still leaves workers with the power to organize themselves; in short, it allows them the freedom to associate that shouldn't be denied anyone in the United States.