Like most people of a leftist inclination, I grew up with a favorable opinion of labor unions. It was the workers against the owners, the relatively poor against the very rich. Unions were good. I can see that and get behind it in practice, but as I get older I find myself more and more mystified when I try to think through the theory of labor unions.
Surely there is a positive role for a place where workers can talk and plan and organize and come up with proposals. Improvements of a "qualitative" nature are sensible. If workers dislike some policy out of proportion to what the owners gain from having it, perhaps they will give it up. If in contrast the management is holding onto some program for fear of worker reaction, perhaps they will find that workers don't care about that as much as they thought. Give and take.
The story I heard is that US aircraft carrier pilots early in World War II complained to their superiors that they felt doomed. It was a job with a high death toll, and they would keep flying until they were killed. Management saw their point and instituted the "tour of duty", where if they survived a certain number of months or years, then they could leave and go to less hazardous duty in the US -- training, in this case. The story is that this policy paid off many times over as the training of new pilots could be influenced by the actual experience of veterans who had operated under real conditions as opposed to just the theory imparted by people who had never been there. Something of a digression -- but it wasn't a zero sum game of pilots against higher-ups.
But at the core of the negotiation in the case of US labor disputes seems to be that the workers want to earn more and the owners want to pay less. Without unions, the rule that classical economics would suggest is that there is supply and demand. The owners pay what they need to hire the workers they need, and the workers don't work for a wage if they can do better elsewhere. Unions seek to organize workers who are particular in some fashion (trade, industry, employers) so they can get more. But how do we know how much they deserve? Is it just the result of a bitter contest?
Backing up a bit, the workers and the unemployed make up the vast majority of the electorate. If they choose to do so, they could devise any policies they want. If the current constitution (let's restrict ourselves to the US) prohibits certain things, they could convene a constitutional convention and come up with a new one that was entirely to their liking. They could order all the wealth in the country to be divided up evenly. It's probably a very good thing they don't do this. Although I can't find the reference, my understanding was that Zimbabwe ordered a radical land distribution, but the new owners knew little about organizing agriculture for selling to world markets and there were very serious economic consequences. "Owners" who do nothing but collect dividends from shares of stock are worth little, but I am convinced that the well-paid upper management in most industries (short of the CEOs) are highly skilled people doing vital work that few other people can do. It is suitable that they are paid well.
What keeps the relatively poor from taking over? Some of it might be a genuine belief that rich people deserve to keep most of their money. Some of it might be the overall effect of "rich people control everything" as applied to the democratic process. But there have been exceptions. The 1930s New Deal set in motion a radical redistribution of wealth and income in the US that lasted decades.
Whatever mix they represent of the interests of rich and poor, government has passed significant legislation limiting what employers can do. There are child labor laws, safety requirements (as in OSHA), and minimum wages. In theory, this seems like the right approach to me, in contrast to unions. In practice, with the rich wielding (in fact) a great deal of power in elected government, perhaps unions are a source of worker strength. But the fact that their beneficial effect is so uneven is troubling.
I had some more detailed information about labor disputes at Verizon 10-15 years ago than most people because I knew a contractor there. Verizon inherited some of the unions of the old AT&T ("Ma Bell") when that company was broken up. The situation at Verizon? The unions mass their forces, and Verizon prepares for a strike by training professional employees to take over union tasks. A strike comes, both sides expend lots of effort and resources, and it is eventually settled. One contentious issue was the health plan. The union wanted to keep their relatively generous plan. The less generous one that management proposed was in fact the same health plan that all the professional employees (of supposedly higher rank and status) had. Who was to say what justice was? Did the organized workers deserves better health care because they were organized?
Then there are unions where the employer is the government. I knew a little (very little) about the teachers in the Newton (Mass.) school system, who were organized. Compared to other school districts, they were paid well, but still went on strike for higher wages. Who was to say what was right? Newton teachers didn't need to settle for less than they were worth just because others were being judged to be worth even less. But who could say what they were actually worth?
Unions can also be cumbersome and slow to react. This same Verizon contractor was setting up her office in a union building and was told she was prohibited from plugging in her devices because it was a union building. She had to wait for a union employee to plug them in for her. Something is wrong here. Imagine trying to unionize employees of stores that rented VHS tapes. The industry was hot at its peak, but disappeared so quickly a union would have been useless. Perhaps a silly example...
I'm not sure what to think about today's (US) world in terms of labor. There are lots of what we used to call "white collar" workers who are expected to return text messages 7 days a week. And yet I think most would say they have initiative, empowerment and flexibility that so far exceeds factory workers from 100 years ago that it's hard to even think about comparing them in terms of exploitation. Workers at Google and Apple may not be unionized, but the company treats them well in a competition to keep the most talented.
On the other hand, there is the horror of part-time jobs with irregular scheduling. You never know when your shifts will be in advance, but you must be ready to work when called. Along with leading to a disrupted life, this effectively prevents a worker at one part-time job with taking another to supplement. We can imagine the federal government stepping in to limit this practice, in the same vein as minimum wage laws.
One proposal I have made to help with economic inequality is "wage magnification" (http://bartfusn.blogspot.com/2021/03/wage-magnification.html). It is nowhere on the political map, but in principle it seems like the right kind of solution to income inequality.
But when unions go up against management, do we have anything short of a knock-down, drag-out fight on our hands? Is there any principle governing what the proper level of pay is? Our political system itself is in a knock-down, drag-out mode, but the parties to the fight are elected by voters. Even in a Republican-dominated era, they are deterred from simply ending Medicare or Social Security, because they fear their voters would rise up and desert their party. Instead they have to chip away at it and weaken the programs gradually. Even so, they must be alert to the swing voters who could shift the balance of power to Democrats. However imperfect, there is an anchor there to guide us.
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