The union certainly does NOT advocate for all workers and for union-supporters to think and advocate that union = better while ignoring all the complaints about them is just absurd. Perhaps better for the lazy, unconcerned workers but certainly not better for the company or shareholders or union employees who actually want to do more than’t what’s expected. Unions also prevent merit raises, which is where the bulk of my raises and bonuses have come from in my life. If I work harder, I receive more money. I don’t expect to cover for the “senior” employees who do less than the bare minimum and earn more $$. Whew! ok, my rant is over. Normally I agree with most everything written on this blog, but the subject of unions is where I diverge from the pack.

# jacqui583 says:
September 4th, 2008 at 10:52 am – Edit

Excellent post! As a CAW member in Canada, I can never understand why there is such an anti-union mentality out there. Non-union workers sometimes seem to resent us when we are able to save jobs or make gains where they often can’t. But rather than working to unionize themselves to improve their own position they’d rather tear us down. I just don’t understand it.

Um…. individual choice? Self determination? A good understanding of personal worth that happens to use different weightings than those of other union members?

In order to GET something from a union, you have to GIVE something to a union. Maybe it’s money. Maybe it’s hours. And maybe it’s a whole bureaucracy that you might not particularly like, or trust, or want to get involved in.

Here’s an easy one: I know plenty of people who do not want to get involved in contracts where their skills are viewed as secondary to their seniority when determining employment. They want to get bumped only by better people, not older people.

Many of those people not only want to avoid unions and will prefer empooyers who are nonunionised, they actively dislike unions. Why? Well, the whole concept of a union is to get a monopoly on the employer, thus preventing the employer from hiring “scabs” or non union members. But that means that the interests of the unions and the interests of the folks I know are materially at odds.

The union is actively working against my friends’ abilities to get hired without agreeing to union rules. My friends are actively working against the union’s attempts to force them to either join the union and comply with union rules (which they detest) or go jobless.

Unions sure as heck aren’t helping them. They’re hurting them. And unless you want to take an uber-patriarchal view that you “know what’s best for every individual,” you need to acknowledge that.

Now, as a society-wide thing I still think unions have a decent net benefit, problematic though some situations are. There’s a big difference between “this is the best choice for every individual” and “yeah, some folks get screwed, but the overall average gain justifies the harm.” The latter is, basically, what governments (and unions, and other groups) are FOR. But the concept of “all workers must join unions and it is a net benefit to all individuals” is as crazy as the concept that employers will watch out for their employees’ interests.

But I’ll leave it there – not exactly the thread for it…

“I know this is going to sound socialist…” Let’s try not to treat “socialist” or “communist” as a dirty word – the legacy of McCarthy is still here, but we should be fighting against it.

Agree with your saying socialism as a general economic ideology shouldn’t be regarded as a dirty word as its elements have successfully been incorporated into many pluralistic democracies all over the world…..including the US.

I do, however, regard Communism as it has been practiced by Marxist derived regimes with much scorn.

From the experiences of some family members who lived in Mainland China during the Maoist era and other similarly situated Chinese, the Maoists had no hesitation to brutalize, imprison, and kill anyone who was perceived to be a dissident….including those who were attempting to issue constructive critiques. They remembered what happened during the 50′s era Anti-rightist campaigns in the wake of the 100 Flowers Campaign, the millions killed through mass starvation in the wake of the ill-conceived Maoist instigated Great Leap Forward economic policies from 1958-1961, and the 60′s era Cultural Revolution which not brought about more brutalizations and killings of unknown millions, but privileged loyalty to Maoist ideology over competence to such an extent that by the aftermath, China’s educational, technological, and economic infrastructure were shattered to the point it wasn’t too far removed from the ravaged conditions of war torn China during the 1940s.

What’s more ironic is that in a society which supposedly privileged the workers and peasants, the “unions” which were allowed to exist had no power to strike or ask for better wages and working conditions because…….they were controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. Any attempts to protest….or even advocate for better wages and working conditions meant the worker(s) concerned ended up risking being labeled “counterrevolutionaries” and punished accordingly with imprisonment, forced labor, or worse.

As such, I will continue to regard Communism in the sense of Marxist-Leninism and Maoism as severely flawed tyranny-enabling ideologies which need to be studied, but regarded as warnings of what could go wrong when deeply flawed ideologies are implemented on a actual society filled with living breathing human beings.

However, rather than just scrap the whole idea of unions, we should be looking at how things got that way. Unions, particularly in the US, have followed a “business unionism” model, whereby they act in effect as an arbitrator between unions and business, rather than representing the workers. Many unions also are quite bureaucratic, which money going to high union exec salaries, rather than organizers on the ground. The good news is that we union members can actually do something about this, by exploiting the democratic system in place in most (all?) of our unions. We can elect our coworkers to union positions, and reform it from the inside.

Side note: “I know this is going to sound socialist…” Let’s try not to treat “socialist” or “communist” as a dirty word – the legacy of McCarthy is still here, but we should be fighting against it.

Working at a much faster pace can be disruptive to everyone else, no matter how “good” you think your own productivity is. It can also affect people’s pay unnecessarily by busting bonus curves. It’s a social world out there, gotta make nice!

Does that mean that workers in a factory…or any work environment should not be angry with co-workers who have the same or higher pay despite routinely slacking off or even sleeping on the job due to factors such as seniority and publicly demonstrated institutional loyalties??*

Does this also mean I have no right to be angry with co-workers/classmates on group projects when the vast majority of them decide to not pull their weight leaving me and one or two others to take up their slack?

Does this mean that as an instructor, I should let this behavior pass when I assign and grade such group projects instead of penalizing the slacking students with Fs for riding the coattails of those who end up doing all the work because the harder working students are taking the assignment more seriously?

* That was the experience of two aunts who were forced to work at an SOE factory during the latter stages of the Cultural Revolution.

2.“Unions raise the cost of goods and services.”
Because price gouging, market manipulation, monopolies, mergers and acquisitions couldn’t have anything to do with it.

Of course they do. They probably have a lot to do with it; maybe even most of it. But what does that have to do with the question of unions’ effect?

5.“Unions protect deadbeats; incompetant union workers can’t be fired.” No union contract forbids an employer from firing a worker who is drunk, high, lazy, incompetant, etc. ….

Two things here:
First, functionally speaking, adding another layer makes it more difficult to fire bad workers. It’s a side effect of the (good) goal to make it more difficult to fire good workers. Good goal, good end result, but it has a side effect.
Next, the issue more often becomes how one defines “incompetent” and how that meshes with other internal rules like, say, seniority. It can certainly be difficult to fire people who are not really pulling their weight but who are not drunk, high, etc.

9.“Unions mean less flexibility in the workplace and more rules to follow.”
How is abiding by a union contract different from abiding by any other contract? Granted, the union will be there to advocate for the enforcement of any laws or policies that were previously ignored in a nonunion environment, but flexibility? Labor unions are in the forefront for advocating flexibility in the workplace.

I don’t get your answer here. The more contracts, and the more detailed they are, then (generally) the less flexibility. Employers in union environments need to follow their own rules AND the rules of the union contract. More rules. less flexibility.

This may be OK–as you note, unions have significant benefits–but it still happens.

Oh yeah, one more thing: Unions are designed to be protectionist of the members, which is the entire point. But they do not just fight against corporations. They ALSO fight against nonunion workers.

In a nonunion world, I might get fired if my job could be done for less by someone else. If I’m in a union, I might have seniority which prevents me from getting fired. This sounds like a 100% good thing, until you add in the effect on the third party: you know, that person who can do my job as well, for less, and who can’t get hired.

Look at it this way: elementary schoolteachers are heavily unionized, and disproportionately female. It’s a lower-paying field than mine, which is moderately unionized, and almost all-male. There’s a huge gap between the pay of journeylevel electricians and elementary teachers (or secondary, or most community college teachers, for that matter). But within those union environments, the men and women are getting the same pay.

Closing the segregation gap has to be part of closing the pay gap.

As for reduction in sexism—I don’t know. I have spent almost my entire working life as a union electrician. Before getting into this, I worked in childcare, was a waitress, did some pinch-hitting as a receptionist, and odd-jobs as a teenager. I don’t have really anything to compare it to personally. We have a saying out in the field: “Put it on my check.” That’s what you say when someone complements you on your work. It’s a truism that once the compliments start coming, the layoff is on the way. (Human nature, I guess. No one wants to be the ‘bad guy’ handing out the second check, so compliments come first.)

Workforce sexism is kinda like that—-”put it on my check.” ‘Notherwords, how nonsexist is the work environment when men aren’t necesarily telling “pussy jokes” within earshot of women, but they’re taking home larger paychecks? And how nonsexist (or nonracist) can a work environment be when workers aren’t allowed to talk about who is making what kind of money—-where the amount on the paychecks, and the standards needed to make X amount of money aren’t common knowledge amongst the workers—not written policy? What is being hidden?

But it’s more than the higher pay. Having a union gives me mechanisms for fighting sexism that don’t exist in the nonunion environment. There is also a strong culture of fighting back in a union environment. Hearing stories from female friends and relatives who work in nonunionized workplaces, I think mine is hands-down far less sexist. That’s the “personal” judgement, based on who I am and where I come from. I still think the objective measurement would bear out than women are better off in unions (pay, advancement, level of sexual harassment, etc.).

Oh—and those pussy jokes. Tradesmen get to bear the brunt of the asshole, chauvinist-pig image, but lemme tellya—as a person who has done a lot of work in office buildings, schools, hospitals, government buildings, and has been de facto invisible while doing it—-let’s just say that men who are disrespectful to women wear any kind of collar. Executive types just have better PR.