[Debate] The rise and fall of US unionism

Fri Jul 20 10:40:04 BST 2012

*Peter sez:*

Possibly the NYT sees the writing on the wall for US - and many other
national union movements - but it does not see the writing on the other
side of the wall. There is, possibly, a hint of such writing where he
refers to the alliance between the AFL-CIO and the Domestic Workers
Alliance in New York. But, then, one would have to know the nature of the
latter and the nature of the alliance. Being allied with Business Unionism
Inc (aka AFL-CIO-USState Inc) might make the domestic workers hostages to
the declining fortunes of this behemoth. As for the writing - or dialogue -
behind the wall, see elsewhere on these pages - or on the
*UnionBook<http://www.unionbook.org/profile/peterwaterman>
*blogs of myself and Orsan Senalp?*
*

*Now read on...*

Organized labor is in free fall. Is the death of this movement inevitable?
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Sid Shniad
10:25 PM (12 hours ago)

to bcc: me

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/18/business/economy/unions-past-may-hold-key-to-their-future.html?pagewanted=all

New York Times
                                                                 July 17,
2012
Unions’ Past May Hold Key to Their FutureBy EDUARDO
PORTER<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/eduardo_porter/index.html>

Organized labor is in free fall. The number of workers who belong to a
union has plummeted about 20 percent over the last decade. Only 8 percent
of all workers are unionized. And leading labor activists are wringing
their hands over the seemingly inevitable death of a movement unable to
cope with technological change.

“I see no reason to believe that American trade unionism will so
revolutionize itself within a short period of time as to become in the next
decade a more potent social force than it has been in the past decade,”
warns one of the nation’s foremost economists.

The description sounds like the labor movement today. But the statistics
are from 1930. George E. Barnett, president of the American Economic
Association, issued the warning at the depth of the Great
Depression<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/g/great_depression_1930s/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>in
1932.

Mr. Barnett proved to be quite wrong. A decade after his speech at the
group’s annual meeting in Cincinnati, one in five American workers belonged
to a union. Some 10 years later, organized labor was at the peak of its
power.

While it would be naïve to invest too much faith in this mistake as a
precedent, history offers some clues about how the labor movement — once
again on the mat, pummeled into insignificance by economic forces beyond
its control — might recover its relevance to American workers and society.

Today, fewer than one in 14 private sector workers belongs to a
union<http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/union2.pdf>,
half the portion of 15 years ago. Where unions matter most — fighting for
workers’ share of the spoils of economic growth — they lost the battle long
ago. Despite soaring worker productivity, the typical American
worker<http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswktabs.htm>takes home today only 2
percent more than a quarter of a century ago, after
adjusting for inflation.

Yet while union leaders have spent the last decade fretting, they have been
unable to reverse the downward trend.

Partly, this has to do with the diagnosis of the problem. Many union
leaders still like to believe that an ideological shift spun the labor
movement into a death spiral. Elected in the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan
set out to destroy obstacles to unfettered markets — including organized
labor — with ideological assistance from Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
of Britain.

The ideological assault on unions changed workplace norms. In the United
States, company executives who had tolerated unions as standard features of
the workplace started spending billions to fight them off.

Losing control of the factory floor, unions lost touch with society, too.
In the 1950s and ’60s, union contracts set a standard that was followed
across the economy. Today, they are too weak to be standard-setters. And
nonunion workers tend to resent rather than applaud the better pay and
benefits of their unionized brethren.

Only about one in five Americans say they trust unions, according to
polling by Gallup, the same share that trust banks or big business. And
unions’ once impressive political clout has been overwhelmed by a wave of
corporate money. Their biggest campaign this spring, trying to remove Gov.
Scott Walker of Wisconsin from office after he rolled back collective
bargaining rights for state employees, ended last month in ignominious
defeat<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/07/us/politics/scott-walkers-win-in-wisconsin-casts-doubts-on-union-power.html>
.

But this reading of history misses a fundamental part of the story.
Notably, it underplays the impact of globalization, which intensified
competition and spurred businesses to slash labor costs. And it ignores
technology, which changed the nature of work.

In the 1920s, unions were as unprepared for change as they are today.
Dorian T. Warren, a professor of political science at Columbia University,
notes that at the turn of the 20th century, guilds were organized around
crafts, like carpentry or glass blowing.

This structure gave organized labor enormous power in the economy. Running
apprenticeship programs, guilds controlled the supply of labor at the time.
But it left labor unions unprepared for the subsequent arrival of large
corporations, which hired unskilled workers directly, without the
imprimatur of a guild.

When organized labor bounced back in the late 1930s, Mr. Warren observed,
it was in a different form, as big, inclusive industrial unions that
organized workers at the company level, not by skill. Crucially, the unions
understood that part of their job was to ensure that a labor contract would
not put a company at a competitive disadvantage. They had to remove wages
from competition. That was essential to their success. Otherwise,
corporations would fight them to the death.

But no model of labor relations can last forever. This one worked as long
as the United States remained largely a closed economy. Unions roughly
ensured that working standards improved uniformly across many industrial
sectors. If they negotiated higher wages or better working conditions at
one airline or car company, others quickly followed — even nonunion shops,
which hoped to appease workers and prevent them from voting for a union.

Yet economic changes upended the pattern again. The new jobs created around
the revolution in information technology of the late 20th century did not
fit the mold of the corporations of old. New companies relied more on
independent contractors and freelance work. The lifelong relationship
established between industrial companies and their workers gave way to
looser, shorter dalliances.

Perhaps most important, globalization exposed America’s industrial-era
titans to more intense competition. The emergence of powerful rivals
overseas, where labor was cheap and unions scarce, made it more difficult
for companies to improve wages and working conditions without becoming less
competitive. And corporations, especially new high-tech companies that
arose in southern states where labor law made it tougher to organize,
turned against unions as albatrosses around their necks.

Unsurprisingly, a majority of unionized workers today are employed by the
government, the last sector of the economy that is largely protected from
foreign competition. “We are forced to conclude that a resurgence of labor
unions in the private sector in the foreseeable future is unlikely,” wrote
the labor market
scholars<http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/western/pdfs/JLR_2001.pdf>Henry
S. Farber and Bruce Western of Princeton University a decade ago,
echoing Mr. Barnett’s thoughts 70 years before. And things have only
deteriorated for the unions since then.

But if the prospects look grim for the unions of America’s industrial era,
the precedent of the 1930s — when workers organized in droves — offers
perhaps a hint of a path for organized labor as the economy works its way
forward from the Great Recession, a role that perhaps better fits the
nation’s corporate makeup.

The future labor movement may have to give up organizing work site by work
site. Its biggest political fight in the last few years — pushing a law to
make it easier to organize a workplace — may be irrelevant. And fighting to
create new barriers to foreign competition is probably a lost cause.
Instead of negotiating for their members only, unions might do better
pulling for better wages and conditions for all workers.

Some scholars, like the economist Richard B. Freeman of the National Bureau
of Economic Research, suggest the labor movement could take a page from the
AARP’s playbook and become a lobbying group. German-like worker councils
could discuss workplace issues with management, without negotiating over
pay.

Maybe unions don’t have to entirely give up collective bargaining but
broaden it. A model might be the alliance between the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and the
Domestic Workers Alliance of New York City to push for a bill of
rights<http://www.domesticworkers.org/ny-bill-of-rights>for
nonunionized nannies and maids.

In any event, 80 years from now, labor organizations will probably look as
different as our current unions look when compared with the guilds of 80
years ago. Today’s strongest unions — of autoworkers and airline pilots —
could easily be the weakest, decimated by international competition. Unions
may well be strongest in hospitals, hotels and other businesses not exposed
to international trade.

Union leaders understand this — to a point. They are slowly beginning to
experiment with new models of organization. Time is not on their side,
however. If they fail to embrace radical change, in 80 years unions may not
be around at all.

E-mail: eporter at nytimes.com

Twitter: @portereduardo

-- 
*1.* Contribute to Journal Special on 'New Worker
Movements<http://www.interfacejournal.net/2011/06/call-for-papers-volume-4-issue-2-for-the-global-emancipation-of-labour-new-movements-and-struggles-around-work-workers-and-precarity/>
'!
*2. Blog:* http://www.unionbook.org/profile/peterwaterman
*3. EBook 2011, 'Under, Against, Beyond - Essays 1980s-
   1990s* s <http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/under-against-beyond/>
http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/under-against-beyond/
*4.* WorkingPaper *2012*: 'Emancipatory Labour
Studies'<http://www.iisg.nl/publications/respap49.pdf>
:
*5.* Draft EBook 2012: 'Recovering Internationalism - Essays 2000-10'
(draft):
     http://www.scribd.com/doc/82125289/ReCovIntComp-A-2
     http://www.scribd.com/doc/82129474/ReCovtIntComp-B-2
*6. *Essay 2012: 'The 2nd Coming of the World Federation of Trade
Unions': <http://www.unionbook.org/profiles/blogs/peter-waterman-the-second-coming-of-the-wftu-updated>
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