A Balanced View of American Labor Unions

With the recent news of efforts in Wisconsin and several other states to undermine the power and influence of labor unions—even taking away, by fiat, the rights of unionized workers in public employ to bargain collectively—it might be a good time to give some thought to unions.

I have a certain sympathy for unions and the labor movement. A hundred years ago, give or take, labor unions filled a great need. Workers may have worked long hours, for poor wages, and under unsafe conditions. There was no OSHA (US Occupational Safety and Health Administration) to ensure safe conditions in the workplace.

When workers unionized and attempted to use their main tools--the strike and picket lines--to better their working lives, they were often met by thugs hired by the factory owners and even the police, who cracked heads and even at times killed some of the picketers.

But by my lifetime—by the middle of the twentieth century—things had changed radically. Many factory workers were well enough paid to live middle-class lives. Organized workers had good benefits such as health plans and pensions.

In fact, you might even say that unionized workers' aims backfired. As American workers achieved good pay, they were not particularly thinking globally. They did not realize that their pay needed to be viewed in comparison with workers' pay in other countries. So what has happened is that labor costs for American manufacturing is higher than those in any other countries, so even American companies were having their products made by foreign labor. There is essentially no more clothing being made in the US. There are essentially no shoes being made in the US. A big shoe factory here in Chicago with a widely known name in shoes--was first turned into a warehouse, stocked with shoes made abroad. Then the building lay empty and was available for redevelopment and was, I think, when I last drove by, being turned into condominiums.

So, sadly—as no one, least of all the rank-and-file worker and not even their leaders—foresaw, the American industrial worker priced himself out of the world market.

Also, labor unions nearly completely killed railroads at one point. Nearly all railroad passenger service had to be taken over by Amtrak in 1971. Freight railroads have had to merge and consolidate. The reason? Railroads were being forced, by union "work rules" to run trains with crews of a certain size—essentially, with more crew members than were needed. This was a practice known as "featherbedding." Needless to say, that meant unnecessary cost to the railroads which they couldn't do anything about. It was purely a matter between the unions and the railroads.

There was also a bad situation in Chicago regarding a huge convention center. Trade shows and exhibits finally were refusing to hold their shows in Chicago. This was because of union work rules: it might have required one union to string some wires for a light, a different union to screw the light bulb in, and so forth. (That is a hypothetical example, but the reality was very much like that.) Of course this multiplied the number of workers involved. More workers, more cost. The unions were gouging the people holding the shows.

All my life, it seems, I've been noticing that anytime there's a work crew—say, working on roads or, as I saw yesterday, working on railroad tracks—there are one or two workers who clearly are working, and maybe five or six who seem to be essentially standing around, doing little more than watching, at best. It finally occurred to me that this is also probably a matter of union "work rules"—meaning more workers than are needed must be allowed to be on the job—and, of course, paid.

Many labor unions have been tarred by scandal. Some of their leaders were stealing union funds, such as pension funds. So that the unions were not operating for the benefit of their rank-and-file members but rather, the union leaders were feathering their own personal nests. A couple unions come to mind as having gotten a reputation for corruption but I'm not going to name them here.

Now I don't want to go so far as to say that, although 100 years ago labor unions were needed—and in fact, union workers and organizers and strikers were often heroic—today the story is completely the opposite. Unions have lost a lot of their strength and power: fewer workers are in unions these days. That's partly a matter of the decline of American manufacturing which I mentioned above. But many unions are still powerful, and I think it's still true that any worker who is in a union is likely to be well paid. Unions have served their members well, and maybe even too well, sometimes. But they probably do not have the power and influence they once did, so maybe many of the excesses have been corrected.

Except I do still see those over-manned work crews.

Update, October 12, 2011
The City of Chicago, under its new mayor, Rahm Emmanuel, is struggling to deal with a deficit in the city budget. One difficulty Emmanuel is having is trying to get the unions that represent city workers to agree to changes in work rules.
Another problem is with the city's transit system. I heard that many trains and buses have to be canceled, because of absenteeism--which of course makes the public--the riders--suffer. I know that in jobs I have held, if I or any co-worker was absent excessively, we'd be in danger of losing our jobs. But then, we were not unionized.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein