Workers' Rights, Workers' Power

It might be only a slight exaggeration to say that there have been a rash of anti-labor measures enacted by governments recently.

First there were the measures in Wisconsin that were initiated by Governor Scott Walker which stripped public employees of their collective bargaining rights.

A few days ago in Michigan that state's Republican governor signed two bills, notably so-called right-to-work legislation, normally understood as undermining organized labor because it specifies that workers in factories do not have to join a union nor pay union dues.

And now today the Mayor of Chicago has signed a new labor contract for the janitorial employees at Chicago O'Hare Airport. This new contract is with a labor vendor who employees non-union labor.

It's commonly known that by many measures the power of unionized labor in the United States has been declining. For one thing, the percentage of American workers who are labor union members has been steadily declining for decades.

These latest developments may not be totally surprising but I think they occasion some thought about labor in America.

First it must be said that the labor movement improved working conditions for workers in factories, which was often brutish and unsafe. Through the efforts of labor unions, the work week was reduced and government-enforced safety standards for the work place came into being.

It was far more through the work of unions than through the generosity or conscience of employers that the American worker attained a working-class standard of living that was the highest in the world. (I suspect that nowadays some European countries equal or possibly even surpass that living standard.) On the other hand, workers are paid much less in the so-called Third World countries; and just as according to the laws of thermodynamics heat will flow from higher to lower, so work flows from higher-cost to lower-cost countries, so that not only American but Japanese and European manufacturers are having their goods produced in China. So, if you were minded to focus on the American worker's role in this—which most likely would not be fair—you could or say that the American worker has priced himself out of the world marketplace of labor.

Thinking about the import of new laws mentioned above, my thought was that we are creating a new class of the immigrant-laborer. But after just a moment I realized that this is not at all a new development. For over a hundred years it's been immigrant labor which has worked at the least-skilled jobs. Once it was in factories but now it's more likely to be janitorial, farm work, or perhaps in restaurant kitchens.

So the nature of the low-paid, unskilled work whose ranks are peopled by immigrant laborers has changed. But still I want to reflect on labor.

First, a disclaimer of sorts. If you want to look at "blood," then I am to be suspected of not being a friend of labor. My immediate ancestors were the factory bosses who would move their production to another state to avoid having to have union workers.

And I have written about some of the things that I blamed on union work rules: for example, one can see many jobs in progress where it looks like one person is working and three, four, or five men are standing around doing little or nothing.

In Great Britain you could argue that unions have undermined the success of British industry. The joke is that 15 minutes after starting work, the British worker pauses for a tea break. English auto factories were plagued by labor unrest and poor quality of production. Just as one example, the famous German car company BMW bought the English company that built Rover and Land Rover. After some years they failed to turn it around and sold it for $1.

So maybe it's bad if unions have too much power. Maybe that happened in England. Maybe it happened in the Unites States. (One needs to remember the era around 1950 when John L. Lewis was head of the powerful United Mine Workers and his union, or railroad unions, could cripple the country.)

But I for one would not like to see all the power on the part of the employers, either, even if that would not mean a complete return to unsafe and exploitative conditions in factories and other work places.

Maybe what is needed is a fine balance of power between labor and management. But I fear that recent or current conservative and Republican states and local governments are not aiming for a balance but want to turn back the clock and eviscerate workers' rights as much as they can manage.

Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein