Labor

Recently, I've come across two articles on labor and unions.  The first, and perhaps the most useful is by Thomas Kochan in the Conversation.  As its title suggests, "it's time we reinvented labor for the 21st century."  The second, by Moshe Marvit in the Washington Post, outlines 5 myths about unions. Both speak well of unions.  I haven't given a good deal of thought to unions, not since I worked at a large midwestern community college and had to deal with faculty unions as an administrator.  For the sake of honesty, from my administrator's perch, I found the late stage culture created by the union to be unnecessarily adversarial and malignant.  I felt, pretty much, as Obama must have felt over the latter part of his term, stymied at every turn.  Norman J. Ornstein, one of the author's of “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism,” also had a column in Washington Post.  His column was titled "Forget your obstructionist policies.  They backfired."  

If you'll forgive a sort of detour and  personalization of my union experience, when Ornstein characterization of the republican congress resonates with me.  He writes:

We know that Republican congressional leaders, on the night of President Obama’s inauguration in January 2009, chose a deliberate policy of uniting in opposition to all of his initiatives, even before he served a full day in office. Now we have a pair of blue-ribbon establishment Republicans fundamentally suggesting the same approach — one that has contributed to the decline of the Republican brand, the rise of Donald Trump, the weakening of GOP leadership and the growth of know-nothing radical anti-government sentiment — months before the election of a president.

Such was my experience on the limited scale of our institution with the American Federation of Teachers, and our college's local chapter.  Obama, of course, faced not only a political, but a racial animosity that is deeply unfamiliar to me except by analogy.  Before I arrived at the institution,  I found that my military background had been broadly discussed, in the most stereotypical terms.  They expected someone on the order of the character played by Jack Nicholson in "A Few Good Men," 
and the union leaders clearly saw themselves in the role of Tom Cruise, the crusading lawyer who unmasked the colonel's arrogance and corruption.  They had already decided on a "deliberate policy of uniting in opposition to all of my initiatives" long before I had served a single day in office, even though some were clearly in their best interest.  The opposition was vehement, and on more than a couple of occasions, I even received death threats from union members (one a sketch of a pup tent with my title on the side and a grenade rolling toward it, with the script 'we know what to do with baby burners -- frag!').   Ornstein goes on to write that "hamstringing government while trashing any policies that actually get enacted almost inevitably works against the party of the president, which is held responsible for action and inaction in Washington."  I have to say that the institution's president, Michael Murphy, himself was ethically corrupt.  I learned later that he had encouraged the faculty union  conversation around my military background, had even stoked the fires, and he did it as a scapegoating deflection to survive in his position until his retirement date.  He survived, though I don't think he ever thanked me for being his "fall guy."

I mention this because the tactic may have worked for Murphy, but it didn't work for the institution.  To extend the analogy, it led to the progressive decline of the union brand.  Despite the efforts of the AFT, at the next board meeting, the conservative political connections of many board members led to an increasingly anti-union board.  One newly elected official, a tea party member with aspirations of high office, wore a t-shirt to board meetings that read "end faculty pay for play."  The obstructionist tactics of the union led to an equal but opposite obstructionism from their conservative adversaries, and instead of "problem-solving," the institution was stuck in "obstructionist limbo" for a number of years.  I say all this, not only to be honest with myself -- I understand in personally and viscerally why some republican legislators would be anti-union -- but I also have to admit that they are necessary.   Kochan reminds us that "on Labor Day, politicians have traditionally paid lip service to the plight of the worker," and they do so for "good reason. Not only have American workers made it clear they are fed up with being left behind as the economy prospers, there is a growing body of evidence that union decline is one of the key causes of wage stagnation and income inequality."  If we are to be a nation not only with liberty, but with prosperity for all, then we need strong unions.   As an aside, there is perhaps a growing body of unexamined evidence that union decline correlates as well with the growing ineffectuality and distrust of the democratic party, a core substrate of support that would help corral the white working class vote and alleviate some of the ethno-nationalist scapegoating that animates Trump's bid for president.  Regardless, as Kochan goes on to say, "the solution, however, isn’t to bring back the unions of yesterday."  They are dead and gone, and perhaps deserve to be dead and gone, but we nevertheless "need to create stronger business-labor partnerships for tomorrow."

Before I touch on Kochan's suggestions, let me touch briefly on Marvit's five myths about unions, the first of which is that "unions are for the working class only."  He notes "For decades, the percentage of professional workers in unions has grown, and now professionals are the majority of union members in the United States.  Conversely, the share of union members in traditional blue-collar jobs such as manufacturing and mining has diminished along with those industries."  Here it might be useful to drill down just a bit.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that in 2015, the number of union workers was about evenly divided between the public and private sectors, with "7.2 million employees in the public sector belonged to a union, compared with 7.6 million workers in the private sector," but that is only half the story.  As they go on to say, "the union membership rate for public-sector workers (35.2 percent) was substantially higher than the rate for private-sector workers (6.7 percent)."  Increasingly, that is, unions are for public workers, with local government leading the way, with 41.3 percent of its workers represented by a union, to include mostly "employees in heavily unionized occupations, such as teachers, police officers, and firefighters."  Although I spent a portion of my career butting heads with the AFT, and I could detail their recalcitrance with great enthusiasm, I will say that, in general, teachers are over-educated and under-paid for the demands placed upon them.  Although the failures of the police have received much attention of late as a result of the Black Lives Matter movement, I will say again that, in general, protective service occupations are significantly underpaid particularly for psychological demands that most of us would not or could not meet.  In both cases, though very different, the lure of the profession is not the salary, but something deeper.   Union membership for teachers and I suspect for police is not only, or not solely, about bargaining for salary and benefits, but also an affirmation of the "higher calling" that genuinely animates both professions.  

Why are unions losing ground in the private sector?   Well, for starters,  as noted, "median weekly earnings of nonunion workers ($776) were 79 percent of earnings for workers who were union members ($980)."  The BLS does caveat this observation, but no matter how you slice the data, earnings are better for those represented by unions than for those who are not.  Contrary to much of the political rhetoric, private business does not exist to "create" jobs.  It exists to generate profit, and if it wants to remain profitable, it creates only those jobs necessary to the creation of profit.  Moreover, since jobs represent an expense, if it wants to remain profitable, it seeks to minimize the pay and benefits of those jobs necessary to the creation of profit.  Here, another slight detour through another Washington Post labor day article might be useful.    Robert J. Samuelsonsuggests that we should forget about the so-called "gig-economy" -- think Uber -- at least for now.  He tell us "the gig economy is overrated. It’s not the main engine of change. It accounts for only about 0.5 percent of employment, according to a new study by economists Lawrence Katz of Harvard University and Alan Krueger of Princeton University. That’s one half of 1 percent of all jobs or roughly 750,000 out of 150 million. The much larger change, the study found, lies in the replacement of traditional wage and salary jobs with what Krueger and Katz blandly call “alternative work arrangements.”  Katz and Krueger note that "the percentage of workers engaged in alternative work arrangements – defined as temporary help agency workers, on-call workers, contract company workers, and independent contractors or freelancers – rose from 10.1 percent in February 2005 to 15.8 percent in late 2015."  Moreover, as they note in italics, "A striking implication ... is that all of the net employment growth in the U.S. economy from 2005 to 2015 appears to have occurred in alternative work arrangements."  Why is this significant?  Well, as Samuelson suggests, "The new reality is how the old reality is being remade. We don’t really know why this happened. A plausible explanation is that the multiplication of alternative work arrangements was a consequence of the Great Recession, which created mass unemployment and shifted bargaining power to companies. People desperate for work can’t be too picky in their choices. Employers seized the opportunities to cut costs."   It's really that simple.  Samuelson notes that there is some good news and "that U.S. workers may be retrieving some of their lost bargaining power. The supply-and-demand dynamics for labor look more favorable. As the recovery has continued, the unemployed pool has shrunk. In August, the jobless rate was 4.9 percent, down from a peak of 10 percent. In addition, the retirement of baby boomers reinforces the competition for good workers, exerting upward pressure on wages and giving workers more choice." It is unlikely, however, given the "alternative work arrangements"that we will see a resurgence of the old-style bargaining power, the line of striking picketers outside the GM plant in Flint, and leaves open the question of just what would "institutionalize" new forms of bargaining power.

Marvit's myths two and three play together -- that is "workers can be forced to join unions" and "right-to-work laws would bankrupt unions."   He is right to point out that compulsory union membership has been illegal since the Taft-Hartley act in 1947, and that right to work laws seem to have little effect, particularly within the public sector.  He notes that, according to the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in a brief before the Supreme Court, "union membership among union-represented workers has remained around 80 percent despite right-to-work policies passed in recent years."  I might suggest, as I suggested above, that this can be attributed at least in part to what might be thought of as more "guild" membership, an organization representing the challenges and values of the profession, rather than an organization devoted to collective bargaining and employee/employer dispute resolution.  One way of gauging this might be "strike participation."  As he notes, "although strikes are among labor’s strongest weapons, but they require a great deal of solidarity to ensure that workers don’t cross the picket line or that the union does not face a decertification vote following the strike. Between 1990 and 2015, the number of strikes declined by more than 90 percent, from 801 in 1990 to 72 last year."    Very often public employees are prohibited by law from striking.  What would a police strike, for example, look like.   Within the private sector, the exercise of old-style bargaining power through the strike has lost impetus, for any number of reasons, but perhaps central to them is the increasing fluidity of capital and the labor it finds necessary to profit.   I will return to this thought in a moment, but again we are left with the open question of just how unions can, in the absence of the old style strike, exercise their collective power. 

Although anecdotally limited, a look at actual teachers' strikes is illuminating.  They point toward organizations concerned more with challenges to the values of their professional guild, and also helps dispel Marvit's fourth myth that "unions help only union workers."  Marvit cites two examples, one being the "Chicago Teachers Union going on strike in part for increased libraries and other resources, " and "the St. Paul teachers union fighting to limit foreclosures during the school year for households with school-age children."  In the former case, a CTU position paper point out the rift.  They write that "Under state law, the union could only strike over wages, benefits, and parts of teacher evaluations. While these were the issues on the table, publicly, the union made its case as the defenders of public education."  Specifically, they demanded "smaller class sizes, stronger and better-staffed “wraparound services” like nurses and social workers, an enriching curriculum rather than one centered on standardized testing’s dictates, and provision of basic facilities like libraries in all schools, while proposing to fund these things through progressive tax policies including an end to regressive school funding based on property taxes and a financial transactions tax."  Their agenda, in short, was explicitly political.  It was articulated not for private benefit of the union membership, per se, but was a "coherent vision for education that had long been under attack by neoliberal Democrats [aligned with neoliberal Republicans] in Chicago and nationally," a neoliberal agenda that called for the increasing privatization of public education through, for example, charter schools.  in the latter case, the SPTU President Denise Rodriguez addressed an issue that could have come directly from the Occupy Wallstreet Movement, calling "on U.S. Bank and Wells Fargo, which do business with the St. Paul Public Schools, to commit to limiting foreclosures on families that have school-age children during the academic year."  Again, their agenda was explicitly political, and was again articulated, not for the personal benefit of the school workers, but for a public good.  As was reported, "Rodriguez and SPFT member Lily Tharoor, a social worker, described abruptly losing students from their classrooms or school buildings after their families received foreclosure or eviction notices."  In both cases, they were, as professionals, expressing professional concern for their students within a broader public context.

Teachers can strike because they don't pose the threat of a public safety outrage in the way striking police or firefighters, and unlike many private sector jobs, they cannot, as yet, be outsourced to China or India.  The fifth myth concerning unions is that they serve as a bulwark against globalization. They would perhaps like to be a bulwark against globalization, and Marvit cites two examples of their express opposition to the "neoliberal" support for ostensibly laissez-faire "policies such as privatization, fiscal austerity, deregulation, free trade, and reductions in government spending.    The AFL-CIO, for example, states that the TPP “appears modeled after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a free trade agreement that boosts global corporate profits while leaving working families behind.”  Likewise, the SEIU calls the TPP “NAFTA on steroids” and “a secret trade agreement that must be stopped.”  As I have suggested elsewhere, we live in a global economy and have for some time.  To pretend otherwise is futile, but we have sacrificed a good deal to achieve the low prices at Walmart and Hobby Lobby that result from improved "efficiency" (read "profitability") of an international labor market.  As Robert Reich points out, there are at least three big realities, not one of which should be a surprise.   The trade agreements have exacerbated "inequality."  As he puts it, "in a society of widening inequality, the winners are often wealthier than the losers, so even if they fully compensate the losers, as the winners gain more ground, the losers may feel even worse off."  We do not compare ourselves to the workers of Cambodia, but to those who live in the house on the hill, behind the gates, and the invidious comparison leaves us feeling, well, under-compensated.   But, as he goes on to point out, "as a practical matter, the winners don’t compensate the losers. Most of the losers from trade, the millions whose good jobs have been lost, don’t even have access to unemployment insurance.  Trade adjustment assistance is a joke. America invests less in jobs training as a percent of our economy than almost any other advanced nation."  Unemployment and education  suggest ways of compensating, but of course most such "compensation" bumps up against the neo-liberal agenda of "fiscal austerity" and "reductions in government spending," and we wouldn't want to increase taxes to pay for such "compensation." And in the end, what really matters is one's paycheck and its efficiency.  Again, as Reich points out, "those whose paychecks have been declining because of trade don’t make up for those declines by having access to cheaper goods and services from abroad. Yes, those cheaper goods help, but adjusted for inflation, the median hourly pay of production workers is still lower today than it was in 1974."   

In the end, as Marvit laments, "despite the best efforts of labor, including large protests in the 1990s, globalization has largely continued apace, and U.S. workers have paid the price. According to the Economic Policy Institute, while NAFTA promised to create 200,000 new jobs for American workers, since its 1994 inception 682,900 jobs have been lost. Another EPI report found that international trade depressed wages for non-college-educated workers by 5.5 percent, meaning an annual loss of $1,800 for the average worker."  Where does that leave us?  Kochan notes that democratic candidates are calling for the re-building of American unions, but that may well turn out to be empty rhetoric.  "Since 1978 three major efforts to pass labor law reform to make it easier to form a union have been blocked in Congress. And there is no reason to believe this will change."  Moreover, even if the Trump phenomenon drives more voters to the democratic party, even if the congress is recaptured, and "even if unions started growing again, they would not be able to rely on their past sources of power to drive up wages."  All the reasons outlined above suggest that "there is just too much domestic and international competition, and it is too easy to move capital and jobs to lower-wage countries. That makes it much harder to use strike or unionizing threats to get businesses to lift wages or match negotiated increases."   So what to do?   Kochan suggests better education, negotiated public-private partnerships in infrastructure, and public investment in next generation technologies, but beyond that what he calls a "high road economic strategy:"

One attraction of the high road is that almost any community can start building it immediately. “Reduce waste, add value, capture and share the benefits of doing both, repeat” is the high-roader’s basic mantra, with clear imperatives for action. Start now to reduce the fantastic waste in your systems of developing skills, organizing work, producing things, and moving people and goods. Start now to map your regional economy to locate areas of potential competitive advantage, and develop those areas with the aid of more efficiently organized places. Start now to improve the adaptive and learning capacities and power of your democratic institutions, recognizing them not only as a force for representation and justice, but also wealth generation. 

Who couldn't support this?  I would suggest that the paths of hell are paved with good intentions, and high road economics is perhaps just one example.  At a high level of abstraction, one suspects, you would find unanimity.  Again, it's like "tax reform."  At a high level of abstraction, everyone supports the basic premise of "fair" taxes, but the devil is in the details, so too with the "high road."  What counts, for example, for waste in our systems of "developing skills?"  Education in the arts and humanities?   What counts as waste in our systems of producing things?  Hiring benefited employees when robots will do?  When capital "locates areas of potential competitive advantage," the development into more "efficiently organized places" is rarely to the benefit of labor.  Moreover, within political discourse, the devil appears as synecdoche, using a part to represent the whole, even if it isn't representative of the whole.   Within our current political discourse, "trade" and the problems with trade, refer to an institutionalized capitalism that benefits the few at the expense  (literally) of the many.   The power of "our" democratic institutions should be recognized, but at the moment it seems to be overwhelmed by the power of "their" institutions, which serve not as a force for "representation and justice," but as a force for undistributed "wealth generation."