In his column in the Washington Post David von Drehle muses on the decline of organized labor in the United States:
Why, then, if “labor is the superior of capital,†has labor union membership in the United States dwindled to just 10.5 percent of the workforce? Why has this erosion been going on for 65 years? Myriad academic papers and manifestos purport to explain the phenomenon, but I think the root of the problem is organized labor’s self-image. Too many unionists see themselves as outsiders battling the market economy, when they should be asking how unions can add new value to the marketplace and share fairly in the value they create.
I think he identifies one of the reasons for organized labor’s decline in influence correctly:
It’s no coincidence that the era of organized labor’s rising influence — the 1930s through the 1950s — was also an era of labor-intensive mass production. In steel mills and coal mines, in fields and factories, large numbers of workers toiled side by side like cogs in a machine. The dark cloud of such conditions had a silver lining for labor: It gave unions the power to severely disrupt an enterprise by going on strike.
I also think that the promises of presidential candidates to re-unionize the United States are largely useless and based on incorrect assumptions. The reason for the rise in relative and absolute power among public employees’ unions is a corrupt arrangement between politicians and public employees’ unions. That’s something that should be abolished not fostered.
I think that among the reasons for the decline of organized labor is that they got too fat and happy and forgot their identity as a world-wide movement in support of workers everywhere rather than just their own union members. They should never have tolerated what amounted to scab workers in other countries who weren’t union members and didn’t have the protections afforded to American workers being used to replace unionized American workers. They should have shut down American manufacturing companies rather than allowing it. They didn’t, preferring to get raises for their own present membership and letting their future members or workers in other countries fend for themselves.
Another reason is that in, say, Japan there is considerably more social cohesion. Rank-and-file workers and their managers are both ethnic Japanese. Here there is frequently an ethnic and/or racial gap between the managers and the workers. They look at each other and don’t see themselves.
It is possible to foster social cohesion other than by ties of blood but we’re not doing it. We’re promoting discord and that will never help working people.
Leadership . What is Jimmy Hoffa Jr doing still heading up the Teamsters after all these years and all the failures?
He is not well liked among the rank and file but he’s connected . He keeps going by undercutting rivals, not by job performance.
That is a problem common to unions, government, and big business.
“They should never have tolerated what amounted to scab workers in other countries who weren’t union members and didn’t have the protections afforded to American workers being used to replace unionized American workers. ”
I seriously doubt that they had the ability to affect what happens in other countries. Sympathy and secondary strikes are outlawed for one thing. In general, legislation has been anti-union since the 40s. The laws written in this country have long favored the wealthy over everyone else.
Unions did get fat and happy and forgot that they needed to also promote quality. They got greedy. They also got hurt by widespread incompetence of management in the manufacturing sectors that were unionized. I am sure that most of us remember the awful cars of the 70s and 80s.
Mostly though, I think that in the US we have a long running tension between anything that smacks of regulations and organization vs our pro-business free market inclinations. That is at least partially why unions never caught on in the South. Unions were portrayed as anti-free market, anti-liberty and associated with communists. Unions were never going to be as successful in the US, then add in the government opposition and they were bound to lose influence. Poor union management hastened that demise.
Steve
No, they have the ability to affect the behavior of the companies for which they work. The union with which I am most familiar is the UAW. Over a period of 40 years the UAW, focused intently on increasing wages for present workers, ignored that so much work that had formerly been performed by UAW members was increasingly being performed by workers overseas. Here they tolerated a tiered wage system in which new workers were paid at different rates than previous workers and allowed work to be transferred to non-union workers in other states.
They could have stopped it. By the time of the last major automotive strike, the Flint strike in 1998, it was already too late.
I agree with that completely.
I also think that the Democratic Party has a very bad habit of taking their most reliable voters for granted. They’ve driven many of those formerly reliable voters away by taking them for granted. What the party needs to worry about now is taking blacks so much for granted that they drive them away or discourage them from voting completely.
I thin it’s multi-factorial. In no particular order:
– Labor is no longer as scarce as it once was thanks to immigration, women in the workplace and globalization. In short, unions are in a weaker bargaining position than they were in the middle of the last century.
– Unions continue to cling to a binary and inherently adversarial worker-management industrial model that is less relevant every year
– Unions won the major fights long ago, therefore they are less relevant now and workers have less incentive to join (and pay dues).
– Seniority policies burn the seed corn.
Andy’s first point is the key, labor surpluses: free trade, free migration, off-shoring, women in the work force, automation. That is an early lecture on demand-price curves in Econ 101. Of course, no one believes that principle.
Free trade and free migration (basically the same things) necessarily drive wages and prices toward the global mean. The Ruling Class pretends that the policies will raise the global mean to the American mean. That claim is tendentious in the extreme, and it is proven to be false. The American mean for the exposed working class is falling. On the other hand the Chinese mean is rising. Our Masters, who are globalists and cosmopolitans, not patriots, are perfectly happy with that outcome. Of course, they are capturing all the growth in the economy, so it works for them.
At one time the trade unions were gatekeepers limiting supply and increasing demand. Wages were higher, but quality was as well.
The financialization of the economy has shifted increased production to accounting ledgers. Quality becomes a function of warranty losses, or like Boeing, producing cheaper planes than the lawsuit payouts.
I would suggest that any healthcare reforms be thought through regarding the long term and ancillary effects. The healthcare industry is a racket, and it needs to be changed. At some future date, I would rather not hear, “but it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
Maybe, limiting the number of doctors and nurses graduating per year is not such a bad idea, or if it is changed, it might be best to allow the system to not expand instantly. Everything will need to be upscaled, and that is not done ‘over night’.
Maybe, limiting drugs manufactured overseas is not such a bad idea. Others may disagree, but I am not impressed with Chinese imports. I would think that it is easier to import counterfeit drugs.
I am sure that there are more.
I’m unconvinced of the wisdom of that. As an alternative I would point out that it’s only practical to do one of the following:
– have more than 50% of health care be paid from the public purse
– not control prices and wages in health care
Doing both is a formula guaranteed to result in unaffordable health care.
My point is that we should think through things more.
With the intellectual property laws, a modern industrial society is difficult. Development of new products do not work according to economic theory. Building a better mousetrap is not easy when somebody can claim a patent infringement on every part or process.
At the time, lowering the standards for VA claims seemed like a good idea, but the VA did not have the infrastructure for the additional people. Because there were not enough doctors for the increased patients, previously long wait time was increased substantially.
All I know is that it is cheaper to pay on the front end than the backend.
The irony is that lawmakers have lost sight of the purpose of intellectual property laws. Their purpose is written right into the Constitution. It’s to promote creativity. It is not because inventors have a right to their creations or to make creators rich. If the Founders had wanted that, they could have written it. They knew the theories better than most today do. They didn’t say that inventors have an exclusive natural right to their inventions because they didn’t believe it to be the case.
I have first hand knowledge of two unions, the USW and UAW. All you have to do is read their official rags and you know the communist characterization is true.
Unions had their place when corporations behaved badly. But then unions behaved badly. In the interim the two sides grew to hate each other. It served neither side well. When labor market dynamics changed, as Andy an Bob point out, it was game over. Daves lament that union leaders should have reached out globally is high minded stuff. Perhaps correct, but with these guys, fuggetaboutit. They were all about themselves.