UNION’S LAST STAND GOING WELL ?
A Golden Chalk Award goes out to all the volunteers in Wisconsin who are fighting to save the last hope of labor unions. Organizers of the move to recall Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker said they filed more than one million signatures with election officials demanding a new election. The total represents nearly half of all the votes cast in the 2010 race for governor that Walker won and nearly twice the number of signatures required.
Governor Walker and his millionaire friends were trying to strike the death knell for public worker unions like those of teachers, policemen and firefighters. Walker moved to crush unions by doing away with their collective bargaining rights and by cutting funds that went to employ such people. The last decade has seen union membership in the U.S. decline rapidly and with the recession, unions have been put on the defensive and have been under increasing pressure by powerful conservative business interests.
The situation in Wisconsin has been a sort of last stand for public employee unions as we know them. If the Wisconsin governor had crushed the unions and faced very little opposition in doing so, it would have been a signal to other states that the time was right to put an end to unions for once and for all. The strong opposition to Governor Walker’s policies has shown that the unions are not dead yet. Even if the governor wins the recall election, the amount of opposition demonstrated so far will deter other state leaders from trying the same approach.
I understand people who say that labor unions became too strong and hurt American businesses’ ability to compete with the cheap labor of foreign countries. I understand why people complain about the salaries and benefits given to auto workers, carpenters, plumbers, electricians and others. I understand it, but I don’t agree with it. I can’t understand how people can criticize the salaries and benefits of unionized public employees like policemen, firemen, and teachers. I think the public is getting a bargain when it comes to those workers. I don’t think there would be any criticism of public employee salaries and benefits if the source of their compensation came from somewhere other than taxes. These are not exorbitant salaries and benefits. These are honest, hard-working people who struggle to make ends meet and support themselves and their families. Most of these people live paycheck to paycheck and have very little in the way of savings. It’s not like public employees have bundles of cash stored away in banks in the Cayman Islands. (Oops, sorry for the Mitt Romney reference).
We will see what happens in the recall election in Wisconsin. At least the public workers didn’t go down without a fight. The ghosts of past union workers would be proud of the Wisconsin effort. The workers who were shot, beaten, fired, threatened, intimidated, and abused during the early struggles for workers’ rights would be proud. The workers who died fighting for an eight-hour day, job safety, decent working conditions, an end to child labor, a living wage, and all the other items that workers today take for granted, the ghosts of those workers would be proud.
Coming from one some say is the birthplace of American labor unions, the coal region of West Virginia, I honor the history of the labor unions, and what they were able to accomplish in regard to safety and fair compensation.
But I’ve never quite understood this tendency of labor unions to be willing to ‘eat their young.’ For instance, there was once a major GM plant near where I now live. It employed thousands of workers, but as labor costs climbed, GM shifted more and more product to other plants which could produce for less. Layoffs followed, and of course, the newest and youngest employees were the ones laid off first.
A couple of years later, GM offered to bring a substantial amount of production back to this plant, if it would get some concessions from the union. What followed was a big fight within the union as to whether the laid off union members of the local should be allowed to vote. You see, the senior members of the union were afraid that the young, laid-off workers would vote in favor of accepting the concessions just to get their jobs back, while the well-paid and seemingly secure older members saw no reason to accept a pay cut. So much for union brotherhood. The older, secure workers won the fight, and the plant didn’t get the additional work.
Today that plant is gone. Not just shut down. Gone. In its place, a casino is being built. The owners are going to make a ton of money. Thousands of jobs will be created, but they’ll pay a fraction of what the GM workers were paid.
Would there still be a GM plant there had those senior union workers accepted those concessions a couple of decades ago? Who knows. That GM is gone too. The company called GM today is a new corporation formed to take over the assets and some of the liabilities of the GM that failed.
An MIT/Sloan graduate friend of mine, who once worked at GM, said that he wished the UAW had gone on strike to protest the crappy cars they were being asked to build. If the UAW was really forward thinking in their concern for the workers, they would have forced the management to make the radical decisions necessary to give GM a fighting chance in the face of Japanese competition. The UAW would likely have had to make some wage concessions as part of the solution, but then maybe 100,000s more US auto workers would still have jobs, not to mention the millions employed by parts suppliers. America would be in much better shape.
I think the teachers’ unions could learn something from this story. In most school districts around here, more and more of the budget is being spent on a decreasing number of teachers. As compensation costs go up, and the economy struggles, even highly regarded school districts find themselves needing to cut programs and services to stay solvent. And those cuts of course mean layoffs, and layoffs mean the youngest, most energetic, and in many cases, the more promising teachers get put on the street, wondering how they’re ever going to pay off their student loans. The older teachers act as though they have no part in that outcome.
Many politicians, our governor included, have decided to go to war with the public sector unions, thinking that is a solution. I think all it will do is leave more bodies on the battlefield, many of whom will be the innocents. We need a different path to solution.
Meanwhile, teachers – please don’t be like those GM workers. I appreciate that those of you nearing retirement now are among those who fought to bring collective bargaining to public education, and it’s going to pay off for you, as well as the younger teachers who survive.
But please also think about the young teachers who getting laid off in droves across the country. Help them figure out a way to use their political power to better the education system from top to bottom, and not just make the union be about comp and benefits. Say what you will about the unions’ influence on education policy – teachers’ contracts are about comp and benefits and little else.
Here’s one idea: Use you political power to push for the development of school choice, then make it so that parents will seek schools staffed by union teachers.
Paul Lambert
January 20, 2012 at 9:57 am
Thanks Al! You said it for 99% of us.!
Carl Osterlund
February 9, 2012 at 5:52 pm