Retribution not enough

Bill Stewart bill.stewart at pobox.com
Mon Oct 22 19:54:03 PDT 2001


At 02:09 PM 10/22/2001 -0700, David Honig wrote:
>At 11:09 PM 10/22/01 +0300, Sampo Syreeni wrote:
> >On Mon, 22 Oct 2001, Tim May wrote:
> >>"Sure, unions are good" is not at all obvious to me. Why do you claim this?
> >When they're not given special privileges, they are a useful tool for
> >market awareness and employee side organization.
>
>Sure.  But unions work to make membership *compulsory*.  They have
>other legal privledges.
>....
>UC grad students (TAs) are Teamsters, members of AFL-CIO.  Seriously.
>Obligatorily.  No choice.

My brother was a Teamster once, when he had a job in a warehouse.
He decided that if he was going to have to pay union dues,
he was going to work towards making the union local have some
actual control over where the political-contribution part of the dues went
instead of letting the Teamsters national bosses control it.
(Do not taunt Happy Fun Teamster!  He had a good time messing with them...)


I'm strongly opposed to laws requiring companies to deal with unions,
but also to right-to-work laws that forbid companies from doing
exclusive deals with unions, except insofar as they're counteracting
federal mandatory-union laws.  After growing up watching Philadelphia TV,
it took me a long time to be willing to view unions as anything other
than the violent thugs who kept burning down construction sites
and beating non-union workers and excluding incorrect racial groups
and helping Mafiosi shake down businesses, though some of the businesses
also helped Mafiosi shake down unions and hired their own goons
(both blue-suited and free-market) to beat up union members as well -
government and Pinkerton thugs have been just as violent and murderous,
particularly in the coal mine strikes and northwestern lumber strikes,
and the government has occasionally provided National Guard strikebreakers
to do scab labor as well as to beat up strikers, which is
inappropriate in a free market.

Politics aside, though, I've dealt with construction unions and
communications workers unions, and
sometimes unions have been able to provide good service both for
their members and for companies that hire them -
you can go to the appropriate union hall and get well-trained workers
to do the projects you need, and they provide workers with a certain
amount of mutual insurance, often including medical and pension benefits.
It's not that much different than what many of the Silicon Valley
technical body-shops provide, except that the internal dispute-resolution
methods are much more strictly seniority-based than competence-based,
and it's more collectivist than individualist, but that's not as
inappropriate as you'd think for industrial-age businesses that
need large groups of workers for mass-production work rather than
individual artisans.

Business hiring is a process of negotiation in a market,
in which all sides are trying to maximize their return,
just as buying and selling are.
Capitalists are out to make money, and so are workers,
and if forming a union is an effective negotiating tool
for the workers to get more of the pie than they'd get individually,
then I wish them good luck, just as if forming partnerships
or other kinds of business alliances are an effective business tool
for business owners, I wish them good luck too -
as long as they stick to moral methods, rather than
threatening violence against strikebreakers or strikers
or hiring politicians to give them an unfair advantage.

Employee Stock Ownership Plans have also been an effective method
of aligning the interests of unions and companies -
they tend to encourage cooperation by leading both sides to
recognize their mutual intersts.  Of course, when you start
giving workers stock, and telling them they're "empowered",
you find they not only care about the company's success,
they really lose patience for upper-management cluelessness,
and in a unionized company, sometimes this is more visible to
clueless upper managers than in a non-unionized company
where the pointy-haired ones can ignore their "empowered" workers.

Collectivist anti-management rhetoric, greedy union bosses,
and various other cluelessness and abuses by unions sometimes
cause employers to go broke or generally keep the pie smaller
than if they were willing to share the wealth and do the
win-win strategy of growing their market or at least their market share,
and eventually Darwin will get those people; same holds true for
greedy, stupid, and short-sighted business-owners or managers.
Unfortunately, this often turns into a lose-lose situation,
especially when organizational conflict causes a business to be
too inflexible to adapt to changing market conditions.

Back when part of the company I was in had some threat of becoming
unionized, some of my co-workers joked about how we ought to
respond by forming a Wobbly local, and run it against the CWA/IBEW/etc.
The IWW may have a bunch of economically clueless class-warfare rhetoric
about the worker class never having common interests with the boss class,
but they can be pretty individualist and they certainly don't
put up with greedy union bosses trying to push them around.
(One guy from another union referred to them as the "I Won't Work" society.)
They do have an unfortunate history of violence as well,
but hey, if we've got to be part of One Big Union,
might as well have it be One Big Highly Disorganized Union,
and it seems to really torque off the Teamsters.





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