Dean's World

The big flaw I found in that essay was his assertion that union workers aren't laxy, followed by his assertion that unions insist on padding the work force with more workers than the job requires. The net effect of the second assertion is laziness at the group level.

It's like the Men in Black line: no worker is lazy, but the workers as a group are.

That's the sort of union rethinking I would like to see: less emphasis on benefits and union growth, more emphasis on business growth. Because the ultimate job benefit is a job, and a growing business has more jobs. So instead of trying to protect turf, I want the union saying, "Hey, instead of cutting people to cut costs, here's how adding people can add profits." The workers are close to the work, and can see growth opportunities the execs can't. And the execs see a bigger picture, and can see possibilities (and limitations) the workers can't. If the relationship is less adversarial and more collaborative, everybody wins.

That's the sort of union rethinking I would like to see: less emphasis on benefits and union growth, more emphasis on business growth.

You won't ever see that on a general level because the union itself is a business within another, a kind of co-parasite. The only time they do stuff along those lines is when they have to in order to continue their existence or to increase benefits for members with seniority over their juniors. The union equivalent of cutbacks and layoffs.

I agree that there are areas where the article doesn't make a good case. With respect to the NY Electricians, it seems more that their high quality of work is motivated more by competition (they have to perform to be rehired for the next job) than by their being in a union. With constant performance review like that, your work has to be good quality. But many of the union abuses we see, in fields like teaching and auto manufacturing, relate to union protection of BAD workers (ask NYC schools).

IF unions could get past their old 'extort as much as we can out of ownership' mindset and into one more of ACTUAL partnership (not like what they talk about now), where they acknowledge business realities, evaluate the health of their company, and work with ownership to grow their companies, they might be useful. But as long as they play the 'gimme gimme gimme' game (and the article doesn't address this at all), with no regard to the industries they're in, they'll be a drag on the companies that deal with them.

The update the thinking part is really important. It isn't 1937 anymore.

Unions are not based on the idea that workers are replaceable cogs. Quite the opposite. They're based on the notion that workers are not and should not be treated that way.

I have worked in a large corporate environment with absolutely no representation and I can tell you--there was no job where I ever, EVER felt more like a disposable, replaceable cog, or where I saw firsthand just how good an idea a union could be--or, even just the threat of a union.

Large corporate employers WILL treat people, especially low-level people, like mindless drones if they can. I've seen it and experienced it firsthand.

As for the notion that the union pads out with unnecessary workers: actually what that means is that they keep people working in such a way that there's excess capacity. The cost goes up, but so does the quality and reliability. That is entirely understandable and not at all surprising, on economic or common sense grounds.

Dean,

The fundamental assumption behind collective bargaining is that there's a similarity between the people in the collection. There's no intelligent agreement to be reached between our employer and a secretary, a janitor, a welder, and a programmer. Our jobs are all so different that there aren't any good compensation strategies which apply to all of us.

And indeed, unions are typically organized along a particular line. The Electrical workers' union, the steam fitters union, the plumbers union, etc. The idea is that you want a plumber, not that you want George Stavendish or Mary Haleward.

There are no doctors' unions. There are no lawyers' unions. There are no painters' unions.

The screenwriter's guild is an interesting example. It's a sorta-pseudo union. All it does is set some (fairly low) minimums and have a few rules about attribution. It doesn't work at all like the unions for whom one member is interchangeable with another (e.g. electricians).

You're quite right that any large organization becomes hierarchical and treats those below it like cogs; unions do the same thing as large companies, since they basically just are large companies at this point (once you had professional union bosses, the nature of unions changed irrevocably). They're companies which sell manpower to other companies.

But you missed the point when I say that unions are predicated on the idea that workers are cogs. I don't mean that they're not human, I mean that they're interchangeable. The whole reason that 5,000 people can get the same deal is that those 5,000 people are interchangeable.

Of course there are parameters such as education level. Teachers are actually a great example of this. Teachers vary in experience and education, and they're paid differently for that. But you can't pay good teachers more than bad teachers; the entire union agreement is based on the idea that there aren't good and bad teachers, only teachers.

Actually, I'm mis-speaking a bit when I say that it's the idea behind it. It's simply an idea that your precepts can't contradict, because union agreements require homogeneity of the people they cover.

Accreditation bodies -- AMA, bar association, engineering licensing boards -- accomplish many of the same goals as unions. Jesse Hills example above shows that some unions accomplish many of the same goals as accreditation bodies. I think you have to look at these all as facets of a larger phenomenon.

Take everything Dean said about Corporations and apply it to unions and you've got my view on them.

Here we see once again, in my view, the damage that's been done over the last 3 decades by "liberals" and "socialists" who swindled us with the notion that unions are somehow good and efficient and noble and hard-working and the source of what is great about America, and Corporations are just lazy greedy bastards.

Original

Here we see once again, in my view, the damage that's been done over the last 3 decades by "conservatives" and "libertarians" who swindled us with the notion that large corporations are somehow good and efficient and noble and hard-working and the source of what is great about America, and unions are just lazy greedy bastards.

You mean like Actor's Equity, the Screen Actor's Guild, the American Federation of Musicians, the National Writers' Union, and many others.

Here's a list of trade unions and their web sites. There are both artists' and professionals' unions.

You bet your ass unions serve a purpose in America. I have a kid who worked for a while at non-union Walmart.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

The proper way to view unions is that they are corporations.

They are just corporations that existed well before the modern statist idea of the corporation. They were known as "guilds" back then, and there was nothing dishonorable about that.

There still isn't.

Indeed, let me point out a simple undeniable fact of life: a publicly-traded corporation is a form of collective bargaining. And if you do not recognize this simple fact of life, then you're simply blind.