We Need strong Trade Unions

 

We Need Strong Trade Unions                   Gerry OShea

Two recent stories come to mind when I think of the vital importance of trade union membership. First, I talked to my friend John OShea at a memorial mass a couple of months ago about his recent retirement as a carpenter. John is not related to me although we grew up a few miles apart near the beautiful town of Kenmare in the southwest corner of Ireland.  He is still a vibrant young man at 60, so I wondered why he bowed out so early. John explained that he had worked for 34 years mainly with Eurotech, always in union jobs. His union-negotiated pension provides a good retirement income that allows him to retire and spend more time with his family as well as pursuing wider interests.

By contrast, I was approached last year by a former colleague at work who was distraught about her father. I never met this man, but his daughter described him in glowing terms as someone who often worked two jobs to provide for his wife and their three daughters. He is 71 years old and is now employed packing shelves in a supermarket. He lives a relatively frugal life in an apartment in the East Bronx, but until he started in the supermarket, he depended solely on his monthly social security check to pay household bills and to run his car.

His daughters offered to supplement his income but he was adamant that they had enough to do taking care of their own responsibilities, and he didn’t want to end his days relying on what he deemed “charity” from his children. He worked his last 35 years with a mid-size non-union company without an employee pension plan. He took what was offered and was singled out publicly by his supervisors on two occasions for his dependability and the admirable quality of his work. He is still invited back for the company’s Christmas party and is sometimes lauded at these gatherings by one of the bosses as an exemplary employee.

His daughter was tearful as she shared her story about her father’s predicament as he shows up at his age every day for menial and dispiriting work just to keep going.

The Economic Policy Institute, a non-profit think tank, found that only 15.8 million people in America were represented by unions in 2021, a decline of 581,000 since 2019. However, according to Gallup, support for trade unions among the general population reached a new high at 68% last year, and younger workers are the most enthusiastic with 77% of 18 to 34-year-olds affirming their preference for union membership.

Trade unions are about the exercise of power in the workplace. Who makes the important decisions about salaries and the conditions of employment? Unions assert that their members are essential for the optimal performance of the enterprise, and they demand to be part of the decision-making where they provide their labor.

They negotiate the employees’ salaries and also have a say on what healthcare, vacation time and pension entitlements the company provides. Mike Quill, the great union organizer, stressed that his negotiations always focused on benefits for his members’ families.

Union workers earn up to 25% more than those men and women who are not organized. Reflecting on this, Peter Ward, head of the Hotel Trades Council in New York, challenged workers to look to their own betterment when he said: “To me the definition of stupid is a person who doesn’t exercise enlightened self-interest.” Keeping that principle in mind, but cognizant that, unlike their European counterparts, many Americans have no family or community history of union involvement, it is still difficult to understand why only 6% of workers in private industry in the United States are organized.

Employers resent any system where they are not in complete control. To avoid unionization, they sometimes use threats, often insisting that workers attend anti-union meetings as well as issuing warnings about closing the plant and moving the company to a different state that is more amenable to their version of capitalism. Employees whose families are dependent on the weekly paycheck feel that quietude is their only option.

In the last twelve months we have seen young workers, many of them college graduates, lead the unionization drive in companies like Amazon, Apple, Chipotle, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s. This is a serious new trend led by people in their twenties and thirties, suggesting that a new generation will not accept the old model of complete company control.

Recent research led by the Sloan School of Management in MIT reveals, not surprisingly, that workers’ first priority centers on traditional collective bargaining as well as sectoral or regional rights to setting standards across a whole industry in various adjacent states. This study also shows that workers prize fairer unemployment benefits, family health insurance, retirement coverage and job training.

Corporate negligence in the area of worker safety provides one of the most cogent arguments for plant unionization. One shocking example of this arose in the Upper Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia in 2010. On April 5^th of that year a coal dust explosion killed 29 miners. A federal investigation revealed that the ventilation system was out-of-date and explosive gases were allowed to build up.

Workers in the non-union mine knew of the danger, but they felt they would not be listened to if they complained. Some of the employees testified that if they expressed their fears in public their jobs would be in jeopardy.

Numerous scientific studies confirm the common-sense observation that when workers are consulted about safety the number of accidents is greatly reduced. This is especially evident in warehouses and mines where unionized workers always insist on an active safety committee.

Most American labor laws were passed after the Second World War and they are built around unions that bargain at a single plant, factory or warehouse. President Biden, easily the most pro-union president since FDR, ran on a promise to expand workers’ rights.

His Labor Secretary, Martin Walsh, started his career as a union member following in his father’s footsteps. We are told that the administration is just waiting the right time to launch a major federal initiative in this area. Enacting progressive proposals will require that the Democrats hold the House in November and increase their number in the senate because, right now, they have two recalcitrant senators who tend to vote with the conservatives on proposals that curb employers’ prerogatives.

In the final analysis unions are all about respect for workers in every industry. Pope John XXIII in the sixties articulated his views on this topic in his masterful encyclical Mater et Magistra. He explained that the dehumanizing practices that prevail in most workplaces had to end and should be replaced by a system where employees are treated as co-owners of the enterprise with a right to a share in the company’s profits. Now that is real respect.

Gerry OShea blogs at wemustbetalking.com