Rethinking the Right's Approach to Organized Labor
This title is biting off more than I can chew.
Ever since I read Richard Freeman’s America Works, I’ve been thinking about the idea, and the value, of representation in the workplace. From Virginia Postrel to the Freelancers Union to Andy Stern, there have been a lot of interesting arguments about how to think about unionism beyond collective bargaining. A few days ago, a friend was telling me about the work of Harvard Law School’s Benjamin Sachs, and I’ve just started to dip into his work on how the labor movement is pursuing different channels to work around the narrow strictures created by the NLRA. Part of the Sachs argument — and it is related to arguments made by Stern at SEIU — is that for many workers, particularly for vulnerable low-wage workers, representation, not collective bargaining, is the key issue. Having an actor that can defend the interests of individual workers has a pretty straightforward value, particularly since we don’t have, and I don’t think we want, a regulatory panopticon. That is, basic enforcement of fair employment practices and safety standards — believe it or not, there really are employer who forbid their workers from taking reasonable bathroom breaks — might actually require an at least mildly adversarial institution.
This leads me to the debate over card check, where I’ve mostly been in sympathy with my team (i.e., BeP, or, “Banglo-Americans Eating Pumpkin”). The idea of the secret ballot is attractive for all kinds of reasons. But card check is separable from a whole host of other measures designed to limit the abuses of employers running counter-organizing campaigns. T.A. Frank has written a very smart article on exactly this idea for The Washington Monthly.
What most undermines the secret-ballot process is that employers can violate the law in numerous ways without consequences. Under EFCA, however, every illegal action has the potential to be costly, so firings, spying, threats, or other forms of intimidation would be less likely. Also, there is an alternative way to preserve the secret ballot while guarding against company malfeasance: expedited elections. Under current law, months can go by between when NLRB announces the results of a card check vote and when a secret-ballot election is held. If, however, this campaign window were reduced to just a few days, employers would have less opportunity to intimidate union supporters into changing their minds.
Which begs the question:
Given that card check is substantively minor, why has it come to define the entire debate about EFCA in Washington? Because it is the one element of the bill that its opponents can object to and still seem principled—it’s easier to stand up for “democracy” than for the right of companies to break labor laws without consequence.
Yes, and let’s not forget that some of us don’t want to just seem principled. By my lights, Frank has come up with a pretty ingenious approach. To be sure, I probably disagree with Frank regarding the salutary effects of labor unions. In my ideal world, we’d separate out the collective bargaining question, or tightly focus on enterprise-sensitive bargaining, and focus the efforts of unions/worker representatives on enforcement/fairness.
Over lunch, I was talking to a center-right Australian, who had served as kind of an intellectual architect of a reformist state government, and I was struck by his fairly warm sentiments regarding the labor unions he’s dealt with in the private sector. To state the obvious, our quirky history might lead conservatives to have a darker view of organized labor than is appropriate.
Be careful, Reihan, lest you want to be primaried off this blog by the Club for Growth. I’m kinda sorry to see no one has anything to say.
As a brother of IATSE, which has something of a reputation of being a “bad union,” in that the leadership is kinda close with management and most members don’t really know their board or go to meetings, I’d offer that some union arrangements can do great things, like operate a pension and health plan. Pointedly not like the UAW, where they put a gun to GMs head and make them bear all the risk, but where they set the fringe rates the management (or “producers” we call them) pays, and then the money goes to a union (or union-producer joint administration, like in the film industry) for them to either block-bargain with PPO/HMOs for the best price or to use the money to operate their own medical clinics and services (and fund the pension). The union bears the upside cost risk and is able to give the management a very simple formula to determine what they owe, and the management effectively doesn’t have to worry about healthcare and pension cost uncertainty. I guess this is essentially what the Freelancer’s Union does as well.
The arrangement is not perfect, and there have been some problems <a href=“http://www.deadlinehollywooddaily.com/mptf-issues-press-release-about-news-conference-before-it-finished/”>lately</a>, but it seems like it’s a bit better than if I were on Medicare-for-all. An employer plan wouldn’t work for most people in our situation, since we tend to circulate from studio to studio every 6-12 months (it has been this way in the business since the 50s). And isn’t a completely migrating workforce what we’re trying to create? Er, let me put it less prejudicially, “a smoothly commoditized labor market.”
— j · Feb 12, 05:51 AM · #
It all comes down to supply and demand, so a union boss has to choose whether he wants higher wages for his members (like Cesar Chavez of the UFW) or higher numbers of low-paid members (like Andy Stern of the SEIU works for).
If a union can shut off outside supply of workers, then it can get higher wages. For example, Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers took off in 1965 following the shut down of the bracero program in 1964. It was quite successful at driving up stoop labor wages (in part because Chavez delegated his brother to lead UFW vigilantes to patrol the border and beat up would-be illegal immigrants) through 1982, when the Mexican economic collapse unleashed what Marx called the “reserve army of the unemployed” on America, causing farm labor wages to stagnate and turning the UFW into a nostalgia act.
In contrast, Andy Stern’s strategy is to get as many illegal immigrants into the U.S. as possible, and position himself as their Great White Protector, while he makes sweetheart deals with management on wages. (With such a surplus of labor, what else can he do besides take whatever management is offering and then talk about how he’s “representing” his members. About once a decade he wins a janitors strike (in LA in the 1990s, in Houston in the 2000s), and then Harold Meyerson write 50 columns about it.
— Steve Sailer · Feb 12, 08:07 AM · #
I’m trying to decide if you’re actually pro-union or not given this language, you’re clearly using certain negative terminology but I see no prescription here, just a bit of caviling. I don’t think conservatives actually have any good reasons to oppose “associations of labor” in the most general sense, and they resort to demagoguing and playing to stereotypes.
It’s remarkable how this entire response goes through the motions of pushing all the Republican-friendly UnionsAreTehOMGOntheWaterfront buttons without actually responding to any of Reihan’s points. It appears that a lot of conservatives would rather talk about how everyone in a union is a “dupe” and how the whole movement is a sweaty embrace between gangsters, the Democrat party, and lazy goldbricking crakcers in factories (and wetbacks in the field, we must not forget them). These stories always read well, but they really don’t constitute an “argument” or “substantive criticism,” and look more like a pseudo-Leninist diatribe, full of generalizations, cultural signalling, conspiracy theories, and colorful characters that really don’t exist in the way they are described.
— j · Feb 12, 08:39 PM · #
“I’m trying to decide if you’re actually pro-union or not given this language,”
I was trying to help readers understand unions and the choices they make.
Not every single person in the world sees every single issue through Lenin’s lens of “Who? Whom?”
— Steve Sailer · Feb 12, 09:15 PM · #
I don’t follow, but you have to remember I’m a little slow, I’m in a union after all :) What’s your opinion Reihan’s post? Do you think conservatives in the US have a reasonable approach to the organized labor movement, or that they’re unnecessarily reactionary for historical or cultural reasons? I think that was his point, and your response was to give Cesar Chavez the Der Sturmer treatment; either that, or to make a series of observations so jaded and glancing that it doesn’t really say anything. I would also add there’s a lot more to organized labor than Cesar Chavez and Andy Stern, though I have no information on the former charge and I disagree with your conclusions on the latter.
So I get what you’re saying, but maybe I’m not following how this is germane.
— j · Feb 12, 11:29 PM · #
Reihan wrote: “Part of the Sachs argument — and it is related to arguments made by Stern at SEIU — is that for many workers, particularly for vulnerable low-wage workers, representation, not collective bargaining, is the key issue.”
I then explain the underlying the fundamental differences Andy Stern’s approach to unionization and the approach of the previous best-known organizer of Hispanics, Cesar Chavez.
My general feeling is that understanding how the world actually works is more important than expressing one’s feelings about who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. If you understand the differences between Stern and Chavez, you can then make an informed decision for yourself who you like and who you dislike.
— Steve Sailer · Feb 12, 11:56 PM · #
In that case, I think you’re list should include “neither” on the list of options, since that’s on the table as well, and as the article lays out, “neither” doesn’t have much to say for itself, and employers are capable of being just as coercive as labor bosses.
You might think you were presenting the options objectively, but you basically asserted that Cesar Chavez was a gangster and Andy Stern a perfidious collector of racial maumaus. I think it’s sorta intellectually dishonest to present the two options in the way you did and presume that a reasonable person would “make an informed decision for [himself] who you like and who you dislike.” It’s a Sophie’s choice, and I think the third “neither” option doesn’t perform much better.
I think there’s something wrong with your presentation, mainly because you’re focused on wages and labor pool control and I don’t think this is as important as you make it out, but I can’t work on it right now, I have to get back to work! :P
— j · Feb 13, 01:21 AM · #
I was thinking about this some more and I think there are a few other ways labor organizes itself.
Firstly, labor, instead of bargains with employers, bargains with a government jurisdiction and has its labor role enshrined in law, and people who do the work defined by the “guild” (let’s call it) in the jurisdiction are committing a straight-up felony. Granted, the state bar and medical board don’t set minimum rates for services, but they provide a framework through which individuals in the profession are able to bring up issues of professional misconduct. Also, and this is a very important aspect, doctors and lawyers are free to ply their trade safe in the knowledge that they won’t be undercut by incompetents in a storefront in a strip mall charging 70% contingency to desperate people. You see a pattern like this repeated to a lesser extent for things like real estate agents, auto repairmen, cosmetologists, etc.
The weaknesses of the Stern/Chavez approach you lay out seem to stem from a legal weakness in the labor movement per-se. For example, many of the more disgusting aspects of scab control we see in the labor movement wouldn’t come to pass if employers were required by law to hold up their end of bargaining agreements and only hire union workers, and not short-circuit their own agreements by using non-union-signatory satellite operations. If, for example, labor had its own political party in the US (and no, right now it doesn’t) labor would have a better go of seeing the US’s own labor laws enforced, and seeing laws enacted that would remove the incentives to scabs and their employers, and thus contain the more violent and corrupt aspects of the labor movement.
Tangentially, I think at the base of the whole union/organized labor idea is the belief that job X is Important, for reasons of tradition, safety, etc., and it’s Important that job X be done in such a way, regardless of what it might cost people. This is very un-economic, granted, but laws and custom enshrine all kinds of costly behavior, it just depends on how much people believe it’s important. If people think that getting overtime after 8 hours is important, and they aren’t getting it by way of bargaining with employers themselves and they aren’t getting by operation of law, and not getting extra money for having to stand in the store positively harms them and their family life and the things they hold dear, they’ll do the next logical thing…
— j · Feb 13, 07:29 PM · #