6-4-08: Unions

I had a pretty good discussion with some co-workers today about unions and their role in today's economy and society in general. All of those involved in the discussion are engineers, and none of us are currently in a union. One of my co-workers was, however, in a musicians union years ago, and did not enjoy is time as a member.

I took a course a few years ago when I was an undergraduate student on the history of American unions. It went through the early development of some of the larger unions, like the American Federation of Labor and the International Workers Association, and included some of the more popular modern day unions like the Teamsters. In the early days of unions, companies were, in general, awful to their employees. So, unions were formed and gave the individual worker some leverage.

Nowadays it seems like the unions are keeping the workers down. I work for a company that had a strike a couple of years ago with many hourly workers. Workers held the strike as a protest against rising health care costs. The company decided to make workers pay more for their own health insurance. The union workers had been paying nothing for health insurance, and were concerned that paying 20% was too much (ignoring the fact that other salaried workers had been doing so for years). They held the strike for a few months, and got next to nothing out of it. By the end, more and more workers were crossing the picket lines, and the union nearly went under. They've been basically hiding in shame ever since.

My buddy belongs to a food workers union. It's required in order to work at Stop & Shop. He pays dues at every paycheck, but doesn't have a vote because he hasn't been in the union long enough. How does that work? What are his dues going to?

The truth is that many (though not all) unions today exist to maintain themselves, like any other business. There are plenty of laws out there to protect the members from unlawful termination and other harassment. Some unions are quite powerful within their sport, like the MLBPA, which has made baseball such a lucrative career. Other unions, like the teachers' unions, are partly responsible for the degradation of such heralded institutions as the United States public education system. Unions did serve an important purpose for a time, but nowadays they seem to do little but be sources of complaint for things that have been historically seen as a privilege. Just look at the recent Writers' Strike. It was over internet-based profits and royalties. It's a far cry from poor working conditions and abusive bosses. Has America gone soft?

I am not in a union. I'm an engineer. I know of no major engineering unions, yet I don't see a tremendous amount of complaint amongst engineers that would be solved by unionization. Why is it that some professions are known as "union jobs"? Where is the line drawn? Are unions really helping their members to advance, or are they operating more similarly to a fence that keeps people in?