Die Neue Zeit
7th September 2010, 03:10
Review of 'Restoring the Power of Unions,' a look at the potential revival of organized labor by UT law professor Julius Getman (http://www.statesman.com/life/books/review-of-restoring-the-power-of-unions-a-897808.html)
By Roger Gathman
In a famous passage in "The Wealth of Nations," Adam Smith paints a Hogarthian portrait of the contentious relation between masters the owners of enterprises and workers. Masters are everywhere in "tacit combination" not to raise the wages of workers. Workers were forbidden by law in Smith's time to combine to raise their wages that is, to form unions but they did it nevertheless.
In Smith's time, the workers' combinations were small, lacked resources and were usually defeated. Smith, however, despite his laissez-faire reputation, was sympathetic to the right of workers to combine, and skeptical of the interests of the masters — especially the claim that the higher wages brought about by such combinations would have bad effects: "Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people."
Smith was writing on the verge of the industrial revolution. During the 19th century, the advantages of the masters seemed to increase, and the strength of the workers to plummet. Karl Marx pointed to the power given to capitalists by centralizing production, a process symbolized by the modern factory. However, this trend turned out to conceal a vulnerability. Highly centralized businesses were vulnerable to well-organized strikes, as they were so often anchored to four or five sites. And during the Great Depression, the unions finally were able to use this weapon without fear of interference from the government — which was until then, as Smith had noted long before, on the side of the masters.
The labor law that arose from that time put in place a framework that held up until the 1970s. As University of Texas law professor Julius Getman puts it in "Restoring the Power of Unions: It Takes a Movement," his book on the decline and potential revival of organized labor, during the 1950s and '60s "most employers were individual entities that could not withstand the loss of profits and productivity that came with strikes."
But the composition of the economy changed — and unions did not. Getman is not unsympathetic to the constant union complaint, articulated by past AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, that "the labor laws in this country are formulated for labor to lose. And if you play by every one of those rules, you lose every time." He is keenly aware of the fact that the new corporate structure that evolved in the '70s and '80s, with its international reach and decentralized work flow (made possible by, among other things, improvements in logistic coordination brought about by computers), blunted the old union tactics of stopping work at the center.
An often studied example is that of meatpacking. Meatpacking was once highly unionized and highly centralized, with the major meatpacking plants dotted around a few metropolises, like Chicago, Los Angeles and Memphis. Then in the 1970s and '80s, after a series of corporate takeovers, new companies decentralized, putting giant packing plants well away from urban areas. Automatization played a part in weeding out the work force. The companies also began a concentrated effort to break the unions, often by hiring immigrants at much lower wages. As Roger Horowitz, a labor historian who studied the industry, has written, real wages (including inflation) plunged 30 percent from 1979 to 1990. Meatpacking wages used to exceed the average manufacturing wage by 15 percent in the 1960s, and now averages 20 percent below it. The power of the unions was essentially crushed.
Getman's book neatly divides into a history, a diagnosis and suggested cures. As a law professor, he is concerned, of course, with labor law, and makes certain therapeutic suggestions as to how they can be reformed. He points out the absurd conditions weighing on a union's right to mount "secondary boycotts," a weapon that is perfectly legal for civil rights or environmental activists.
He points to the lack of laws preventing the permanent hiring of replacement workers during a strike. And he points to the problem that the National Labor Relations Board reflects not a body of precedents but the ideological whims of sitting presidents — anti-union under George W. Bush, pro-union (one supposes) under Barack Obama. He would rather see arbiters, chosen from professional organizations, staff the board.
Getman is not very enthusiastic about the latest union proposal, the Employee Free Choice Act, which would allow signed cards instead of secret ballots to determine union representation. Instead, he believes, that the law should enforce parity between employer and union in being able to communicate with workers.
Getman, however, does not think organized labor's woes simply descended upon it from external circumstances; instead, labor leaders and the rank and file were much to blame for becoming complacent and insular when unions ruled the roost in many sectors of the economy. Most significantly, they failed to keep organizing.
The majority of "Restoring the Power of Unions" is taken up with tracing the symmetry between two factors that may revive unions: organizing on the grassroots level — that is, organizing to make the workers themselves organizers of other workers — and the new "comprehensive campaigns" waged by some unions against corporations. There is, at present, a large controversy within labor about whether the key to a revival is in organizing — bringing ever more people into unions — or militancy — mainly, reviving the strike. Getman suggests that those who have grown nostalgic for the strike are simply not looking at the way corporations now work.
While this sounds uber-wonkish, Getman's narrative isn't because he has chosen to follow the history of one innovative union — UNITE HERE, which used to be known as HERE. In 1980, Getman, then a professor at Yale University, was asked by the department secretaries whether they should affiliate with HERE or with UAW. Getman suggested the UAW, which had a great civil rights history. The secretaries chose HERE, which had a reputation for corruption.
But the union was changing — as Getman soon learned. A brilliant organizer named Vinnie Sirabella had been authorized by the new union president, Ed Hanley, to organize service workers in New England.
Hanley was an old-line union leader, but he took a chance with Sirabella, a controversial figure in the union for his militance and his belief in workers' democracy. He trained a new generation of organizers at Yale in the belief that true organizing should be done by committees of the workers themselves. Some of these new organizers were recruited from Yale graduate students, or from former civil rights and Vietnam war protesters.
The strikes and organizing they mounted at Yale paid off in a number of successful contracts. Over the years, Sirabella's "children" spread the gospel of grassroots organizing, but they were also wise to the ways of pressuring corporations with the most modern research, publicity and the use of local, state and federal regulations.
The triumph of what began to be called the "comprehensive campaign" came in Las Vegas, where casinos and hotels faced not only militant work forces, but groups of young researchers who would sift through their financial records, find grounds to oppose their zoning permits and reach into New Jersey and other places that allowed gambling to make their lives more miserable.
Unlike most accounts of the world of American unions, which paint a picture of unadulterated decline and fall, the reader comes away from Getman's book thinking that unions might yet survive.
Realistically, it is hard to see the 1930s wildcat strike coming back, no matter how the militants dream. But the two-pronged approach of grassroots organizing and comprehensive campaigns, along with the tactical strike, might indeed lift unions out of their slough — and begin the long process of creating greater equality and upward social mobility in the American economy.
By Roger Gathman
In a famous passage in "The Wealth of Nations," Adam Smith paints a Hogarthian portrait of the contentious relation between masters the owners of enterprises and workers. Masters are everywhere in "tacit combination" not to raise the wages of workers. Workers were forbidden by law in Smith's time to combine to raise their wages that is, to form unions but they did it nevertheless.
In Smith's time, the workers' combinations were small, lacked resources and were usually defeated. Smith, however, despite his laissez-faire reputation, was sympathetic to the right of workers to combine, and skeptical of the interests of the masters — especially the claim that the higher wages brought about by such combinations would have bad effects: "Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people."
Smith was writing on the verge of the industrial revolution. During the 19th century, the advantages of the masters seemed to increase, and the strength of the workers to plummet. Karl Marx pointed to the power given to capitalists by centralizing production, a process symbolized by the modern factory. However, this trend turned out to conceal a vulnerability. Highly centralized businesses were vulnerable to well-organized strikes, as they were so often anchored to four or five sites. And during the Great Depression, the unions finally were able to use this weapon without fear of interference from the government — which was until then, as Smith had noted long before, on the side of the masters.
The labor law that arose from that time put in place a framework that held up until the 1970s. As University of Texas law professor Julius Getman puts it in "Restoring the Power of Unions: It Takes a Movement," his book on the decline and potential revival of organized labor, during the 1950s and '60s "most employers were individual entities that could not withstand the loss of profits and productivity that came with strikes."
But the composition of the economy changed — and unions did not. Getman is not unsympathetic to the constant union complaint, articulated by past AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, that "the labor laws in this country are formulated for labor to lose. And if you play by every one of those rules, you lose every time." He is keenly aware of the fact that the new corporate structure that evolved in the '70s and '80s, with its international reach and decentralized work flow (made possible by, among other things, improvements in logistic coordination brought about by computers), blunted the old union tactics of stopping work at the center.
An often studied example is that of meatpacking. Meatpacking was once highly unionized and highly centralized, with the major meatpacking plants dotted around a few metropolises, like Chicago, Los Angeles and Memphis. Then in the 1970s and '80s, after a series of corporate takeovers, new companies decentralized, putting giant packing plants well away from urban areas. Automatization played a part in weeding out the work force. The companies also began a concentrated effort to break the unions, often by hiring immigrants at much lower wages. As Roger Horowitz, a labor historian who studied the industry, has written, real wages (including inflation) plunged 30 percent from 1979 to 1990. Meatpacking wages used to exceed the average manufacturing wage by 15 percent in the 1960s, and now averages 20 percent below it. The power of the unions was essentially crushed.
Getman's book neatly divides into a history, a diagnosis and suggested cures. As a law professor, he is concerned, of course, with labor law, and makes certain therapeutic suggestions as to how they can be reformed. He points out the absurd conditions weighing on a union's right to mount "secondary boycotts," a weapon that is perfectly legal for civil rights or environmental activists.
He points to the lack of laws preventing the permanent hiring of replacement workers during a strike. And he points to the problem that the National Labor Relations Board reflects not a body of precedents but the ideological whims of sitting presidents — anti-union under George W. Bush, pro-union (one supposes) under Barack Obama. He would rather see arbiters, chosen from professional organizations, staff the board.
Getman is not very enthusiastic about the latest union proposal, the Employee Free Choice Act, which would allow signed cards instead of secret ballots to determine union representation. Instead, he believes, that the law should enforce parity between employer and union in being able to communicate with workers.
Getman, however, does not think organized labor's woes simply descended upon it from external circumstances; instead, labor leaders and the rank and file were much to blame for becoming complacent and insular when unions ruled the roost in many sectors of the economy. Most significantly, they failed to keep organizing.
The majority of "Restoring the Power of Unions" is taken up with tracing the symmetry between two factors that may revive unions: organizing on the grassroots level — that is, organizing to make the workers themselves organizers of other workers — and the new "comprehensive campaigns" waged by some unions against corporations. There is, at present, a large controversy within labor about whether the key to a revival is in organizing — bringing ever more people into unions — or militancy — mainly, reviving the strike. Getman suggests that those who have grown nostalgic for the strike are simply not looking at the way corporations now work.
While this sounds uber-wonkish, Getman's narrative isn't because he has chosen to follow the history of one innovative union — UNITE HERE, which used to be known as HERE. In 1980, Getman, then a professor at Yale University, was asked by the department secretaries whether they should affiliate with HERE or with UAW. Getman suggested the UAW, which had a great civil rights history. The secretaries chose HERE, which had a reputation for corruption.
But the union was changing — as Getman soon learned. A brilliant organizer named Vinnie Sirabella had been authorized by the new union president, Ed Hanley, to organize service workers in New England.
Hanley was an old-line union leader, but he took a chance with Sirabella, a controversial figure in the union for his militance and his belief in workers' democracy. He trained a new generation of organizers at Yale in the belief that true organizing should be done by committees of the workers themselves. Some of these new organizers were recruited from Yale graduate students, or from former civil rights and Vietnam war protesters.
The strikes and organizing they mounted at Yale paid off in a number of successful contracts. Over the years, Sirabella's "children" spread the gospel of grassroots organizing, but they were also wise to the ways of pressuring corporations with the most modern research, publicity and the use of local, state and federal regulations.
The triumph of what began to be called the "comprehensive campaign" came in Las Vegas, where casinos and hotels faced not only militant work forces, but groups of young researchers who would sift through their financial records, find grounds to oppose their zoning permits and reach into New Jersey and other places that allowed gambling to make their lives more miserable.
Unlike most accounts of the world of American unions, which paint a picture of unadulterated decline and fall, the reader comes away from Getman's book thinking that unions might yet survive.
Realistically, it is hard to see the 1930s wildcat strike coming back, no matter how the militants dream. But the two-pronged approach of grassroots organizing and comprehensive campaigns, along with the tactical strike, might indeed lift unions out of their slough — and begin the long process of creating greater equality and upward social mobility in the American economy.