When Thomas Frank wrote in 2000 about the decline of labor reporting in American newspapers since the 1970s, he summed up the prevailing attitude by the late 1990s as "Unions are obsolete and strikes are sad." Strikes are no longer indicative of any underlying labor dispute, and certainly not extensions of any social or class conflicts (America having magically purged itself of the concept of class in the Reagan years). They are simply sad things that happen that make people fight and end with companies losing money and people losing jobs. The most damaging change, however, was the abandonment of the idea that the interests of management and labor are – or even could be – different.
The 1990s revolution of Third Wave whiz-bang techno-capitalism, complete with video montages of the crumbling Berlin Wall and other tomahawk dunks of the free market, told us all that the interests of management and labor are one and the same.
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Strikes, unions, and class conflict are little more than personal vendettas and grudge matches played out by New Deal era relics who are too stupid and too stubborn to accept the inevitability of progress, refusing to accept the new, improved future in which the wage-grubber and CEO join hands and stride proudly onto the broad, sunlit uplands of post-regulation capitalism. Federal law prohibits the pre-1930s practice of setting up bogus "company unions" to derail organizing drives, but that is no longer relevant: the entire country is a company union now and we're all members.
In the interceding years, news coverage of labor issues has further degraded – which is to say that it is essentially nonexistent. The coverage of the pilots' strike at Spirit Airlines has abandoned any pretense of talking about labor-versus-management. Instead it focuses on passenger inconvenience, the quintessential "What's in it for me?" angle. Don't talk about the issues, just tell me if my flight has been canceled and how I can use my iPhone to get a refund.
No matter how many coats of sugar we apply over the issue with corporate propaganda and compliant, unquestioning journalism (due in no small part to the consolidation and successful union-busting in the print journalism industry since 1990) our society and economy really haven't changed that much.
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Workers and their employers are in a fundamentally adversarial relationship. The Company wants to get as much work out of you as possible at the lowest cost, and if they find a way to do your job more cheaply they will do it. You want to work as little and get paid as much as possible, and if a higher-paying job comes along you will take it. They are trying to fuck you, and it is in your interest to see to it that they do not succeed. That truth is fundamentally absent from labor journalism these days, which is unsurprising given the anti-union position of the newspaper industry and the generation after generation of brainless 23 year old journalism students with little practical skill aside from writing bland, inoffensive copy and sucking up to their corporate masters.
That said, the Spirit Airlines strike is an excellent example of how 21st Century strikes are born and play out. Management is emboldened by decades of compliant legislation and judicial willingness to strip away regulatory and labor protections. Labor is endlessly frustrated by the continued degradation of the things that have always defined "good jobs" in our society – benefits, pensions, reasonable hours, and good salary. The emboldened management acts like a swaggering caricature of John Wayne; the exasperated employees dig in their heels in an effort to salvage pride if not a better deal. Basically, picture two people holding a revolver to one another's head and saying "Don't push me, or I'll…"
The end result of this dispute is most likely going to be the collapse of Spirit as a viable airline, which feeds into the "strikes are sad" storyline. But the important questions go unasked. What kind of system produces management willing to burn their company to the ground rather than pay their pilots wages in line with other bargain basement airlines? What kind of system produces employees who would rather strike and possibly lose their jobs rather than continue to work under the existing conditions? Examining the underlying issues that produce this kamikaze approach to negotiation would require not only more effort than we are willing to devote to any issue but the admission that, believe it or not, labor and management are fundamentally in opposition – not to mention that they are engaged in a death struggle over a piece of a rapidly shrinking pie.
We can probably do better than "Unions are obsolete, strikes are sad." But even good labor reporting under the current economic circumstances would probably conclude that labor-management disputes are like two bald men fighting over a comb.
HoosierPoli says:
I don't think you're laying enough blame on the Reagan Revolution for basically making "union" a dirty word. If the union leaders aren't exploiting their poor union members for those fat dues (what a fucking load that one is), the lazy union members are exploiting their employers (HA!) to get big contracts and cushy, unChristian benefits (that is, wages and benefits that un-unionized America is too scared to fight for and are therefore jealous of).
Comrade PhysioProf says:
Excellent post, holmes.
comrade x says:
Even union members fall for the " I – got- mine- so- drop- dead" mentality. Nothing is more sickening than to listen to a white or black worker bitching about " illegals" or an autoworker condemning teachers and their union.
Its called solidarity, folks, and if you are not fighting for all workers than you are not a union man.
ladiesbane says:
Two paths are so clear in my head that I don't know which direction to run.
One: just as our employment relationships are adversarial, so too are our commercial relationships. This may have been a matter of choice for the middle class at one point (shopping at Costco rather than a local grocery and feeling smug about getting the best deal) but now that we have a grossly expanded poverty class, there is no choice but to shop at Wal-Mart, even for folks who hate worker oppression, even for overseas workers. $300 boots that last 10 years are a much better deal than $100 boots that will last one year, but who has $300 to spend on boots? I'd love to do some bootstraps math with Rand Paul sometime. Barring that, I'd like to see him reincarnated as a 14 year old factory worker in China.
The other One: a lot of people regard Union workers as lazy, demanding crybabies, but one of the reasons we non-Union types have things so good as we do is because Unions have driven the average wages higher, in certain industries, and in others, employers want to please workers enough so that they won't organize. Many workers don't understand the benefits they have derived from the work of Unions and don't support them.
This ignorant position is like that of the young women I see who say, "Oh, no, I'm not a feminist. Of course I believe in equal pay for equal work, of course I'm pro-choice, and it's ridiculous to think of a job where I wasn't allowed to wear pants or complain when my ass gets grabbed. But feminism? Ew." Non-union workers want guaranteed breaks, overtime, work comp, sick leave, and safe work environments, but organize? No way! I might lose my job!
I don't see too many people who would risk their lives, their honor, and their fortunes on an outcome dubious, however noble the goal, but I do see a lot of people who want someone else to do it.
Do they still teach "The Grapes of Wrath" in high school?
glf says:
"What kind of system produces management willing to burn their company to the ground"
Greed. Did the business schools teach 'greed is good' or did society? Make as much money as possible, in the shortest amount of time. Look at the institutions we had to bail out; people made up all sorts of financial instruments to extract as much fees and commissions from their clients and investors. Luckily for those bailed out – they convinced our idiot politicians they are "too big too fail", when instead they should have all gone out of business. Just as Spirit Airlines may go out of business after exploiting their employees. And their upper management will get hired by other companies to do the same things all over again.
ChicagoPat says:
My dad worked for American Airlines (recently retired) when Reagan busted the air traffic controllers union. He wasn't an air traffic controller, or pilot, just a line guy. I can still rememeber how livid he was over that. Shortly after, he was given the choice of getting laid off for an indeterminate time or getting transferred to Texas. And so we moved, away from my childhood home, aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors we'd known since childhood. All because Reagan, the hypocritical jackass he was, saw no problem with serving as president of his union (the screen actors guild) but busting someone else's. This country will continue to be fucked up until we realize the destruction he wrought on our society with his and his administration's ideas.
Crazy for Urban Planning says:
Not to post on a different subject, but it would be good if POTUS could tie together all these loose ends. Over the last 10 years or so I feel like we have been bombarded with a constant stream of crises and I feel like they are largely responsible for the frayed feeling America has. I wish Obama could talk about this phenomenon. Liberals never seem to define what it means to be liberal or what type of society we want to help others in creating. I don’t feel like I know who we are any more. Ideally, Obama would use this question as a spring board for the future. He could say that we have become too tribal and focused on the individual.
Relating it specifically to the oil spill, we need to ask ourselves if we are going to drive and consume these petroleum based products forever. It could well be argued that driving to and from work on a daily basis is not a responsible activity. The environmental cost is too high; not only does the carbon monoxide (on the arrogate) negatively affect the world’s environment, but this oil isn’t supposed to be pumped out of that ground and we can all see the consequences of pumping it.
Regardless of the details POTUS talks about tomorrow, I sure hope that its more than the boilerplate messages that a typical POTUS speech has evolved into. I think the USA has become insecure in the rapidly changing world and we need to seriously think about who we are. It appears to me that the Republicans like Glenn bonkers boy Beck have seen this and are distorting what America is on a daily and hourly basis.
nate says:
Careful Ed, that way of thinking is a gateway to.. MARXISM
Nunya says:
Solidarity seems to be extinct among American workers. Most of us amble through a series of jobs that will be "restructured" out of existence in a few years and we scramble to make ourselves "intrapreneurs" in order to maintain the illusion of relevance and stay employed.
The truth of the matter in labor is that we are now so unbelievable productive that it takes fewer and fewer people to maintain high levels of output. If we were unionized or has pro-labor policies, we'd all be working less and earning more but the complete lack of courage and self-centered attitude of workers in this country makes that impossible.
I had long expected a resurgence of unionization in this country as more and more people found themselves marginalized by their employer but our love of fear and senseless competition among ourselves makes that seem increasingly unlikely.
Maybe the new generation will have something to do with bringing about this change but only if they can do it from their iPhones.
Monkey Business says:
I would say that my generation will be even less pro-union than those that came before.
See, we haven't had the experience of seeing when unions were good things, protecting workers rights, pushing for livable wages, those kind of things. All we've seen are our teacher's unions keeping incompetent and ineffective educators in cushy positions, our autoworkers unions squeezing the automakers for every last dime for their employees who now get paid more and have better benefits than us non-union folks do, and newspaper unions valuing seniority over all else, usually at the expense of merit.
I wouldn't consider myself non-union, but they haven't done a whole lot to endear themselves to me lately.
MalyPense says:
Here in Seattle the set piece has been the Boeing strike a couple of years ago. Open a second line for the [someday] 787? Screw you, overpaid machinists with your living wages and benefits; unless you promise [on your kness] to never, ever strike again, we'll move to South Carolina and hire people who can't cut it at WalMart. TAnd so they did. The union man & woman are nothing more than targets these days, and it doesn't matter who's in power.
Doc Nagel says:
Should there be a renewal of unionism – or should some alternative to unionism as an organizing practice be sought?
I'm a proud member of the California Faculty Association, which is a pretty strong union and has established a great reputation among higher ed faculty unions for winning better working conditions for non-tenure-track faculty. Part of what has made CFA successful, in my view, is that we've consciously taken a social movement approach to organizing: formed alliances with whoever we can, developed intelligent responses to some terrible policies of the CSU administration, getting politically active, and so on.
When CFA fights against student fee increases, for instance, it makes it more difficult to depict the union as privileged, whining crybaby faculty who only care about their wallets.
I'm not saying this to toot CFA's horn (and thus my own), but to present a counter-example. Plus I do think our multi-level and social responsibility approaches are helpful.
party with tina says:
Malypense, that's not really true, cheap labor over-seas made our workers unfeasible over the last decade. That union almost ruined boeing, they had to renegotiate contracts, and might have had to raise the cost of the 787 till it was uncompetitive. The people who work at those companies, upper-management to blue collar are all slave to the investors who fuel their initial production and pay their salaries. And further, investors in boeing range a wide swath of society.
Investment has become the real bread-basket of our society, not manufacturing, so if some company's stock declines because of a strike that will ruin a lot more people's economic standing. I think this is the prevailing reason why unions are so under-appreciated. And again, cheap overseas labor made our workers uncompetitive to begin with.
bb in GA says:
Maybe this is a model we could use if we can make it work.
‘In December 1995, Boston businessman Aaron Feuer¬stein had just returned home from his seventieth birthday party, when a phone call informed him that his Malden Mills textile factory in Lawrence, Massachusetts, burned down. Twenty-six employees had been injured, some seriously.
Three thousand people worked at Malden Mills. When the employ¬ees saw the devastation wrought by the fire, they assumed, as one worker put it, "The fire's out of control. Our jobs are gone."’ [Algemeiner.dot – Greenberg, 05-30-07]
He paid everybody in the union represented company (I’m sure not part of the contract) while they were down (cost him around $25 million) and actually rebuilt the factory. Sadly, the company went bankrupt in 2001 and again in 2004 with Chap 7 in 2007.
Their leading product Polartec survives to this day in a successor corp Polartec, LLC Where they employed 3000 in New England pre-fire, today they have 1000 employees worldwide.
Maybe it was inevitable as the conditions in the textile business had been driving the producers South (we had a bunch here in Georgia) and eventually reeeally South to Mexico (thanks NAFTA) in the last 20 years and now on to Asia..
However, their post-fire rebuild stats:
• Business grew 40% from pre-fire levels.
• Customer and employee retention reached 95%.
• Off-quality products dropped from 6-7% pre-fire to just 2%.
• Production increased from 130,000 to 200,000 yds. per week.
Unfortunately, a $140 million debt load (much of it tied to the re-build) eventually brought Malden Mills down.
So Mr. Feuerstein bought the good people of Lawrence, Mass about 6 or 7 years more than they had any right to expect.
W. Edwards Deming (famous industrial engineering guru) said that 80% of the problem is management. Not our hero.
Even though he ultimately failed, old Mr. Feuerstein had union people who would have taken a bare-headed run at a brick wall for him….probably still would.
//bb
BillCinSD says:
LadiesBane just described the Sam Vimes Boots Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness "
"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness."
— Terry Pratchett (Terry Pratchett's Men at Arms) "
BillCinSD says:
I also think MonkeyBusiness ought to try to learn something about unions rather than just repeating corporate propaganda. But maybe that's how he earns hs money
bb in GA says:
Rich people also buy things that poor people never buy, but in so doing they help employ the rest of us.
When a Limbaugh buys a Gulfstream (whatever the latest G#) there are machinists employed to fabricate the engines, electricians to wire it, upholsterers, plumbers, mechanics, electronics specialists for the avionics, and all manner of materials suppliers etc, etc. Of course, we hope that some healthy degree of such economic activity benefits people here in the US.
When we demonize and eat the rich, it feels good for just a little while but eventually proves to be pointless. I think that Messrs Lenin, Stalin, and their successors kind of demonstrated that, but who knows, maybe we'll get to try it again with the right people in charge this time.
Of course, I understand that some who live here would be happy to eliminate most of the foolish consumerism that is the American economy. I would like to see a lot of it gone too, but I don't think that Government should impose that on us.
//bb
Nunya says:
@Monkey Business
Unions surely have their problems and a history of abuse but the alternative is much, much worse.
Employees produce wealth. That is the only reason anyone ever hires another person to work for them. Unions can only push so far before the company can no longer remain in business. There is a balance built into that equation.
Without a seat at the table in determining your salary based on productivity and profitability, you are essentially agreeing to be a slave. In some growth industries, unions aren't necessary because workers can simply pursue other opportunities but in any specific industry with a limited amount of competitors, their skills aren't as easily mobile. With specialization, people require unions to maintain any real leverage and security.
There are only a few auto companies in this country as their are only a few aircraft manufacturers. Without the ability of labor to move to the next better paying employer. they are at the mercy of their employer and mercy does not exist in capitalism.
Every time I hear about people complaining about how much better people in unions have it than they do and want to destroy unions to bring them back down to their level I am astounded at how few people actually don't ask themselves why their company or their industry doesn't offer the same type of benefits. I mean REALLY, why not ask why the hell you're working for peanuts with no job security, crappy benefits and no pension?
As America continues to focus our collective rage on anyone we deem not to be working hard enough and not enough wondering what happened to the 85% of us without collective bargaining agreements, our status and earning continue to plummet. There is a long standing belief in this country that anyone can get rich if he works hard enough. Over 80% of Americans believe that they will at some point in their life be in the top 2% of earners. I wonder how long it will take before this most basic of math is proven wrong and we decide that if we ever actually do become filthy rich that it might be fair to pay higher taxes as a duty to our lesser citizens who didn't win the lottery.
Come on people. How fucking stupid are we?
HoosierPoli says:
Oh Jesus BB, you're like a time-capsule Republican, still living in a Reaganomics wonderland.
bb in GA says:
HP,
Thanks for linking me w/ that great man…
that'd be Jesus, not Reagan
//bb
Keifus says:
Indeed, the rich are so effective at returning their gains to the general economy, they have hardly anything left over to inflate lucrative investment vehicles. It's a good thing those guys instead keep using that dough to buy things, pay people, and invest conservatively in businesses that make stuff, otherwise who knows what might happen. Things might not hum along as awesomely as they are right now.
bb in GA says:
K:
"There you go again" (Saint Ronnie 1980 Campaign to Nobel Prize Winner James Earl Carter, Jr)
After these wonderful people pay most all the Federal taxes, you expect them to single handedly pump up the economy (2/3 consumer driven)*
Where's the Love?
*sarcasm vibe is near max (in the spirit of NPF Friday)
//bb