One of the big problems in the US is that they're organized at the shop level and consituted to represent the interests of their present membership rather than the interests of the workers in the industry more broadly. This leads to some perverse, short-sighted incentives.
For example the IBEW, which organizes electrical workers, decided to come out against the Green New Deal even though most of what the GND does would create tons of new jobs for electrical workers in the fields of solar and wind power, in developing distributed smart grids, and generally overhauling all sorts of infrastructure to come in line with new energy efficiency regulations. But most of the IBEW members are from the incument energy companies rather than part of the new energy companies that would come to life if we kicked off a Green industrial policy. They have no interest in growing the field of electrical workers as a profession, they're focused specifically on protecting the interests of the people currently employed as electrical workers.
This feeds into a lot of criticisms people have about unions preferentially focusing on creating benefits for seniority and incumbency over actually protecting the rights and status of workers more broadly.
Yeah there very much is a preserve the status quo in US unions.
I've seen a lot of "Feel free to learn new skills" / "But no way are we going to let them be a requirement / judged for advancment because that would be bad for those with seniority who don't want to learn it...." type policies.
And if you're in a related field outside the union... you're just hosed, and unions are surprisingly not interested in growing in to closely related areas at times even if their PR says otherwise. I suspect those areas are dealt away with in the negotiations.
Well done, one of the more succinct and accurate explanations of the shortcomings of the unions I've experienced and have relayed to me (Teamsters, NEA, CWA) in the US.
Thank you. I will say though, that as a shortcoming I think this is largely a consequence of the American labor movement being so small and neutered. If they encompassed a larger share of the workforce I think the pressure from the membership would push them towards being more representative of industrial interests as a whole. But they've been on the back foot over multiple generations of retrenchment now, so the leadership has kind of been captured by insular and reflexively change-averse factions.
The unions that have actually been successful at growing their membership during this era of reaction, such as the SEIU, tend to be a lot more progressive and forward looking.
There is also an aesthetic thing at play here and the older dudes just don't like the idea of tech workers, professional workers, and "pink collar" jobs unionizing because they're not "real" workers. If we made hard-hats and tool-belts part of the standard nurse's uniform we could probably make some real strides. . .
Well you seem to have a good handle on some of the pain points with unions in the US. Hopefully the folks taking this up at Kickstarter will find a way to make up for the overall shortcomings of collective labor in this country and build a system that takes the long view. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, i learned a bit!
>Green New Deal even though most of what the GND does would create tons of new jobs for electrical workers in the fields of solar and wind power
Very possibly at the destruction of as many jobs in established industries. That's not really a clear win for electrical workers. This is especially true if new employers living off of the GND subsidies decides not to use the senior union members or the union at all.
Most US unions have been heavily neutered and de-politicized, and rarely have the ability to force management to change course. Outside the US, its not uncommon for unions to own a good share of the company, holding board seats which let it affect who manages the company, and in some cases with the business becoming entirely worker owned.
This is what I was thinking. I know a big complaint especially of the larger US unions is that they just end up mirroring the bureaucracy & power structure of management anyway
That’s not how unions get board seats in countries where they’re on the board; they don’t own significant parts of the company. They have board seats because that’s legally mandated. This can help with short and long term planning but it’s not a free lunch.
A worker owned business is either a partnership or a co-op. The forms have been around for centuries. They’re not generally competitive with firms where ownership and employment are separated or they’d be far more common.
> They’re not generally competitive with firms where ownership and employment are separated or they’d be far more common.
That logic doesn't actually follow; even if they performed equally, capital owners get more return in conventional firms (because they get all the returns, not just partial returns from lending capital), so they will favor conventional firms. So, all other things being equal, employee-owned firms have a disadvantage in access to capital and so can be expected to be less common than traditional firm unless they outperform enough to negate the return disadvantage for capital providers.
That’s a consequence of the fact that diversification is good. You don’t want your investments and your employment in the same place unless the greater productivity is enough to offset the added risk.
I don’t see any disagreement between what you wrote and I did outside of companies with explosive growth trying to dominate an industry, i.e. VC.
If your aim is to build a cooperative supermarket chain like the Coop in the U.K. banks will happily lend once you have a proven business plan. So someone does need to put up the initial capital but once you have a proven business model you’ll be able to borrow from banks and capital markets in the same way as conventional firms.
Your argument fails to address the sectors where partnerships and cooperatives dominate, law, accounting and management consulting. I’m sure there are others but the fact that every twenty years or so the Big 4 all spit out a giant services company but they don’t change their own corporate structure is suggestive that a partnership model works. And McKinsey, Bain or BCG would have no trouble accessing capital if they wanted to stop being a partnership.
Previously I've expressed my skepticism of US unions that rely heavily on seniority to determine pay and opportunity and work out very... overarching type deals that leave little room for personal advancement or even change beyond the prescribed path. The senior folks who have their seniority and refuse to change / don't have to is a real thing.
I've heard European trade unions are more flexible and are as far as technical aspects allow for more more individual progress outside of say a union / employer agreement.
To be clear, this is just what I've heard about European unions. I've had no personal experience with them.
> How would you qualify US style vs non-US style unions? The prevalence of business unionism here?
The big difference, which nobody seems to have mentioned here, is that unions in the US are guaranteed exclusivity by law over representing people within a bargaining unit, as well as unilateral and retroactive control over defining the bargaining unit. In practice, this means that all employees at a given company are required to be represented by the same union; they have no choice in the matter. Once the union is established, it is almost impossible to decertify it, so the union corporate structure will never feel any real pressure from the employees.
In almost every other country, employees can choose alternative representation, which means the unions are forced to compete with each other for membership, and they are not guaranteed to represent employees at that company in perpetuity. This creates a healthier and less exploitative dynamic.
Sure, but if you didn't force an exploitative monopoly by the existing unions, how would you build anti-union sentiment and drive union membership lower and lower year over year? /s
The difficulty is that it feels like the current labor organization laws in the US has supporters on both sides. The existing unions enjoy their strength and wouldn't want to have to fight off upstarts and the capital class keeps seeing less and less union representation under our current system and can just keep feeding anti-union sentiment.
I agree that some competition could help in this matter since so many unions at this point no longer need to fairly represent their members as a whole due to their ubiquity in the industry. Also I feel that many of them are so large that they would have too many conflicting interests within the union and could be harming as many people as they help with a choice.
> The difficulty is that it feels like the current labor organization laws in the US has supporters on both sides. The existing unions enjoy their strength and wouldn't want to have to fight off upstarts and the capital class keeps seeing less and less union representation under our current system and can just keep feeding anti-union sentiment.
Exactly - it's a stable equilibrium, where unions and employers are actually content with the status quo and don't want to cede power, but ultimately it produces a clearly suboptimal result for workers.
Unfortunately, it would be very difficult to fix this, as you said, for political reasons.
For example the IBEW, which organizes electrical workers, decided to come out against the Green New Deal even though most of what the GND does would create tons of new jobs for electrical workers in the fields of solar and wind power, in developing distributed smart grids, and generally overhauling all sorts of infrastructure to come in line with new energy efficiency regulations. But most of the IBEW members are from the incument energy companies rather than part of the new energy companies that would come to life if we kicked off a Green industrial policy. They have no interest in growing the field of electrical workers as a profession, they're focused specifically on protecting the interests of the people currently employed as electrical workers.
This feeds into a lot of criticisms people have about unions preferentially focusing on creating benefits for seniority and incumbency over actually protecting the rights and status of workers more broadly.