[bwestergard]

Do you have a particular historic incident in mind? In what national context was this taking place?

There have been very few incidents where a union successfully defended its particularistic interest in a way that harmed the interests of working people generally in the long term. Employers' associations have characterized union activity this way even when the unions were objectively losing ground in every way (e.g. declining wage shares of output, declining membership, etc).

For structural reasons, unions are constantly faced with a choice between limiting their interests to the defense of some small section of workers alone (e.g. lamplighters, software developers, truckers) or expanding solidarity with ever wider sections of the working class. To generalize for the sake brevity, unions that go the former route tend to become very weak and get captured by employer interests. Only unions that go the latter route, which requires them to adopt a broader view of their struggle, have any chance of becoming strong.

For a clear historic example in how these diverging approaches can play out, see Eley's discussion of the knife grinders union versus the metal workers union in turn of the century Germany (around page 77).

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[scoofy]

The advent of parallel treatment of different workers in a shop the late 1970's is one of the main reasons we saw union membership start declining. Two-tiered bargaining structures started to show up as soon as there were difficult economic headwinds. When one segment of the union with some seniority is unwilling to make sacrifices for the younger generations, you end up with as system that is bad for non-trivial number of workers, and is literally the opposite of meritocratic. Solidarity only goes as far as "I've got mine" for many folks, and when that happens, the union as a way of protecting workers turns into a vehicle for extracting concessions at the expense of others.

Examples of ruinous two-tiered contracts include UFCW's 1978 contract, Teamsters' 1979 contract, UAW's 1979 contract and their 2007 contract.

[bwestergard]

No disagreement from me there. I am a stalwart financial and activist supporter of LaborNotes, which organizes across unions to eliminate two-tier contracts.

But two-tier contracts are the result of employer power. Employers always portray them as an inevitable outcome of the legal form of collective bargaining; the historical record cannot sustain this reading.

The solution to two tier is more powerful unions, which are inherently more democratic unions, because wage workers only have leverage if they act in concert.