When people bemoan the increasing inequality in American society, they usually fail to mention one of the reasons for the huge gaps between those at the top and those at the bottom of wealth and income: The decline of unions. Unions didn’t disappear because workers lost interest in being represented by them. Major employers never liked unions, which demanded better pay and better working conditions, and thereby raised costs and cut profits. They used every opportunity to dispense with them, whether by automation, outsourcing to non-union states or nations, or intimidation.
California-based Capital & Main has produced an important series about union-busting tactics today. Capital & Main is a fearless, award-winning web journal. it specializes in investigative reporting and is typically on the cutting edge of political issues. It recently published a four-part series on the tactics used by union-busters. I will post them in order today. I strongly support unions. I have never belonged to a union, but I keenly believe in the importance of unions. Unions were the route into the middle class for millions of people. Unions were strong supporters of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. The rightwing attack on organized labor has almost stamped out unions in the private sector over the past half century. The withering of unions coincides with the dramatic increase in inequality of incomeand equality. There are signs of a rebirth of unionism. Terrible working conditions and low pay are spurring on this movement. The big corporations are ripe for change, but as today’s articles show, the powerful oligarchs will fight to maintain union-free workplaces.
The company owner was so worried about his employees joining a union that he mounted machine guns to keep labor organizers off his coal mine, launched an anti-union magazine and even secretly funded a Black newspaper to convince African-American workers that unions were dangerous. Those union-busting tactics worked, allowing mine magnate Charles Debardeleben to stop his workers in the industrial Birmingham-Bessemer area of northern Alabama from joining a union during the 1920s and 1930s.
Almost a century later, the tactics have gotten less physically intimidating but remain just as effective. Earlier this year in Bessemer, Amazon was easily able to fend off a well-publicized union organizing effort through a relentless anti-union campaign that included a website, text messages to employees, fliers posted in bathrooms and classic techniques like captive audience meetings, in which workers can be forced to sit for hours and listen to anti-union consulting firms paid at least $20,000 a day. Some of the tactics may have been illegal — the National Labor Relations Board recently authorized a new election after the union argued that the company’s decision to install a mailbox onsite created the false impression that Amazon was running the election, which pressured workers to vote against the union.
While union membership has risen slightly since 2018 thanks to some major organizing wins, and public approval of unions is at its highest level since 1965, labor has a lot of ground to make up. Union membership plummeted from 20.1% of American wage and salary workers in 1983 to just 10.8% in 2020. One of the biggest reasons for that decline is the use of well-funded, aggressive campaigns by employers to fight off unions, conducted largely through expensive union avoidance consultants and lawyers. In 2019, it was estimated that companies spend at least $340 million per year on such consultants and often engage in illegal tactics, for which the penalties are minimal.
“They seem to be more aggressive than they used to be,” says Joe Hernandez, an organizer with the United Food and Commercial Workers in Orange County, California. “There was a union election in South Dakota, where pro-union workers who had a couple of tardies that were previously overlooked ended up getting fired. Other times they just close down the store or factory. They’re doing it all — using surveillance technology, social media messaging, whatever they can to beat the union.” (Disclosure: UFCW is a financial supporter of this website.)
In conversations with dozens of union officials, union avoidance consultants, former regulatory officials and workers, we’ve gained insights into union-busting activities by companies ranging from behemoths like Starbucks, Amazon, CVS, Dollar General and Safeway to health care organizations like Kaiser Permanente and HCA-affiliated hospitals to gig economy startups like HelloFresh and Imperfect Foods.
In a series of four stories, Capital & Main will explore the role and impact of union busting: how your favorite companies still aren’t required to disclosehow much they spend on such consultants, how new workplace surveillance technologies have been exploited by some businesses to help them defeat organizing efforts, how labor studies academics have been pressured and intimidated by pro-business think tanks and lawmakers to stop their research into workplace issues — plus an interview with a longtime union organizer about his unlikely alliance with one of the most notorious union busters.
Speaking as a fourth generation member of the IBEW, and a proud Conservative union member; the one item missing from this conversation is the effect of Illegal immigration. The non-union sector hires heavily from this group of people, and it suppresses wages, and union membership. In Las Vegas, every home built is built by non-union labor, because the union can’t win the bids, our wages are too high. Cesar Chavez marched against illegal immigration for that very reason. Until this becomes part of the conversation, the conversation isn’t serious, it’s political.
As a fellow member of the IBEW I am here to tell you that if that immigrant did not fill that Job an American would have. It would have cost a Non Union contractor more but it still would be far below the Union Scale. The Company I worked for was one of the oldest and Largest Electrical Construction companies in the Nation(1907) one of the earliest signatories with Local#3 NYC. I would guess by the 30s .
In 98 as part of an organizing drive that took in 2000 new members . it merged with a non union company taking in near 200 workers. Not one of them was an undocumented immigrant. Nor any of the 2000 new members. Which is not to say that the undocumented are not being exploited today.
It was 1979 when JC Turner President of the operating engineers addressed the National Building Trades detailing the massive loss of market share that the Trades had suffered in the course of the 70s.
due to a coordinated assault by the” Industrial End Users” of the “Business RoundTable” (to control construction spending )
Immigrants were not the issue.
All it took was the will to attack Unions in the big Blue Cities and 40 years of the American people voting for anti Union Republicans who block needed labor reform, The anti tax fervor and privatization schemes that avoided prevailing wage ,thus Unions in publicly subsidized housing and the Great Recession gave them the will.
If that immigrant could be organized in a matter of months no developer would build anything larger than a Pizza store in NYC non union .
Thus drying up the demand for the undocumented, immigrants always worked for less being able to organize them is the key .
The ILGWU organized new immigrants in the 1930s and 1940s, helping them to enter the middle class. At some point, the shmata trade moved to the non-union South. Then to Mexico, then to Asia. Always in search of lower wages.
Most of the developers that hire the undocumented workers for their projects live in gigantic, opulent homes. I do not see anyone in my state government, Florida, trying to crack down on this practice. The developers are quite pleased with the current arrangement. They make out like bandits.
When Trump started bashing undocumented immigrants, it turned out that he hired many to staff his resorts, including one who did his personal laundry.
jacquilenhardt5598
A fourth Generation member and you see nothing wrong with that being the first thing you tell us. Right before you tell us you have been voting for Union busters. People think generational wealth is confined to the very wealthy. You right there are describing one of the problems with the Union Movement, especially the construction trades.
Thank you, Diane! As a former teachers’ union president/chief negotiator/back bencher, I have been immensely saddened by the decline of the union movement in this country. This was not by accident. Both Canada and the US had about the same number of union jobs in the 60’s (~31%). Canada still has that fraction of union jobs while in the US it is down closer to 10%. This was not an accident.
And it isn’t just the GOP doing this. The corporate Democrats are just as bad. When Mr. Obama was elected and had a majority in Congress, there was a piece of legislation already in process to support going back to the old card system to trigger a union election. When elected, the Democrats let the legislation die. Their paymasters didn’t want more unions.
It seems all of the involved parties have been asleep: the unions slacked off on organizing, the business community organized political and legal attacks on unions, and the general public was fed anti-union propaganda resulting in working class people hating unions. All of these need correcting. Time to roll us our sleeves!
Well said. Obama did nothing when Scott Walker tried to decimate the teachers union in Wisconsin. Obama was no friend of labor.
Obama would certainly never be on the top of my hit list. I have been pretty clear about that. . But what exactly was he supposed to do about Walker who was elected in the same year as the Republican wave and the Tea Party taking the House. . Not that he would have. EFCA never made it out of committee in the Senate was that Obama’s lack of pushing it. Biden claims to be Pro Union and I believe him. How is the Pro Act doing .
While public sector workers in Wisconsin were encircling the Wisconsin Capitol to protest Governor Scott Walker’s attack on unions, Obama was in Miami meeting with Jeb Bush to celebrate the “turnaround” of a low-performing high school. The media said nothing about the incongruity, nor did they notice that the supposedly “turned around” high school was on the state’s closure list, still.
dianeravitch
I prefer to remember Obama for declaring National Charter school teacher appreciation week.
There’s a war on unions, it’s been going on for a long time. I belonged to a union, a teachers’ association, and it did help to improve working conditions and wages. When Chris Christie was governator, he relentlessly attacked the NJEA and portrayed it as a vicious gang of lazy overpaid thugs. Thug, that’s one of the favorite slurs of the anti-union propagandists and union haters.
From the Bureau of Labor Statistics web site:
Highlights from the 2020 data:
–The union membership rate of public-sector workers (34.8 percent) continued to be
more than five times higher than the rate of private-sector workers (6.3 percent).
(See table 3.)
–The highest unionization rates were among workers in protective service occupations
(36.6 percent) and in education, training, and library occupations (35.9 percent).
(See table 3.) end quote
The hidden statistic is that Union Membership dropped. It just dropped less than non union.
Historically, I have always given the trade union movement credit for holding back the tide of extremism in politics. Painting the unionists as extremists, of course, was also a part of the equation that helped business opposition to unions join with those in agricultural areas where farmers had a natural antipathy to group activity. There is a certain irony here. Modern farmers are almost universally beholden to some big agribusiness. Almost no individual has much of a say in the price of his goods.
It strikes me that the difficulty in modern union organization lies particularly in the transient nature of employment. Modern workers do not stay on their jobs for life the way trade unions of the mid-Twentieth Century did. You can organize Starbucks workers, but you will have to organize them again when a new crop of workers come through. Pipe fitters or carpenters might ply their trade for life. Not so much those who work at all the various service occupations.
Douglas Fraser, who headed the UAW back in the day, recalled the necessity of the auto makers employing hundreds of men to sit and straighten fenders that came from suppliers in rough form. Modern technology has eliminated this group, who remind me of the Hecklers, who ran the flax through the combing process to ready it for spinning in the early 1800s. These Flax workers would hire readers to read the daily news to them while they worked, a job which would fall victim to the radio a century later.
To the extent that the march of technology has eliminated jobs that led logically to organization, there is a natural progression past unions as a force. Outsourcing has created a split economy, with investment services quite lucrative, and basic services (food prep, cleaning, etc) very much the opposite.
As AI and robotics take up more and more of the production of goods and services, the question of how an economy of machines functions is one that many are already considering. Some suggest guaranteed income. Others trust the free market. I wonder what market if no one has any disposable income. Still others harken back to the days when new types of jobs replaced.
I do not know where all of this is going.
Roy,
I am concerned that you have succumbed to the “lump of labor” fallacy. There is not a fixed amount of work that can be done, so more efficient production by some does not mean others will have no work to do. See https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/page1-econ/2020/11/02/examining-the-lump-of-labor-fallacy-using-a-simple-economic-model
Looking for others to educate me on this (especially Joel). My main Q’s:
1.The story I’ve always seen behind the destruction of unions since the ‘70’s– & I may be wrong– was only noted by Diane: “At some point, the shmata trade moved to the non-union South. Then to Mexico, then to Asia. Always in search of lower wages.” It seems logical the South would have been non-union, as they started from slavery & indentured servitude, and remained mainly agricultural [pre-giant-agribiz agricultural] until well past the mid-20thC. They were our built-in low-wage ‘country’ to be offshored to; the move to cheaper countries was swift.
What would have turned workers themselves against unions other than the drying up of the US mfg sector? What else besides the destruction of the mfg sector could have brought unions to their knees?
Correct me if I’m wrong; I’ve always assumed that OE’s & the commercial/ res bldg trades– and public-sector unions– were appendages to the worker#’s & GDP clout of our erstwhile mfg sectr. Killing [offshoring] our mfg sector was a deadly assault on the trunk of the tree.
2.The other thing– Euro countries have very high union participation; I think have had for a very long time. Much higher than we ever had even at our peak. Why? I’ve heard anecdotes during [50-yr-ago] foreign travel that Euro union-mgt relations were different than here; less acrimonious, more working together for the good of the company. Wondering how that happened (if true), & whether post-WWII move toward social democracy is part of that picture.
OTOH to my above comment, no reason on earth for our now-dominant service sector [ including public sector] not to re-create this picture in terms of strong unions, despite the absence of GDP-clouty mfg industry. What better time than the present? Pandemic has given plenty of workers time to take a breath & consider their lousy scrabbling existence as low-pd drones for the barely-tax-paying bazillionaires & their union-busting thinky-tanks/ press/ hired hands who threaten the base with job loss. They’ve already offshored everything they can. Let them try to make a buck without box-loaders, latte-pushers & short-order cooks, let alone US-land-tied engrg/ construction tradesmen.