(Note: Part one of six.)
Every January, the federal Bureau
of Labor Statistics publishes updated figures on union membership, an event that
must be the source of increasing anxiety among union leaders. Over the past 20
years, the percentage of union members among working Americans has never
increased by any significant amount in the BLS figures; sometimes the unions
have managed to hold their ground, more often than not, they have lost.
This inexorable decline in
membership has led the union movement to seek changes to labor law, changes that
have one thing in common: They make it easier for unions to win and hold on to
the legal right to represent workers. Whether these changes would improve the
lot of working Americans is another question. Union officials, understandably,
assert that union membership is almost always a good deal, and that the failure
of workers to choose to unionize can only be explained by flaws in labor law or
by employer hostility to unions, or both. The possibility that the union
movement’s decline is due to union practices, and that the best union reforms
are internal not external, needs to be fully explored by unions or lawmakers.
It’s a long train, and Michigan is
at the back end, but there’s no question that the train is leaving union
station, and Michigan is along for the ride. The BLS reports that between 1999
and 2006 the nation added 9.3 million jobs, but unions lost more than 1.1
million members. The losses were especially severe outside of government; in
1999 union members made up 9.5 percent of the private-sector workforce, but in
2006 that figure had dropped to 7.4 percent.
Unions remain more potent in
Michigan: Overall, 19.6 percent of Michigan workers are union members. Still,
back in 1999 that figure was 21.5 percent. Between 1999 and 2006 Michigan unions
lost more than 120,000 members.
Federal labor law is based on the
idea that a labor union should not be "recognized" as the representative of
workers unless it has the support of a majority of those workers. The process of
recognizing a union typically begins with the union collecting authorization
cards signed by workers. When the union has a sufficient number of signatures
from the workers in a bargaining unit, it can petition for recognition.
Sometimes the employer accepts the union’s claim based on the signed cards, but
the employer may also call for a government-supervised secret-ballot election.
Prior to the election, the employer
is allowed to make the case to workers for not having a union, and in the
process the company may hold employee meetings on company time on the condition
that employees are paid for the time they spend in the meeting. During this
period, employers may not threaten, interrogate or make promises to workers in
exchange for their supporting management. If a majority of workers vote to bring
in a union, that union is recognized, and the employer must negotiate in good
faith.
Union officials often argue that
their loss of members is due to the machinations of employers who exploit
loopholes in the nation’s labor law to fire union supporters, threaten plant
closings and force workers to attend anti-union meetings. But union leaders have
not tried to close off these supposed loopholes. Rather, they have taken two
other routes.
First, they have tried to abolish
the secret-ballot election at which workers express their preferences in private
and make the final decision to unionize or not. Labor leaders want to replace
this secret-ballot union election with a "card check" process in which an
employer must recognize a union immediately if the union collects authorization
cards from a majority of workers.
The problem is that not all workers
who sign authorization cards are necessarily union supporters. Workers often
sign cards because they sense peer pressure or want to avoid harassment from
union organizers. Unions can and have resorted to intimidation to collect
signatures, a tactic that is not available – to either side – in a secret-ballot
vote. The main effect of card check is likely to be that workers who are
indifferent or even hostile to union representation will be seen as union
supporters because they were uncomfortable refusing to sign the card in public.
This tendency of card check to create "false positives" will lead to unions
being recognized in places where they do not have the support of a majority of
workers.
The union movement’s second goal is
to have an arbitrator automatically determine wages and other terms of
employment when unions and management cannot reach an agreement on the critical
first contract after a union is recognized. On the surface, binding arbitration
seems like a reasonable way to avoid strikes, but it’s rarely used in the
private sector to resolve labor disputes. Michigan does use binding arbitration
when state or local governments cannot reach an agreement with unions
representing police officers and firefighters, but it is a cumbersome process
and prone to long delays. The final decision on wages and working conditions is
made by an arbitrator who suffers none of the consequences if his decision leads
to layoffs or bankruptcy. Finally, workers themselves cannot reject an
arbitrator’s ruling no matter how unfair they believe it to be.
The overall effect of these two
proposals would be to steer workers into unions even when they are
unenthusiastic about union representation. At the same time, the unions
themselves would become less accountable to the workers they represent.
And all this at a time when it is
becoming less and less obvious that unions give workers any advantages.
Recently, the Detroit Free Press reported that workers at Toyota’s nonunion
assembly plant in Georgetown, Ky., had better compensation than the typical UAW
member working for one of the Big Three. In the auto industry, so critical to
Michigan, the union advantage has been whittled to virtually nil, and workers
are smart enough to see that. The union movement has yet to come to terms with
the effect that this sort of development has on organizing.
Over the next few weeks, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy will be publishing essays that take a closer look at the drive for labor law "reform." We will examine what union advocates are calling for and what the likely effects will be. Finally, we will argue that the union movement doesn’t need new legal advantages as much as it needs "tough love." The best way to strengthen unions is to make them more accountable to
their members.
#####
Paul Kersey is senior labor policy
analyst at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a research and educational
institute headquartered in Midland, Mich. Permission to reprint in whole or in
part is hereby granted, provided that the author and the Center are properly
cited.
