Everyone seems to be missing an important point of unions, which is to increase the standard of the work environment. If you have never worked in manufacturing you will not understand, but I spent three summers working in steel mills, and even today the conditions are not very good. There is constantly steel dust floating around in the air, sulfuric acid fumes, and excessive heat. If conditions are like that now, with unions, I cannot imagine what things must have been like earlier in the century.
It may be easy to simply view laborers as commodities (in fact, pg compares them to servers), but it's important to remember these are human beings with lives to live. Before the era of unions, these people were treated as tools, and unions forced companies to recognize that they need to actually give their workers livable working conditions.
So I would like to submit that one reason for the decline of unions today is that government regulates companies much more tightly. Organizations like OSHA and the Workers' Compensation Fund ensure that workers have reasonable demands placed upon them, and if they get hurt, they will still have enough money to live on.
No web consultant ever had to worry about getting electrocuted by the machine he or she uses, or about passing out from excessive heat and falling into dangerous machinery. To compare the union movement of the early 1900s to the boon of web developers in the 90s is absurd, in my opinion. The people who were part of the union movement were heroic, in a way, by forcing faceless companies to recognize the health and humanity of their workers.
First, I think Henry Ford deserves a lot of credit for recognizing that manufacturing workers are people, not servers. He was the one who discovered the benefits of the 40-hour work week. I'm not sure how Unions factor into that, but treating workers like people does make economic sense (even if many managers even today still do not recognize this).
In any case, in addition to working for better conditions, Unions grew to combat corruption. Blacklisting, for example: One manufacturer fires an employee for trying to organize workers and puts him on a blacklist, preventing him from being hired by anyone else. This is a fear tactic that has a large destructive power in an economy where collective bargaining is not protected.
Recently, I heard from an acquaintance. He is a manager at a corporation that was putting on presentations about preventing Union organization. During the presentation, they shared a list of reasons employees form unions, and salary was _dead last_. I don't remember all the reasons, but mostly the issues were related to blatant Management disregard for(or mistreatment of) employees.
1) Isn't it more efficient to mandate minimum safety standards through the government/OSHA than through unions?
2) When you took the job, did you know about the conditions there? If so, why did you take it? I can't speak for you, but I want to guess the money made up for the suckiness, right? So, it seems like if people know what the conditions are in a job before they sign up, isn't it up to the individual to decide whether the money is enough to get them to put up with the sucky conditions?
1) Isn't it more efficient to mandate minimum safety standards through the government/OSHA than through unions?
That's an interesting question. My initial inclination, however, is to answer "no". The conditions and safety issues associated with different jobs vary so greatly that it would be quite difficult for any general organization to encompass and mandate all relevant standards. Unions can be much more specific, even taking care of issues like, "Workers working in location X should receive extra pay because it is 15 degrees warmer than the rest of the plant." (That's a bad example, but I hope you get what I mean.)
2) When you took the job, did you know about the conditions there? If so, why did you take it? I can't speak for you, but I want to guess the money made up for the suckiness, right? So, it seems like if people know what the conditions are in a job before they sign up, isn't it up to the individual to decide whether the money is enough to get them to put up with the sucky conditions?
The 3 summers were actually 3 different jobs. The first one I took, I didn't know much about the conditions. My uncle got me the job (he's a boss there), and the experience turned out to be a very eye-opening one. This was actually the one with the worst conditions: the company I worked for that summer was hired to do the things that their client companies' (unionized) workers wouldn't want to do. This meant that we were in places with high carbon monoxide, extreme heat, excessive dirt (I crawled around in grease on several occasions), and so on. This company was not unionized, and its workers received abysmal pay... anywhere from $9.50-13.50 per hour, with only a couple guys getting more than $11. On one occasion, I worked 11 straight 13-hour shifts, and the full-time guys were frequently expected to work a month or so at a time (8+ hrs/day) without a day off.
The reason the company could go on like this is because work in my area is at a premium. I live in the steel manufacturing area of northeastern Ohio, and since the early 90s, plants have been slowly laying off workers and closing down. There are so many people without jobs that places like the one I worked for can pay ridiculously low amounts for very dangerous work, and they are bound to get someone to take the job. I guess if you've always lived in a place with plenty of jobs, this situation is hard to envision, but sometimes when you have a family to support, you'll take whatever work you can get.
The following 2 summers, I managed to get a job in one of the steel mills, instead of the company I had worked for before. For me, the situation improved dramatically, largely because it was a union job. The pay was better and the demands were much more reasonable. There were still some jobs, however, that if someone asked you to do them, your first reaction would surely be, "Are you serious?" One of the summer workers' duties was basically to work these jobs that the more tenured workers would never do on a regular basis. At least for us, we could look at the end of the summer as the light at the end of the tunnel. For the guys who worked there full-time, many had 30+ more years to go. So I didn't complain too much regardless of what job I was given.
In all cases, I worked the jobs because they were the best money I could get close to home. This does not mean that the money even comes close to making up for the actual value of the worker or the peril of the job (although in the case of the union job, the situation was markedly improved). This is where unions become very important: to ensure that even in a poor job market, workers get their due compensation for the work that they perform.
It seemed as though pg was talking about the unions of the 1950's. Those unions weren't heroic. The heroism was in the union movement of the late 1800s/early 1900s. Companies/capitalists of that gilded age were often enough a law unto themselves, and workers organizing to have their legal rights respected were in very real danger.
It's a good thing that union organizers are in no real danger anymore, and companies allow a fair negotiation process between workers and the corporate offices who determines their pay.
Sure, in a field where there is a high demand for workers, unions are unnecessary, because any deficiencies in pay will be punished. In manufacturing and retail, however, where the demand is not as high, there has to be someone out there establishing a minimum standard for their employees to receive in compensation for their work. Since minimum wage in the U.S. is not enough to live on, the only other groups with the possibility to enforce such standards are unions.
I think that the recent trend (as in the last couple decades) of discounting the importance of unions is in large part due to comparing dissimilar organizations. Manufacturing and retail is a completely different beast from the service industry, and to lump them all into one "unions fight for overcompensation" group is shameful.
It may be easy to simply view laborers as commodities (in fact, pg compares them to servers), but it's important to remember these are human beings with lives to live. Before the era of unions, these people were treated as tools, and unions forced companies to recognize that they need to actually give their workers livable working conditions.
So I would like to submit that one reason for the decline of unions today is that government regulates companies much more tightly. Organizations like OSHA and the Workers' Compensation Fund ensure that workers have reasonable demands placed upon them, and if they get hurt, they will still have enough money to live on.
No web consultant ever had to worry about getting electrocuted by the machine he or she uses, or about passing out from excessive heat and falling into dangerous machinery. To compare the union movement of the early 1900s to the boon of web developers in the 90s is absurd, in my opinion. The people who were part of the union movement were heroic, in a way, by forcing faceless companies to recognize the health and humanity of their workers.