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Tim Nesbitt's avatar

My thoughts, from many decades in the union movement and six years as head of the AFL-CIO in Oregon:

-The single-employer, site-based bargaining unit, a product of those 1930's New Deal laws Noah cites in this piece, are woefully outmoded and mis-structured for today's economy, whether we pursue industrial policy or not.

-That's why we need sectoral bargaining.

-These outmoded structures infect the organization of the union movement as well. Unions are federations of local chapters, thus the actions of the Arizona pipe fitters, which may run counter to the views of their national leadership. The many tails of any national union often wag or disorient the dog in instances like this, pitting parochial biases and short-term interests against the broader and longer-term interests of workers in a given industry.

-Sectoral and regional bargaining would help to force unions to restructure and better deal with the dynamics of today's economy.

-The union movement continues to press for labor law reform to make organizing easier, without pursuing parallel reforms to change the structure of bargaining to be multi-employer, multi-site and therefore sectoral. The labor law reform agenda needs to add a focus on the latter.

-There remain two types of unions in the U.S. -- craft unions (like the pipe fitters Noah mentions in AZ and all of the building trades unions), which preceded the New Deal (think of Samuel Gompers and the cigar makers), and industrial unions like the auto workers, which are a product of the New Deal. The former (AFL) are supply side unions, based on apprenticeship and their ability to deliver a highly-skilled workforce to multiple employers. The latter (CIO) are industrial unions, structured on a non-craft, all-workers, "wall-to-wall" model, but still largely dependent on localized bargaining units focused on sharing the profits of single employers.

-If we progressives hope to build back better, we'll need to pay more attention to the benefits of the apprenticeship model of the craft unions (on a regional basis) and the need to reform the outmoded bargaining unit structure of the industrial unions (on a sectoral basis). Those changes will require more than new approaches to unionizing and representing workers by the unions themselves. Some unions have been pioneering new ways of representing workers in specific industries, like the Service Employees' Justice for Janitors and home care workers campaigns, but that approach won't get to scale with a new legal framework enacted at the national level. Unions should move beyond trying to regain their power for workers through an outmoded structure and Democrats should stop treating labor law reform as an "oh yeah, that" agenda item. There are big changes needed that will take a concerted effort, like, for example health care reform.

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Lost Future's avatar

Respectfully Noah, this piece is a little empty. Unions in most countries and most times throughout history have been anti-automation, anti-foreign workers, and frequently anti-progress. They are philosophically always, always protectionist. Advocacy for extremely narrow interest groups (dockworkers, cargo ship deckhands) imposes large costs on the other 99.9% of the working population. Everyone in America is paying for the Jones Act giving job security to a few thousand workers!

>That might involve giving labor more of a seat at the table when making industrial policy

So they have even more political power to block progress?

>and convince them that things that they previously perceived as threats — new technologies and foreign workers — now represent opportunities instead

Frequently they really are a threat to their very narrow interest group- automation really will put some dockworkers out of work, machines really did displace the Luddites. The bird's eye view is that it's better for society overall for some workers to lose these jobs, sorry to say. Pain for narrow interest groups leads to diffuse benefits for everyone

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