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.
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
So whilst I sympathise with this analysis, I think what you describe here is an unfortunate consequence of a dog-eat-dog society.
Because workers lack capital, they also lack a reliable means of representation for their political and economic interests outside of leveraging the collective demand for their labour through unions. This means that should governments or businesses opt for policies that disadvantage employees, then the latter have no choice but to either resign and hope they can find another job as to not starve, or go on strike until their grievances are addressed.
Workers are merely operating in accordance with supply and demand dictated value like everybody else is. They won’t provide a service unless they feel they are being adequately compensated. Simply put, if a private investor or capital owner refuses to provide or invest in a service if they won’t see a significant return on said efforts, then there is no reason why workers should do so either.
Inevitably, whilst unions will make major progress in safety regulations, wages, working hours and vacations, you are correct that like any interest group - they become protectionist for their own interests. In the same way that wealthy businesses will lobby for lower taxation and deregulation, unions will try to use collective bargaining to discourage stuff that could be perceived as a threat to them - such as automation. (The difference of course being that capital owners are actually influential here).
The underlying problem here is an economic system whereby most of the wealth generated by businesses and companies is concentrated in the hands of investors and owners of capital. By giving workers more of a stake in the success of a business, they will be more friendly to the adoption of new technologies since they actually benefit from the increased wealth generated.
This is why I agree with Noah’s point that we *should* give workers more of a seat at the table. But this seat should come in the form of actual benefits from the adoption of automation and technology in a given company. Rather than the often empty promise that the increased wealth generated will eventually trickle down to them via increased overall GDP.
Workers don’t lack capital - half of Americans have 401(k)s. Typical operating margins are around 5%. Most of the revenue in most companies is used to pay personnel.
In my experience in local development (Planning Commissioner for 8 years) the problem wasn't unions per se, but their use of other legal mechanisms to blackmail project developers and their repeated advocacy of non-labor issues.
An example of the former is bankrolling CEQA (CA's environmental review law) lawsuits that miraculously go away the moment the developer signs a union scale agreement: "you will pay our wages or we will use snails and turtles to make sure you NEVER build anything." This sort of thing sours people both on environmental review and on unions. However, at least it is "advocating for the interests of their members" in a perverted way.
The second problem is more serious. Major unions have become wholly owned subsidiaries of a single political party. Why the hell is the AFL CIO donating to Planned Parenthood? Why are they taking stands on biological males in girl's sports. In polling, the majority blue-collar males (the class of most of their members) consistently rejects these. And even if they didn't, these aren't labor issues! Sometimes, the union's loyalty to the Party directly harms their members, specifically the issue of illegal immigration, which, while it is a slight positive overall economically, there is no question depresses the wages of the very people the union is supposed to represent.
I have worked in union jobs before, specifically IATSE, the stagehands union. I would love to see strengthening of private-sector unionization (public sector, no, for other reasons). A reconstruction of the tripartite agreement between, as Turchin says, "the few, the many, and the state" that existed from the 30's to the 70's. But to achieve that, American unions are going to have to learn from the Germans and Japanese and Swedes to start staying in their lane and playing well with others. Right now, they don't do either.
They are aligned to one party because the other party tried to eradicate them in the 80s. Conservatives have a nasty habit of confusing the historical (retired) soon to be historical (soon to be retired) working class with the actual present and future working class. One party skews older and is thus more comprised of retirees and older people, so among the working classes political views are not evenly distributed. I counter your argument thus right wingers must cease attempting to murder unions and the young.
You're correct that the Democrats were the party of the working class. That ended roughly with Bill Clinton ("the era of big government is over"). The Dems gradually shifted to embrace the administrative elites (PMC) rather than the working class. Historically the GOP was the party of the oligarch class, as you say, but less so today. As Josh Hawley put it on the Senate floor last year, "the GOP is a working class party now."
Bottom line, there's party realignment happening. The Democratic Party has become the home of the uber-educated and wealthy elites, and there is a chasm between the views of this group and the views of the working class on both social and economic issues. It remains to be seen if the GOP completes Hawley's transition. If they fail, a 3rd party will be created, as there are far too many working class people for some of our frustrated elite aspirants (Ivy grads currently working at Starbucks) to not take advantage of the situation.
And don't discount the older conservatives like me. On another comment on this article someone asked me for my top "populist" wish list items. #4 on my list is a rejuvenated, private-sector, union movement. The German union model seem to work well.
I remember Tim Cook saying something like - and this is 10+ years ago - that if he wanted to hire production engineers, he might find enough candidates in the US to fill a meeting room, but in China to fill a convention center. It's going to be a long march on a long road to reverse that.
Yep. I was looking for that speech. At the time I thought it was the most depressing thing I had heard, and it spelled doom for the west. Luckily some sanity has been restored.
There’s nothing I love more than saying I told you so, which I did. It’s early days still, I’ll grant, and I could still be wrong. But if you think American unions (as opposed to German or Japanese) can be a productive part of the economy, or even only a minimally burdensome one, I think you’re dreadfully mistaken.
The question is so much better than the answer. Give union leaders a seat at the table? How is that supposed to make the slightest difference? In reality, the answer is to just steamroll them when their complaints are this ridiculous.
What a wonder that unions are in a “defensive crouch” when attitudes like yours are so common.
Bluntly, unions are the only organization left in the US that directly advocates for the interests of the workers they represent. Progressives of the 21st century have a habit of treating unions as a semi-disposable tool to get victories rather than as a core ally who’s policy goals are similar, and so there’s a very good reason why unions are wary.
Why should they have a seat at the table? Because, shocker of shockers, when your elected leadership is informed and can explain what’s going on and why it’s worthwhile, people tend to come along voluntarily. It’s an old tool of politics that’s fallen out the progressive toolbox lately - convincing as opposed to threatening.
As far as a seat at the table, this is only going to work well when the union leaders and their members have interests that are well-aligned with the long term economic impacts. In Germany, the system works because we are mostly talking about unions representing individuals who expect to be working in that industry for a career and/or have strong ties to a particular city or region.
OTOH, if you imagine giving McDonald's workers or grocery store clerks a seat at the table in the US it's hard to see how that works. Most McDonald's employees (non-managers) have very little interest in the success of the enterprise because they don't expect to be working there in 5 years. If their union reps actually represent their interests they should be trying to bleed the company's long term economic health for short term payouts to the current employees.
Unfortunately, what often happens in these cases is the unions don't really represent the interests of most workers. When I worked as a grocery store bagger I paid quite a bit in union dues but the union couldn't give a crap about short term workers in the worst positions since they rarely stayed long enough to have any influence. The unions ended up representing the interests of the long term employees who often weren't doing the most unpleasant work so didn't really focus on improving those aspects of the job.
This isn't to say unions are bad. I mean in a perfect world we would all have UBI and we wouldn't need unions because companies would have to treat workers well or they'd give up the paychecks for a more frugal but still decent life on just UBI. In our world, I think unions provide a very imperfect form of partial redistribution but I don't think the seats on the corporate board model works for the us given the higher mobility and expectation that you may be working for a different employer in the near future.
This is a really good point, Peter. It's the mirror image of the CEO's who gin up short-term profits at the expense of long-term investment so they can pad their stock option bonuses.
I see a lot of this in the way they historically fought for defined benefit pensions. Huge, huge rewards for lifers, often paid for in part by non-lifers contributions coupled with a (probably accidental) failure to recognize that the plan actuarially is unsound for the employer when the bills come due in 20-30 years.
Very consistent with my experience. The union represented the unmotivated lifers at the expense of the people that had ambitions to move on someday. Oh yeah, and the unmotivated lifers were also frequently engaged in sexual harassment of younger workers, with the union essentially guaranteeing they couldn't get fired for it.
What's doing the work here is how long someone intends to stay and this creates a sampling bias amoung people who don't pursue a career in a unionized area. I mean professional bodies like the AMA are really just a kind of union under a different name and, ignoring the issue of their effect on society more broadly, they do a decent job of advancing the interests of their members and even help identify and eliminate anyone doing shoddy work.
This is how you get good results in countries like Germany when you have a union representing a skilled craft (or at least a group of employees for whom this is a career). If you're an electrician in the building trade you probably intend to become a master electrician and work in the field your whole life and under those conditions your union probably does a decent (as well as any elected body) of representing your interests and the many motivated ambitious members.
In the US many factors mean we are often less likely to be pursuing a lifetime career in a field. But even that doesn't cause too many problems on its own. Grad school unions are decent (when the students set the agenda) because everyone involved has similar interests even if they won't be grad students forever. But when you have a mix with some people passing through and others who are lifers it's going to be hard.
"I mean professional bodies like the AMA are really just a kind of union under a different name and, ignoring the issue of their effect on society more broadly, they do a decent job of advancing the interests of their members and even help identify and eliminate anyone doing shoddy work."
This may have been true in the past, IDK, but professional organizations like the AMA and ABA are just partisan woke spaces these days. I quit the ABA back in the 1990s for this reason, and and I doubt they changed for the better since then.
If they were really representing the interests of their members then WTF are they doing obstructing the preconditions necessary to improve the welfare of those members?
Unions aren't evil but we shouldn't look at them with rose tinted glasses either. Ultimately, a union is just a form of democratic representation for their members. If you believe congress often fails to advance the interests of Americans at large you should accept that unions can run into the same kind of failures where the interests of union leaders don't always reflect the interests of the members at large.
There are two sides to every story. And union members have been told a story, a lot, that some proposed change will, ultimately, benefit them. Airline deregulation. NAFTA. Admitting China to the WTO. But it somehow seems all the benefits of those changes flowed to every other party but them. So, if a union hears that (yet another) group of H1Bs needs to be brought in for jobs instead of their members, can you understand why they might be skeptical of eventual promised benefits?
Please note that I’m not disagreeing with you in that I think bringing in Taiwanese engineers to help design and construct the fab is a good thing for everyone involved. But I’m trying to point out to you why (since you seemed so surprised) a union might oppose it.
And much like democracy, a union is the worst form of representing workers’ interests, except all the others that have been tried. What would you suggest instead? In Bezos we trust?
Unions are fine as an organizations and should not be outlawed because of freedom of association , but if they prevent the factory from being opened (and the products being produced and other less obstinate workers from being employed) then the government or management should be allowed to fire them and freely associate with willing replacement workers instead.
This is a blanket statement, where in practice it depends upon what the conditions are. Unions and organized labor have suffered for decades, under promises that never materialized, wealth that went into the pockets of CEOS, and factories that were abandoned. It's an overused cliche, but the default position of most unions is that the people they're negotiating with are acting in "bad faith", ie they don't care about their workers, their families etc. It's hard to build a mutually beneficial relationship, whether in life or business when you don't trust the other person you're dealing with. Having workers in closer proximity to corporate or on corporate boards might help them better understand why companies are contemplating making certain decisions or what some of the problems are, or giving workers veto power over certain decisions. I remember reading that during the Great Recession, some companies in Germany cut back workers hours to part time, with the understanding that when economic conditions improved, workers would get full-time hours, instead of losing their job completely. In the United States though, that's impossible because health insurance is tied to full-time employment Barring that, a more radical position would be something like worker cooperatives, where workers vote on major decisions.
Nobody ever believed me but here was Bush’s priority for the WTO…truly the dumbest 8 years in American history:
Foreign brands like 555 made by British American Tobacco and Mild Seven by Japan Tobacco Inc are poised to dethrone homegrown favorites once China joins the WTO, expected by early next year at the latest.
NAFTA actually benefited American working class citizens…that’s why the Bush administration was able to negotiate China into the WTO without a huge fight because it was right after 9/11 and he had a high approval but also NAFTA turned out to be positive. Now one thing that even the Wall Street Journal warned about was the Big 3 putting all of its eggs in the gas guzzling SUV basket…so was it low gas prices and developing SUVs that were the reason for success in the 1990s??
But they do not always advocate intelligently. Unfunded pensions and "Cadillac" health insurance are worse than wage demands, teachers did not benefit from unnecessary school closings (and teachers unions were not solely responsible, either), police officer do not benefit from shielding "bad apples." Other commentators have given other examples.
Cadillac health insurance is a problem with the tax code, not unions. Wages are deductible to the employer but income to the employee; health insurance is deductible to the employer but not income to the employee. The consequence for this problem in the tax code is that negotiations end up more into insurance than tax neutral (economically efficient) bargaining would.
I think your claim that unions "directly advocates for the interests of the workers they represent" is an overstatement. Certainly, there's an element of truth to it, but definitely a significant portion of union workers do not feel represented by their unions. I didn't.
When I was a minimum wage worker at a union (UFCW) shop, I definitely did not feel like the union represented me at all. They took their union dues out of my paycheck and I had no say in the matter whatsoever. I only got one raise in the two years I was working in that job, and that came solely from the state raising its minimum wage. I would have been paid exactly the same amount without the union, actually more because I wouldn't have to pay dues.
When workers organize, the concerns of a subset of workers always take precedence. That group might be the majority of workers in the shop, but it's not all of us.
This romanticization of legalized cartels is pathetic. Oh yeah I’m sure this pipe fitters union just needs to be “persuaded” that this factory needs to actually be built at some point and not milked endlessly for jobs. I’m sure the dockworkers need to be “persuaded” of the benefits of automation completely eviscerating their jobs (which is, objectively, a good thing). I’m sure the TWU in NY needs to be “persuaded” of similar benefits of OPTO. Maybe the fact that this cartel works on behalf of workers (as opposed to everyone else who consumes those workers’ output) doesn’t magically make it less corrosive to a functioning society.
Unions are merely workers organising. It’s the very definition of freedom of association.
The only possible “cartel” like behaviour is closed shops, but that’s generally an agreement between the workers and the management of any given company, and therefore the supposed loss of freedom that a worker who would otherwise prefer not to have to join a union to work for a company is no different than any other restriction the employer might impose on new hires.
I imagine these policies would be even worse with union leaders at the table, with more onerous requirements and much higher costs and more immigration restrictions. Many people criticize libertarians for being too individualistic but these unions only care about their own individual members and not at all about non-member workers, the company’s success, the taxpayers’ money, and the fact that they are slowly progress and denying everyone the products that would be made sooner and cheaper without the self-serving rules they add.
Excellent excellent excellent article. I am a labor-centric, strongly pro-Union New Deal Democrat, and a union member. I don’t see the problem of being able to coexist and think you are spot on. The fact is, unions with nutty work rules & an inflexible approach, can be self-defeating. Unions should ensure that the workers have a voice at the table, ensure fair treatment of their workers through due process, and ensure that workers receive fair compensation and a fair share of the profits for their labor. They should add value, and advocate for their members’ interests over the long term. They should not be a gravy train for union hierarchy or lazy people, or the union honchos who are all too often corrupt and sell out the rank and file. They should return balance & fairness to the workplace. The German union model, in general, sets a fine example.
The US model and the theoretical/intellectual basis on which US unions were established is nothing at all like German unions.
The US unions aren’t going to become Germans anytime soon.
On the plus side, white collar work on the US is much more competitive and cutthroat and flexible and remunerative than it is in Germany. A lot of the truly skilled labor on the factory floors are going to be white collar low-level engineers and skilled production managers. We just need to make more of these.
The job training component of the IRA is minuscule, unfortunately, and the requirements/incentives are also mostly absent
Dayen and the Roosevelt institute are saying “patronage and inefficiency good because it benefits our favored groups”, they’re just too dishonest to be open about it.
Biden’s policies are explicitly oriented toward unions wherever possible (they are key donors and supporters) which is one of the reasons many of these policies will fail.
Unions like to call their members “skilled” but anyone who has been a union member or worked on an assembly line knows this is largely BS in manufacturing (not the case in some trades).
For Biden, a win is where scarce “skilled” labor is used to assemble battery components mostly imported from China, using American union labor that discourages automation at every turn.
I would favor (and impose) much more training and favor higher value businesses (machine tools, robotics, advanced semiconductor fabs) and promote more automation. Biden’s dream would be big union manual assembly shops subsidized by taxpayers.
We should question whether it is sensible to be paying companies to assemble low complexity products (like batteries) using scarce labor resources who would be much more valuable (and trainable) elsewhere .
The good (?) news is that while it is almost certain that much of the subsidized investment will prove to have been misdirected, we can’t really predict how it all will turn out and there should be some winners. And Noah’s list of things that might determine the list percentage is spot on.
What's going on with these unions blocking the Taiwanese visas? It sounds like they are actively interfering with the preconditions needed to get their members more work (no experts -> no building -> no jobs)?
Is this just old fashioned anti-immigration/anti-foreign bias causing people to behave irrationally, opposition to Biden's agenda or what?
Sounds like it could be some sort of misguided solidarity thinking that any immigrant labor must be undercutting some fellow brother workers here in the United States.
"American pipefitters simply do not know the technical details of installing ultraviolet lithography machinery. They need someone to teach them before they can do it, and the people who can teach them live in Taiwan."
This a gross misunderstanding of how fabs are built. The lithography machinery is installed by employees of ASML (the equipment manufacturer). In fact, at the big fabs, the equipment manufacturers station employees full-time on-site for service and maintenance. The building of the fabs is primarily dealing with plumbing, air handling, climate control and vibration dampening, all spelled out by the equipment manufacturer specs and the building design. These are more difficult than putting up an office building, but all things American pipe fitters and related tradesmen can do. We know this, because they built the fabs for Intel, Global Foundries, Samsung, Micron, countless universities, and everyone else. I'm no sure we should be taking TMSC's stated reasons that they're falling behind at face value.
Also interesting is this from David Dayen's piece, cited by Noah:
"[TSMC's] founder, Morris Chang, referred to American high-tech companies in a 2016 interview, stating bluntly: “When you look at why those companies are successful, I think them not having unions is a big part of it.”
Sure enough, as TSMC builds a chip factory in Arizona with public funding support, they have resisted Commerce Department guidance, and labor has been frozen out. “There is zero interest in doing business with us,” the president of Arizona’s building trades told the Prospect in April. Out-of-state, non-union workers are building the facility."
The story seems to be: 1) refuse to hire qualified union workers; 2) hire non-union workers from out of state; 3) claim that they need to bring in foreign workers because the (non-union, out-of-state) workers aren't sufficiently qualified.
IG Metal promoted diesel passenger cars in this century in order to reduce carbon emissions!! So the notion unions have the same goals as progressive groups is absurd! The most powerful union on the planet played a big role in what is now widely agreed is an unmitigated public health disaster that failed to reduce carbon emissions.
This is a demonstration of the failure of industrial policy. Public choice being what it is, political pressure will always trump effectiveness. Neoliberalism has been working and can continue to do so if allowed.
Unions are a core component of Bidenflation. They do nothing but slow down productivity and drive up costs. Most members would not even be in a Union if they could avoid it. If it's a union shop, I avoid it like the plague.
Unions in America are needlessly politicized. In Germany and Japan, all mainstream political parties are vaguely pro-union. In the US, unions today (particularly union leadership) are an arm of the Democratic party.
Actually growing union membership is an anti-goal; more blue collar unionization would cause many unions to become GOP-leaning. This would be catastrophic for Democratic election strategy. The result is that American unions instead push for small self-serving political wins like maintaining the Jones Act or making union votes non-secret. Whining about immigrants fits in here too.
My response as above is a perfect response to this as well:
They are aligned to one party because the other party tried to eradicate them in the 80s. Conservatives have a nasty habit of confusing the historical (retired) soon to be historical (soon to be retired) working class with the actual present and future working class. One party skews older and is thus more comprised of retirees and older people, so among the working classes political views are not evenly distributed. I counter your argument thus right wingers must cease attempting to murder unions and the young.
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.
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
So whilst I sympathise with this analysis, I think what you describe here is an unfortunate consequence of a dog-eat-dog society.
Because workers lack capital, they also lack a reliable means of representation for their political and economic interests outside of leveraging the collective demand for their labour through unions. This means that should governments or businesses opt for policies that disadvantage employees, then the latter have no choice but to either resign and hope they can find another job as to not starve, or go on strike until their grievances are addressed.
Workers are merely operating in accordance with supply and demand dictated value like everybody else is. They won’t provide a service unless they feel they are being adequately compensated. Simply put, if a private investor or capital owner refuses to provide or invest in a service if they won’t see a significant return on said efforts, then there is no reason why workers should do so either.
Inevitably, whilst unions will make major progress in safety regulations, wages, working hours and vacations, you are correct that like any interest group - they become protectionist for their own interests. In the same way that wealthy businesses will lobby for lower taxation and deregulation, unions will try to use collective bargaining to discourage stuff that could be perceived as a threat to them - such as automation. (The difference of course being that capital owners are actually influential here).
The underlying problem here is an economic system whereby most of the wealth generated by businesses and companies is concentrated in the hands of investors and owners of capital. By giving workers more of a stake in the success of a business, they will be more friendly to the adoption of new technologies since they actually benefit from the increased wealth generated.
This is why I agree with Noah’s point that we *should* give workers more of a seat at the table. But this seat should come in the form of actual benefits from the adoption of automation and technology in a given company. Rather than the often empty promise that the increased wealth generated will eventually trickle down to them via increased overall GDP.
Workers don’t lack capital - half of Americans have 401(k)s. Typical operating margins are around 5%. Most of the revenue in most companies is used to pay personnel.
"Diffuse benefits to everyone" is a funny way to describe "enriching the executive class while everybody else gets dogshit gig work".
Workers won't care if they have slightly cheaper iPhones if their employment prospects are either Uber, Mechanical Turk, or a stripper pole.
In my experience in local development (Planning Commissioner for 8 years) the problem wasn't unions per se, but their use of other legal mechanisms to blackmail project developers and their repeated advocacy of non-labor issues.
An example of the former is bankrolling CEQA (CA's environmental review law) lawsuits that miraculously go away the moment the developer signs a union scale agreement: "you will pay our wages or we will use snails and turtles to make sure you NEVER build anything." This sort of thing sours people both on environmental review and on unions. However, at least it is "advocating for the interests of their members" in a perverted way.
The second problem is more serious. Major unions have become wholly owned subsidiaries of a single political party. Why the hell is the AFL CIO donating to Planned Parenthood? Why are they taking stands on biological males in girl's sports. In polling, the majority blue-collar males (the class of most of their members) consistently rejects these. And even if they didn't, these aren't labor issues! Sometimes, the union's loyalty to the Party directly harms their members, specifically the issue of illegal immigration, which, while it is a slight positive overall economically, there is no question depresses the wages of the very people the union is supposed to represent.
I have worked in union jobs before, specifically IATSE, the stagehands union. I would love to see strengthening of private-sector unionization (public sector, no, for other reasons). A reconstruction of the tripartite agreement between, as Turchin says, "the few, the many, and the state" that existed from the 30's to the 70's. But to achieve that, American unions are going to have to learn from the Germans and Japanese and Swedes to start staying in their lane and playing well with others. Right now, they don't do either.
They are aligned to one party because the other party tried to eradicate them in the 80s. Conservatives have a nasty habit of confusing the historical (retired) soon to be historical (soon to be retired) working class with the actual present and future working class. One party skews older and is thus more comprised of retirees and older people, so among the working classes political views are not evenly distributed. I counter your argument thus right wingers must cease attempting to murder unions and the young.
You're correct that the Democrats were the party of the working class. That ended roughly with Bill Clinton ("the era of big government is over"). The Dems gradually shifted to embrace the administrative elites (PMC) rather than the working class. Historically the GOP was the party of the oligarch class, as you say, but less so today. As Josh Hawley put it on the Senate floor last year, "the GOP is a working class party now."
Bottom line, there's party realignment happening. The Democratic Party has become the home of the uber-educated and wealthy elites, and there is a chasm between the views of this group and the views of the working class on both social and economic issues. It remains to be seen if the GOP completes Hawley's transition. If they fail, a 3rd party will be created, as there are far too many working class people for some of our frustrated elite aspirants (Ivy grads currently working at Starbucks) to not take advantage of the situation.
And don't discount the older conservatives like me. On another comment on this article someone asked me for my top "populist" wish list items. #4 on my list is a rejuvenated, private-sector, union movement. The German union model seem to work well.
I remember Tim Cook saying something like - and this is 10+ years ago - that if he wanted to hire production engineers, he might find enough candidates in the US to fill a meeting room, but in China to fill a convention center. It's going to be a long march on a long road to reverse that.
Yep. I was looking for that speech. At the time I thought it was the most depressing thing I had heard, and it spelled doom for the west. Luckily some sanity has been restored.
We have to train them and give companies incentives to train them, working in partnership with state university.
There’s nothing I love more than saying I told you so, which I did. It’s early days still, I’ll grant, and I could still be wrong. But if you think American unions (as opposed to German or Japanese) can be a productive part of the economy, or even only a minimally burdensome one, I think you’re dreadfully mistaken.
Eol, why? What makes Japanese and German unions work in your view? And I agree that they do. But why is that?
The question is so much better than the answer. Give union leaders a seat at the table? How is that supposed to make the slightest difference? In reality, the answer is to just steamroll them when their complaints are this ridiculous.
What a wonder that unions are in a “defensive crouch” when attitudes like yours are so common.
Bluntly, unions are the only organization left in the US that directly advocates for the interests of the workers they represent. Progressives of the 21st century have a habit of treating unions as a semi-disposable tool to get victories rather than as a core ally who’s policy goals are similar, and so there’s a very good reason why unions are wary.
Why should they have a seat at the table? Because, shocker of shockers, when your elected leadership is informed and can explain what’s going on and why it’s worthwhile, people tend to come along voluntarily. It’s an old tool of politics that’s fallen out the progressive toolbox lately - convincing as opposed to threatening.
As far as a seat at the table, this is only going to work well when the union leaders and their members have interests that are well-aligned with the long term economic impacts. In Germany, the system works because we are mostly talking about unions representing individuals who expect to be working in that industry for a career and/or have strong ties to a particular city or region.
OTOH, if you imagine giving McDonald's workers or grocery store clerks a seat at the table in the US it's hard to see how that works. Most McDonald's employees (non-managers) have very little interest in the success of the enterprise because they don't expect to be working there in 5 years. If their union reps actually represent their interests they should be trying to bleed the company's long term economic health for short term payouts to the current employees.
Unfortunately, what often happens in these cases is the unions don't really represent the interests of most workers. When I worked as a grocery store bagger I paid quite a bit in union dues but the union couldn't give a crap about short term workers in the worst positions since they rarely stayed long enough to have any influence. The unions ended up representing the interests of the long term employees who often weren't doing the most unpleasant work so didn't really focus on improving those aspects of the job.
This isn't to say unions are bad. I mean in a perfect world we would all have UBI and we wouldn't need unions because companies would have to treat workers well or they'd give up the paychecks for a more frugal but still decent life on just UBI. In our world, I think unions provide a very imperfect form of partial redistribution but I don't think the seats on the corporate board model works for the us given the higher mobility and expectation that you may be working for a different employer in the near future.
This is a really good point, Peter. It's the mirror image of the CEO's who gin up short-term profits at the expense of long-term investment so they can pad their stock option bonuses.
I see a lot of this in the way they historically fought for defined benefit pensions. Huge, huge rewards for lifers, often paid for in part by non-lifers contributions coupled with a (probably accidental) failure to recognize that the plan actuarially is unsound for the employer when the bills come due in 20-30 years.
Very consistent with my experience. The union represented the unmotivated lifers at the expense of the people that had ambitions to move on someday. Oh yeah, and the unmotivated lifers were also frequently engaged in sexual harassment of younger workers, with the union essentially guaranteeing they couldn't get fired for it.
What's doing the work here is how long someone intends to stay and this creates a sampling bias amoung people who don't pursue a career in a unionized area. I mean professional bodies like the AMA are really just a kind of union under a different name and, ignoring the issue of their effect on society more broadly, they do a decent job of advancing the interests of their members and even help identify and eliminate anyone doing shoddy work.
This is how you get good results in countries like Germany when you have a union representing a skilled craft (or at least a group of employees for whom this is a career). If you're an electrician in the building trade you probably intend to become a master electrician and work in the field your whole life and under those conditions your union probably does a decent (as well as any elected body) of representing your interests and the many motivated ambitious members.
In the US many factors mean we are often less likely to be pursuing a lifetime career in a field. But even that doesn't cause too many problems on its own. Grad school unions are decent (when the students set the agenda) because everyone involved has similar interests even if they won't be grad students forever. But when you have a mix with some people passing through and others who are lifers it's going to be hard.
"I mean professional bodies like the AMA are really just a kind of union under a different name and, ignoring the issue of their effect on society more broadly, they do a decent job of advancing the interests of their members and even help identify and eliminate anyone doing shoddy work."
This may have been true in the past, IDK, but professional organizations like the AMA and ABA are just partisan woke spaces these days. I quit the ABA back in the 1990s for this reason, and and I doubt they changed for the better since then.
If they were really representing the interests of their members then WTF are they doing obstructing the preconditions necessary to improve the welfare of those members?
Unions aren't evil but we shouldn't look at them with rose tinted glasses either. Ultimately, a union is just a form of democratic representation for their members. If you believe congress often fails to advance the interests of Americans at large you should accept that unions can run into the same kind of failures where the interests of union leaders don't always reflect the interests of the members at large.
There are two sides to every story. And union members have been told a story, a lot, that some proposed change will, ultimately, benefit them. Airline deregulation. NAFTA. Admitting China to the WTO. But it somehow seems all the benefits of those changes flowed to every other party but them. So, if a union hears that (yet another) group of H1Bs needs to be brought in for jobs instead of their members, can you understand why they might be skeptical of eventual promised benefits?
Please note that I’m not disagreeing with you in that I think bringing in Taiwanese engineers to help design and construct the fab is a good thing for everyone involved. But I’m trying to point out to you why (since you seemed so surprised) a union might oppose it.
And much like democracy, a union is the worst form of representing workers’ interests, except all the others that have been tried. What would you suggest instead? In Bezos we trust?
Unions are fine as an organizations and should not be outlawed because of freedom of association , but if they prevent the factory from being opened (and the products being produced and other less obstinate workers from being employed) then the government or management should be allowed to fire them and freely associate with willing replacement workers instead.
This is a blanket statement, where in practice it depends upon what the conditions are. Unions and organized labor have suffered for decades, under promises that never materialized, wealth that went into the pockets of CEOS, and factories that were abandoned. It's an overused cliche, but the default position of most unions is that the people they're negotiating with are acting in "bad faith", ie they don't care about their workers, their families etc. It's hard to build a mutually beneficial relationship, whether in life or business when you don't trust the other person you're dealing with. Having workers in closer proximity to corporate or on corporate boards might help them better understand why companies are contemplating making certain decisions or what some of the problems are, or giving workers veto power over certain decisions. I remember reading that during the Great Recession, some companies in Germany cut back workers hours to part time, with the understanding that when economic conditions improved, workers would get full-time hours, instead of losing their job completely. In the United States though, that's impossible because health insurance is tied to full-time employment Barring that, a more radical position would be something like worker cooperatives, where workers vote on major decisions.
Nobody ever believed me but here was Bush’s priority for the WTO…truly the dumbest 8 years in American history:
Foreign brands like 555 made by British American Tobacco and Mild Seven by Japan Tobacco Inc are poised to dethrone homegrown favorites once China joins the WTO, expected by early next year at the latest.
https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/worldbiz/archives/2001/08/09/0000097913
NAFTA actually benefited American working class citizens…that’s why the Bush administration was able to negotiate China into the WTO without a huge fight because it was right after 9/11 and he had a high approval but also NAFTA turned out to be positive. Now one thing that even the Wall Street Journal warned about was the Big 3 putting all of its eggs in the gas guzzling SUV basket…so was it low gas prices and developing SUVs that were the reason for success in the 1990s??
But they do not always advocate intelligently. Unfunded pensions and "Cadillac" health insurance are worse than wage demands, teachers did not benefit from unnecessary school closings (and teachers unions were not solely responsible, either), police officer do not benefit from shielding "bad apples." Other commentators have given other examples.
Cadillac health insurance is a problem with the tax code, not unions. Wages are deductible to the employer but income to the employee; health insurance is deductible to the employer but not income to the employee. The consequence for this problem in the tax code is that negotiations end up more into insurance than tax neutral (economically efficient) bargaining would.
You're in a defensive crouch, it seems.
I think your claim that unions "directly advocates for the interests of the workers they represent" is an overstatement. Certainly, there's an element of truth to it, but definitely a significant portion of union workers do not feel represented by their unions. I didn't.
When I was a minimum wage worker at a union (UFCW) shop, I definitely did not feel like the union represented me at all. They took their union dues out of my paycheck and I had no say in the matter whatsoever. I only got one raise in the two years I was working in that job, and that came solely from the state raising its minimum wage. I would have been paid exactly the same amount without the union, actually more because I wouldn't have to pay dues.
When workers organize, the concerns of a subset of workers always take precedence. That group might be the majority of workers in the shop, but it's not all of us.
"When I was a minimum wage worker at a union (UFCW) shop"
That's some union you got there.
This romanticization of legalized cartels is pathetic. Oh yeah I’m sure this pipe fitters union just needs to be “persuaded” that this factory needs to actually be built at some point and not milked endlessly for jobs. I’m sure the dockworkers need to be “persuaded” of the benefits of automation completely eviscerating their jobs (which is, objectively, a good thing). I’m sure the TWU in NY needs to be “persuaded” of similar benefits of OPTO. Maybe the fact that this cartel works on behalf of workers (as opposed to everyone else who consumes those workers’ output) doesn’t magically make it less corrosive to a functioning society.
Actually, the dockworkers were persuaded in the 1970's, and what happened was the containerization revolution in shipping.
Unions are merely workers organising. It’s the very definition of freedom of association.
The only possible “cartel” like behaviour is closed shops, but that’s generally an agreement between the workers and the management of any given company, and therefore the supposed loss of freedom that a worker who would otherwise prefer not to have to join a union to work for a company is no different than any other restriction the employer might impose on new hires.
Workers have little to do with how most unions are run and aren’t really to focus of most union leadership.
I imagine these policies would be even worse with union leaders at the table, with more onerous requirements and much higher costs and more immigration restrictions. Many people criticize libertarians for being too individualistic but these unions only care about their own individual members and not at all about non-member workers, the company’s success, the taxpayers’ money, and the fact that they are slowly progress and denying everyone the products that would be made sooner and cheaper without the self-serving rules they add.
Excellent excellent excellent article. I am a labor-centric, strongly pro-Union New Deal Democrat, and a union member. I don’t see the problem of being able to coexist and think you are spot on. The fact is, unions with nutty work rules & an inflexible approach, can be self-defeating. Unions should ensure that the workers have a voice at the table, ensure fair treatment of their workers through due process, and ensure that workers receive fair compensation and a fair share of the profits for their labor. They should add value, and advocate for their members’ interests over the long term. They should not be a gravy train for union hierarchy or lazy people, or the union honchos who are all too often corrupt and sell out the rank and file. They should return balance & fairness to the workplace. The German union model, in general, sets a fine example.
The US model and the theoretical/intellectual basis on which US unions were established is nothing at all like German unions.
The US unions aren’t going to become Germans anytime soon.
On the plus side, white collar work on the US is much more competitive and cutthroat and flexible and remunerative than it is in Germany. A lot of the truly skilled labor on the factory floors are going to be white collar low-level engineers and skilled production managers. We just need to make more of these.
The job training component of the IRA is minuscule, unfortunately, and the requirements/incentives are also mostly absent
Dayen and the Roosevelt institute are saying “patronage and inefficiency good because it benefits our favored groups”, they’re just too dishonest to be open about it.
Biden’s policies are explicitly oriented toward unions wherever possible (they are key donors and supporters) which is one of the reasons many of these policies will fail.
Unions like to call their members “skilled” but anyone who has been a union member or worked on an assembly line knows this is largely BS in manufacturing (not the case in some trades).
For Biden, a win is where scarce “skilled” labor is used to assemble battery components mostly imported from China, using American union labor that discourages automation at every turn.
I would favor (and impose) much more training and favor higher value businesses (machine tools, robotics, advanced semiconductor fabs) and promote more automation. Biden’s dream would be big union manual assembly shops subsidized by taxpayers.
We should question whether it is sensible to be paying companies to assemble low complexity products (like batteries) using scarce labor resources who would be much more valuable (and trainable) elsewhere .
The good (?) news is that while it is almost certain that much of the subsidized investment will prove to have been misdirected, we can’t really predict how it all will turn out and there should be some winners. And Noah’s list of things that might determine the list percentage is spot on.
What's going on with these unions blocking the Taiwanese visas? It sounds like they are actively interfering with the preconditions needed to get their members more work (no experts -> no building -> no jobs)?
Is this just old fashioned anti-immigration/anti-foreign bias causing people to behave irrationally, opposition to Biden's agenda or what?
It is extortion. They will want another 200 “no show” jobs for shop stewards in return for every 10 visas
Sounds like it could be some sort of misguided solidarity thinking that any immigrant labor must be undercutting some fellow brother workers here in the United States.
What’s crazy is Arizona isn’t even a traditional Union State.
"American pipefitters simply do not know the technical details of installing ultraviolet lithography machinery. They need someone to teach them before they can do it, and the people who can teach them live in Taiwan."
This a gross misunderstanding of how fabs are built. The lithography machinery is installed by employees of ASML (the equipment manufacturer). In fact, at the big fabs, the equipment manufacturers station employees full-time on-site for service and maintenance. The building of the fabs is primarily dealing with plumbing, air handling, climate control and vibration dampening, all spelled out by the equipment manufacturer specs and the building design. These are more difficult than putting up an office building, but all things American pipe fitters and related tradesmen can do. We know this, because they built the fabs for Intel, Global Foundries, Samsung, Micron, countless universities, and everyone else. I'm no sure we should be taking TMSC's stated reasons that they're falling behind at face value.
Also interesting is this from David Dayen's piece, cited by Noah:
"[TSMC's] founder, Morris Chang, referred to American high-tech companies in a 2016 interview, stating bluntly: “When you look at why those companies are successful, I think them not having unions is a big part of it.”
Sure enough, as TSMC builds a chip factory in Arizona with public funding support, they have resisted Commerce Department guidance, and labor has been frozen out. “There is zero interest in doing business with us,” the president of Arizona’s building trades told the Prospect in April. Out-of-state, non-union workers are building the facility."
The story seems to be: 1) refuse to hire qualified union workers; 2) hire non-union workers from out of state; 3) claim that they need to bring in foreign workers because the (non-union, out-of-state) workers aren't sufficiently qualified.
IG Metal promoted diesel passenger cars in this century in order to reduce carbon emissions!! So the notion unions have the same goals as progressive groups is absurd! The most powerful union on the planet played a big role in what is now widely agreed is an unmitigated public health disaster that failed to reduce carbon emissions.
This is a demonstration of the failure of industrial policy. Public choice being what it is, political pressure will always trump effectiveness. Neoliberalism has been working and can continue to do so if allowed.
Unions are a core component of Bidenflation. They do nothing but slow down productivity and drive up costs. Most members would not even be in a Union if they could avoid it. If it's a union shop, I avoid it like the plague.
Unions in America are needlessly politicized. In Germany and Japan, all mainstream political parties are vaguely pro-union. In the US, unions today (particularly union leadership) are an arm of the Democratic party.
Actually growing union membership is an anti-goal; more blue collar unionization would cause many unions to become GOP-leaning. This would be catastrophic for Democratic election strategy. The result is that American unions instead push for small self-serving political wins like maintaining the Jones Act or making union votes non-secret. Whining about immigrants fits in here too.
My response as above is a perfect response to this as well:
They are aligned to one party because the other party tried to eradicate them in the 80s. Conservatives have a nasty habit of confusing the historical (retired) soon to be historical (soon to be retired) working class with the actual present and future working class. One party skews older and is thus more comprised of retirees and older people, so among the working classes political views are not evenly distributed. I counter your argument thus right wingers must cease attempting to murder unions and the young.