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Time to enact Employee Free Choice Act
Robert Reich
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TEXT OF COMMENTARY
Kai Ryssdal: The enduring tension between labor and management has made its way to Capitol Hill. The Employee Free Choice Act was introduced in Congress yesterday. If it does become law, it would protect workers' rights to organize. That's not necessarily a popular idea with everybody, even including some Democrats. Opponents of the bill say a recession is the wrong time to make unions stronger. Commentator Robert Reich says au contraire.
ROBERT REICH: The way to get the economy back on track is to boost the purchasing power of average Americans. One way to do this is to expand the percentage of Americans in unions.
Go back 50 years, when America's middle class was growing and the economy was soaring. Good pay meant more purchases, and more purchases meant more jobs. At the center of this virtuous circle were unions. In 1955, more than a third of working Americans belonged to one. Unions gave them the bargaining leverage they needed to get the paychecks that kept the economy going.
But now, fewer than 8 percent of private-sector workers are unionized. Middle-class wages slowed so much in the intervening years that most Americans could maintain spending only by working more hours and then, this decade, going deep into debt. But then the bubble burst, and now there's not enough purchasing power to keep the economy going.
The decline of unions is not the only reason for the long-term slowdown in American wages. Much of what Americans used to make can now be made more cheaply abroad or by automated machines. But the vast personal-service sector of the economy is not affected by imports or automation, including millions of jobs in big-box retailers, fast-food outlets, hotel chains, hospitals, construction, and transportation.
Few of these jobs are unionized. All too often that's because employees who want to form unions are threatened by their employers. And if they don't heed the warnings, they're fired, even though that's illegal. I saw this behavior when I was secretary of Labor over a decade ago.
We tried to penalize employers that broke the law, but the fines are minuscule. Too many employers consider them a cost of doing business.
The most important feature of the Employee Free Choice Act toughens penalties against companies that violate their workers' rights. The sooner it's enacted, the better -- for American workers and for the American economy.
Kai Ryssdal:Robert Reich teaches public policy at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Collaboration, Not Imposition Should Be the Goal of Municipal Labor Relations
James C. Smith, March 12, 2009
Legislative imposition of a collective bargaining environment on local government will fundamentally change the entire relationship between public sector management and employees. It might be easier to envision the change if you thought about it as a household which wasn’t getting along, so you hire a third party to resolve disputes. Working out a contract and payment rate with him is only the first step. Once the arrangement is in place you wake up the next morning and want eggs and bacon for breakfast – but your spouse wants pancakes and your children each want a different kind of cereal. You take about ten minutes to explain to the third party why eggs and bacon should be served. Your spouse does the same about pancakes and the kids all explain why the family should have their favorite cereal. Now you are all late for work and school, and the third party decides what will be served regardless of what is in the cupboard.
In theory collective-bargaining provides a workplace constitution where dispute resolution is conducted within a defined framework and controls virtually all aspects of the workplace. However, the system is fundamentally adversarial. In the public sector there are three parties to the collective learning process, labor, management, and the taxpayers. The taxpayers do not have the same choices as buyers in the private marketplace. Particularly in the recent decade the process has further broken down because labor and management do not really control the elements over which they are negotiating. Health-care costs are beyond the control of either labor or management. Unfunded legislative mandates by state and federal governments create expenses for local government which bypass collective bargaining. Tax cap legislation imposes revenue raising restrictions while offering no additional cost saving mechanisms.
Local government officials are ultimately responsible for making the decisions which affect the wages and benefits of public employees. To secure the best wages and working conditions for their members a public sector union will become politically active. They will work and spend dues to ensure that those candidates who support the firefighters, police officers and public works employees are elected and remain in office. One of the first political objectives of international unions when lobbying before a State Legislature is to ensure that employees may “check off†their union dues on a membership card and that the municipal government must collect dues and remit them to the union. It is not unusual to find that public sector unions will be represented by a member of City Council and that conversations within the Council, whether intended to be confidential or not, are shared with union leadership.
Unionization of municipal employees will have a major impact on human resource offices and City Attorneys. The employee union will attempt to influence virtually every aspect of your human relations office’s activities - hiring practices, job descriptions, standards for assessing qualifications of applicants for hiring and promotions, the role of seniority, contents of employee personnel files, timing of the cleansing of files, and procedures for administering work rules and safety requirements. Even the relationships between confidential employees in your human relations office and the city manager’s office may be challenged. A major portion of human relations staff time will be dedicated to processing the several steps in the negotiated grievance procedures and frequently, arbitrating grievances before third-parties and arbitration panels. Management and union will keep detailed dossiers on the tendencies of various arbitrators to support municipal or union positions so that panels favorable to a particular result can be selected.
It is likely that the City Attorney’s office will need to add a lawyer who has experience in labor relations. Union paid attorneys will frequently intervene in issues arising between supervisors and employees. Labor relations attorneys will become an essential part of managing the collective bargaining procedure. Binding arbitration by third parties is almost always a component of the steps in the grievance process.
Further, State Legislators will ultimately be pressured into binding arbitration as the final negotiation step in police and fire collective-bargaining. Legislators will become convinced that binding arbitration is preferable to the potential for police and fire strikes. A third party will then essentially determine what your tax payers should be able to afford for public services. It is not unusual for the binding arbitration process to require as much as 12 months of hearings to conclude a single year’s decision on wages and fringe benefits. Each contract will likely cover a three-year period and negotiations will likely be under way at all times, often with multiple bargaining units. The municipality’s labor attorney and accountant will do battle with the union’s labor attorney and accountant in an effort to convince an arbitration panel that their position should be favored. Ultimately, the arbitration panel will set the wages, hours, and working conditions of public employees. The panel may well even determine how many people we must employ. In addition to the employee costs the expense for attorneys, accountants and one half of the cost of the arbitration panel can easily amount to a over a hundred thousand dollars for a single bargaining unit contract year.
Local governments must identify alternative dispute resolution procedures and determine how they can work successfully in their organizations. We will need to understand the differences between mediation and arbitration and prepare for each in a collective bargaining environment. The hostile environment in collective bargaining which exists today is a substantial further reason enlightened collaboration and good-faith cooperation between public sector employees, management and City Councils should be the goal in municipal labor relations.
In order to maintain a productive and cooperative work place environment local government must have proactive strategies that channel conflict into positive problem-solving approaches, and be prepared to investigate complaints before they become major morale busters. We must be prepared to actively address personality based workplace disruptions and develop techniques for communicating with difficult employees. We must develop and implement effective, progressive disciplinary procedures. We must ensure that our grievance procedures and policies are legal and we must train managers to comply with policies and with the law. If we fail we must be prepared for our employees to have a third party representative present during even investigatory interviews.
The foundation of a relationship between an employer and a union is collaboration. To avoid encouraging collective bargaining, local government must consider current trends in compensation and benefits to determine what best addresses public sector organizations and satisfies public employees. Local governments must compare wage and benefit plans with other public and private sector organizations for equity and fairness. Perhaps above all local govern policy makers must avoid the appearance of being arbitrary and of balancing the budget on the backs of employees. In order for employees to understand that we are providing reasonable levels of wages, benefits and proper staffing it is fair to share the basic financial condition of our government organizations with the public, including our employees. There is nothing which encourages collective bargaining more actively than demonstrating to employees that they are not being treated honestly, and that they are powerless to do anything about it.
Collaboration, Not Imposition Should Be the Goal of Municipal Labor Relations
James C. Smith, March 12, 2009
Legislative imposition of a collective bargaining environment on local government will fundamentally change the entire relationship between public sector management and employees. It might be easier to envision the change if you thought about it as a household which wasn’t getting along, so you hire a third party to resolve disputes. Working out a contract and payment rate with him is only the first step. Once the arrangement is in place you wake up the next morning and want eggs and bacon for breakfast – but your spouse wants pancakes and your children each want a different kind of cereal. You take about ten minutes to explain to the third party why eggs and bacon should be served. Your spouse does the same about pancakes and the kids all explain why the family should have their favorite cereal. Now you are all late for work and school, and the third party decides what will be served regardless of what is in the cupboard.
In theory collective-bargaining provides a workplace constitution where dispute resolution is conducted within a defined framework and controls virtually all aspects of the workplace. However, the system is fundamentally adversarial. In the public sector there are three parties to the collective learning process, labor, management, and the taxpayers. The taxpayers do not have the same choices as buyers in the private marketplace. Particularly in the recent decade the process has further broken down because labor and management do not really control the elements over which they are negotiating. Health-care costs are beyond the control of either labor or management. Unfunded legislative mandates by state and federal governments create expenses for local government which bypass collective bargaining. Tax cap legislation imposes revenue raising restrictions while offering no additional cost saving mechanisms.
Local government officials are ultimately responsible for making the decisions which affect the wages and benefits of public employees. To secure the best wages and working conditions for their members a public sector union will become politically active. They will work and spend dues to ensure that those candidates who support the firefighters, police officers and public works employees are elected and remain in office. One of the first political objectives of international unions when lobbying before a State Legislature is to ensure that employees may “check off†their union dues on a membership card and that the municipal government must collect dues and remit them to the union. It is not unusual to find that public sector unions will be represented by a member of City Council and that conversations within the Council, whether intended to be confidential or not, are shared with union leadership.
Unionization of municipal employees will have a major impact on human resource offices and City Attorneys. The employee union will attempt to influence virtually every aspect of your human relations office’s activities - hiring practices, job descriptions, standards for assessing qualifications of applicants for hiring and promotions, the role of seniority, contents of employee personnel files, timing of the cleansing of files, and procedures for administering work rules and safety requirements. Even the relationships between confidential employees in your human relations office and the city manager’s office may be challenged. A major portion of human relations staff time will be dedicated to processing the several steps in the negotiated grievance procedures and frequently, arbitrating grievances before third-parties and arbitration panels. Management and union will keep detailed dossiers on the tendencies of various arbitrators to support municipal or union positions so that panels favorable to a particular result can be selected.
It is likely that the City Attorney’s office will need to add a lawyer who has experience in labor relations. Union paid attorneys will frequently intervene in issues arising between supervisors and employees. Labor relations attorneys will become an essential part of managing the collective bargaining procedure. Binding arbitration by third parties is almost always a component of the steps in the grievance process.
Further, State Legislators will ultimately be pressured into binding arbitration as the final negotiation step in police and fire collective-bargaining. Legislators will become convinced that binding arbitration is preferable to the potential for police and fire strikes. A third party will then essentially determine what your tax payers should be able to afford for public services. It is not unusual for the binding arbitration process to require as much as 12 months of hearings to conclude a single year’s decision on wages and fringe benefits. Each contract will likely cover a three-year period and negotiations will likely be under way at all times, often with multiple bargaining units. The municipality’s labor attorney and accountant will do battle with the union’s labor attorney and accountant in an effort to convince an arbitration panel that their position should be favored. Ultimately, the arbitration panel will set the wages, hours, and working conditions of public employees. The panel may well even determine how many people we must employ. In addition to the employee costs the expense for attorneys, accountants and one half of the cost of the arbitration panel can easily amount to a over a hundred thousand dollars for a single bargaining unit contract year.
Local governments must identify alternative dispute resolution procedures and determine how they can work successfully in their organizations. We will need to understand the differences between mediation and arbitration and prepare for each in a collective bargaining environment. The hostile environment in collective bargaining which exists today is a substantial further reason enlightened collaboration and good-faith cooperation between public sector employees, management and City Councils should be the goal in municipal labor relations.
In order to maintain a productive and cooperative work place environment local government must have proactive strategies that channel conflict into positive problem-solving approaches, and be prepared to investigate complaints before they become major morale busters. We must be prepared to actively address personality based workplace disruptions and develop techniques for communicating with difficult employees. We must develop and implement effective, progressive disciplinary procedures. We must ensure that our grievance procedures and policies are legal and we must train managers to comply with policies and with the law. If we fail we must be prepared for our employees to have a third party representative present during even investigatory interviews.
The foundation of a relationship between an employer and a union is collaboration. To avoid encouraging collective bargaining, local government must consider current trends in compensation and benefits to determine what best addresses public sector organizations and satisfies public employees. Local governments must compare wage and benefit plans with other public and private sector organizations for equity and fairness. Perhaps above all local govern policy makers must avoid the appearance of being arbitrary and of balancing the budget on the backs of employees. In order for employees to understand that we are providing reasonable levels of wages, benefits and proper staffing it is fair to share the basic financial condition of our government organizations with the public, including our employees. There is nothing which encourages collective bargaining more actively than demonstrating to employees that they are not being treated honestly, and that they are powerless to do anything about it.
Wow, has Marketplace changed it's focus to a commerical-free, pro-socialist, pro-communist format? Must be, because the delusional rantings of Mr. Reich on unions last night was so utterly absurd, it was downright irresponsible of you guys to broadcast it. Never in my life have I heard such a series of historical reinventions, and ultra-leftist panderings. I have long believed that this commentator damages the credibility of your program, because he is a pure socialist, claoking himself in "super-capitalist" clothing. If all the workers Mr. Reich mentions were to unionize, it would worsen the reciession, cause enormous inflation, slow productivity, and worst of all, it would send even more jobs overseas in search of reasonably priced labor. I should also mention I voted for Obama. I suppose in the balance of the universe, the GOP has Rush and the left has Reich. Can we get rid of both and have a reasonable dialogue, please?
I have leaned to the left politically for my whole life. What I understand of this bill is not left leaning, it is political gerrymandering by Unions in a very self-serving way.
If the problem this bill solves is really that a secret vote takes 45 days and the employers too often intimidate or even (illegally) fire organizers, the solution seems simple: make the vote quicker. Next day? How about that? (And does the company have a lock on intimidation during that time period?)
A Card Check rule would allow intimidation by potential unions that I find reprehensible just as much as the above mentioned (illegal) activities. At least with company based intimidation, you don't need to be worried about your knees in the parking lot... Maybe your financial health, but not your knees.
Disclaimer: my wife worked for a UAW organized former Ford plant and drove our brand new, Indiana built, Michigan designed, Toyota Sienna to work on our second day of ownership.
There was approximately $2000 worth of damage done to it that day. The $0 damage was written in the light dust on the side: "buy American you f****t!"
She was afraid to return to work and drove my Jeep for some time after.
Parking lot intimidation is real; unions have a place, and I don't deny the value in appropriate cases, but a blanket statement of "All unions are good" is just about as stupid as "All unions are bad."
The problem with the Union debate, just like with the financial sector, is the history of flagrant abuses. Business is the life blood of the economy and our standard of living. Hence, the key is to find a balance with equitable return for the investor and the employee. Recently employees have become inventory and the implied mutual understanding, contract has been destroyed. We need to find:
1. A way to give appropriate return for the contributors to a business.
2. To provide a living wage, especially in the service sector. The previous, historical manufacturing sector wage advantage has been neutralized by less expensive labor in China.
3. Make businesses and employees more receptive to the economy. We can't have Unions ratcheting up wages in good times to hold those levels in bad times.
One option is to provide a realistic base pay system and a bonus system that tracks business performance. This way the employee is rewarded for their efforts also stays tied to the health of the business.
There is no reason why we can't come up with a system that is not based on extracting from, or taking away from one of the groups involved with a business. Business is not bad. Abuses in all aspect of business is very bad. Business, investors, and employees float the boat for all of us. Business and employee purchasing power affect all of us directly and indirectly.
There is a solution when we get past the abuses and finger pointing.
I think Mr Reich is completely upside down in his logic concerning labor unions. In cases where there is corporate suppression of good working conditions unions have provided a voice and strength for the working man. However unions tilt over to become a problem for industry and jobs in most cases.
The main function of unions is to build benefits and income for workers. If a union fails to do that job it becomes useless to the workers paying dues for that function. Unions therefore squeeze companies out of the profits needed to keep the business sound and competitive.
Mr Reich states that service jobs are what run the economy. Sorry to say the world depends on selling products to each other, not service. America is no longer able to manufacture products that can compete in the world economy, salaries and benefits are out of line with our false standard of living. Serving each other does not bring money into the country, it just moves some money around while a huge leak we call the trade defect bleeds away our economy. Further there are service jobs moving overseas such as banking, help desks, sales, and more so even the service function isn't safe. Unions don't help in most cases, they hurt.
I blame unions largely for the failure of the American auto industry failure for reasons stated above. If we want to further sink our economy we will follow Mr Reich's advise.
I observe that the larger the intrusion of big government the longer it takes to show that it was a failure. Social Security and Medicare seemed like good ideas to some at the time but they are now dragging the economy down. Contrary to intent Social Security has taught people not to save for retirement because they assumed the government would take care of them. Now decades later we are experiencing the faults of that type of thinking. Government boosted union growth already has shown it is a failure. Why would we want to further stimulate a failed program?
I came to this website all worked up about how backwards I believe Mr. Reich got cause and effect in his polemic to the good unions do. Imagine my relief when seeing that the majority of contribtors saw problems with both Mr. Reich's comment as well as NPRs incomplete coverage / introduction to those comments.
The key point - Mr. Reich has confused cause and effect. Economic growth created the resources that unions grew to redistribute. The growth of the unions did not add to economic growth.
Reich has a very simpleminded view that fails utterly to reflect the fact that free competition is the only method of achieving excellence. Unions today are basically massive restraints of free trade that engage in price fixing of labor rates, screwing the consumer and destroying any industry they control if there is foreign (or even non-union American) competition. The UAW has reduced the American auto industry, steel industry, ruber indisyrt,electronics industry, etc. from theri previous from their previous positions of world leaders, to bankrupt empty shells that simply cannot compete against the world. Reich's prescription for unionization is surefile consumer fraud. If he desires for all workers to be paid a "decent wage" (which the UAW defines as $138 per hour for unskilled, unproductiove labor) then he should campaign for some realisitic minimum wage, not anticompetitive and destructive and unconstitutional union
trusts. Reich is simply one narrow minded dumb bunny.
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