March 8 - Are Unions Still Relevant Part I - History

Right now, in congress, a bill is being discussed known as the "Employee Free Choice Act" which will greatly increase the power of Unions in their ability to "unionize" a company. This begs for analysis, but before the relative goodness of this bill is considered, a review of labor unions, their purposes and the effects of their existence is called for. Today we'll have a brief review of the history of modern labor unions and we'll see if their historical relevance persists today.

Labor Unions have a long history (over 300 years) but in the U.S. they only became popular a little more than a hundred years ago. As the industrial revolution took hold in the western world and concepts of labor progressed beyond the artisan stage, it seemed clear that, unfettered, business was abusing employees. Most of us are vaguely familiar with the concepts of labor at the time: low wages, long hours, dangerous environments, abusive management. Business treated labor as slaves, more or less. Labor had to be compensated, yes, but in comparison, most slave owners understood that they had to keep their slaves healthy. The free labor market had no such restriction, freely replacing one unhealthy unskilled laborer with another. This is the environment that industrialization combined with mass collusion between employers permitted.

This was still a time when class differences were extremely obvious and the desire to maintain separation between the classes bred a lot of callous attitudes. I think this is difficult to comprehend, today, when most of us try to make the world a fair place. I mean, we abstractly understand the idea of a slave-owner not seeing his slave as a fellow human but most of us can not imagine what it means to have such a belief. Similarly, the employing class saw themselves as distinctly superior to the employed and many saw no wrong in the way the employed were treated. In fact, many saw the treatment as deserved for imagined cheating on the part of the worker. If you have any doubt, I will, again, refer you to “A Message To Garcia” by Elbert Hubbard. Take a moment to read it. It won’t take too long. While the positive message of that essay has merit, the negative message carries an all too unfortunately accurate representation of attitudes at the time.

In this environment, unions were formed to right some clear wrongs. At first the economic strength of the businesses was turned on the employees in the form of lost wages, lost jobs and application of violence and sometimes death. Just to be clear, police were called upon by employers to beat workers who refused to work (and they did.) In time, though, the strength of unions grew to the point where, by soon after WWI, they had sufficient bargaining power to 1) improve working conditions and 2) effectively lobby for changes to federal law that protected the workers. Though the means the various unions used to accomplish this, most notably the Teamsters, was often just as dirty as the tactics of the employers, up until around the end of the new deal, when the federal government became one of the largest employers in the country, it seems un-arguable that unions served a valid purpose.

Do any of these sorts of conditions exist in this country today? If so, do they exist in the industries where the Teamsters, Longshoremen, AFL/CIO, UAW and other major unions are active? At least with that qualification, I think the answer is a resounding no. Complaints of workers seeking to form unions today mostly center around wages. A big difference in the wage equation, today, is that collusion between employers to set wages is explicitly illegal and most employers have learned that there is a value in maintaining a skilled workforce. Industry has long since discovered that the completely mindless jobs created at the dawn of the industrial age did not result in high productivity. Once this is established, the bargaining power of the individual becomes much more similar to their real value as an employee.

This is not to say that abuses do not still exist. This is to say that today the magnitude of the abuses is not even a pale shadow of what employees suffered in the first half of the last century. Today, an abusive boss is one who is perpetually derogatory or verbally abusive, not one who physically applies a number nine boot to one’s backside or has the local constable give you a caning for delinquency. The wrongs of the early 1900’s have been righted. In this respect, unions are no longer relevant.