Can a Resurgence in Labor Unions Help Working Women, With or Without the PRO Act?

Happy International Women's Day!

First came the wave of teacher strikes led by women fighting the devaluing of their work, then Google employees walked out in protest of its handling of sexual harassment and (later) formed the Alphabet Workers Union, and now racial justice is a central theme as Amazon warehouse workers in Alabama vote on whether to unionize. In between have been innumerable other actions of protest, solidarity, and collective action spurred by concerns with racial justice, the she-cession and other pandemic-induced inequalities, and feelings of powerlessness.

Despite numerous obstacles, this newfound energy could lead to increased unionization. The prospects of a resurgence in labor unions would be dramatically magnified if Congress passes the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act. The PRO Act brings together pieces of failed legislation over the past three decades and would drastically re-shape labor law by removing numerous employer advantages over unions and workers, making it easier for workers to form unions and giving them greater bargaining power. Greater unionization could result in important benefits for working women. Here’s why.

Boosting Women’s Pay

Perhaps the most obvious thing that unions typically do is negotiate for higher pay and better benefits. Recent research indicates that, on average, unionized women earn 12 percent more than similar nonunion women in the U.S. private sector. Unionization appears to increase pay for white women and Black women to a similar degree. So if more women become unionized, we’d expect their pay, on average, to increase. The union wage premium for women could even conceivably increase with the passage of the PRO Act because of its potential to increase union power. There could also be spillover effects that increase the pay of other working women because the threat of unionization can cause employers to preemptively increase pay.

Some things that labor unions commonly do—such as raise pay more aggressively among lower-paid workers, negotiate standardized pay rates and strong grievance procedures, and combat pay secrecy—could also close the gender pay gap. Indeed, when Wisconsin weakened teacher unions and allowed greater individual wage-setting, the gender pay gap increased. But systematically closing the gender pay gap requires greater intentionality among unions because men have a higher union pay advantage than women in the U.S. private sector, so increased unionization could benefit men even more than women without a more explicit focus on the gender pay gap.

Benefits Workers Can Use

Union contracts typically address wide-ranging issues relating to benefits, scheduling, and time off which are beneficial for individual and community well-being. Many of these can be particularly beneficial for working mothers trying to juggle multiple roles, though research paints a mixed picture with union members more likely to have stable hours but also more likely to have nonstandard schedules. Research from the UK highlights three ways in which unions help workers balance work and family: bargaining for policies that directly help working mothers, such as paid parental leave, job sharing or onsite child care; reducing the frequency of excessively long working hours, and fighting the typical manager’s belief that balancing work and family is solely the worker’s responsibility.

But bargaining for policies is not enough; workers need to be able to actually use them. This dynamic is captured by the four A’s: availability, awareness, affordability, and assurance. In other words, for a new mother, for example, to take paid parental leave: 1) the policy needs to be available, 2) if available, the worker needs to be aware of it, 3) even if aware of an existing policy, the worker needs to believe she can afford a leave, and 4) even if affordable, the worker needs to have assurances against negative consequences that might result from taking a leave (e.g., missing out on a promotion).

So beyond negotiating for better policies (availability), unions can also significantly help women use these policies—they can help spread awareness through newsletters, one-to-one interactions, and the like; make leaves more affordable through higher wages and better insurance coverage; and combat reprisals through bargaining, grievance procedures, and other means. In my own research, I label this the “facilitation effect” of labor unions. Through these various channels, union-represented new mothers are more than 15 percent more likely to use paid maternity leave than are comparable non-union mothers.

This facilitation role of labor unions can also help working women navigate the complex maze of federal, state, and local public policies on work. For example, in the first years after the passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), hourly unionized workers were much more likely than others to have heard about the FMLA, and were significantly less worried about losing their seniority or their job if taking a family or medical leave. Eligible workers are more likely to receive unemployment insurance benefits if they were in union jobs, and unions help enforce workplace safety and reduce other labor rights violations. This assistance is likely particularly important for marginalized workers who otherwise don’t have the resources and connections to counter employer transgressions.

Ripple Effects on the Policy Environment

Unions also lobby for legislative protections for workers. The labor movement supports the $15 minimum wage that was controversially excluded from the federal stimulus bill last week. An increase in the federal minimum wage would particularly benefit women, workers of color, and especially women of color (though these workers are also disproportionately excluded from coverage). Passage of the PRO Act could further boost union influence that results in more favorable public policies for workers and working women. Right-to-work laws that allow union-represented workers to not pay union dues or fees weaken unions financially and politically, resulting in more conservative lawmakers and lawmaking. The PRO Act would abolish right-to-work laws, perhaps prompting the reverse cycle.

At an individual level, labor unions help equip members with advocacy skills and norms that translate into greater political and civic engagement. If more women are represented by unions in the future, these empowerment skills and norms could potentially translate to other areas of their lives, too, such as running for political office or negotiating the allocation of household responsibilities.

Putting the PRO Act in Context

A resurgence in labor unions, perhaps supported by the PRO Act, could have important benefits for working women—but there are multiple qualifications. What happens in any particular bargaining unit can reflect contested political dynamics that are not guaranteed to prioritize the concerns of working women or of workers with other identities. Also, even if the PRO Act is enacted, increased unionized would still require workers to successfully organize.

Additionally, the PRO Act would only apply to the private sector, where less than 6 percent of women are unionized; 60 percent of women union members work in the public sector, where most are subject to state-level regulation which is often unfavorable in conservative states. The PRO Act also fails to address labor law’s racist and sexist roots that excluded agricultural and domestic service workers from its protections.

As good as the PRO Act might be for some women workers, it’s only one piece of a broader set of policy interventions and new norms that we need to fully respect the dignity of labor.

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Originally published in the Gender Policy Report.

Union-buster Steve visits Superstore, But Maybe Not After the PRO Act

The NBC comedy Superstore is set in one store of the fictitious big-box retail chain Cloud 9. The main characters are all store employees, and refreshingly, it frequently reveals the injustices that many workers face, such as the difficulty supporting a family on low wages, a lack of parental leave, inadequate health insurance, and many other indignities. These are all rooted in a fundamental imbalance between “corporate” and the realities of work on the shop floor (pun intended), and the prioritization of corporate interests. Appropriately, a repeated theme is corporate’s fear of worker solidarity, including corporate leaders going so far as triggering an ICE raid to derail the workers’ push for a union.

In the “Labor” episode, workers call corporate to ask about paid maternity leave, and after then mention the words “union” and “strike” in passing, corporate immediately escalates the situation, and reminiscent of stories heard about Walmart, the next day the workers are treated to a visit by Steve, a union-busting labor relations consultant:

Because it’s such a great portrayal of the stereotypical anti-union messages, I’ve reconstructed Steve’s whiteboard:

First there is the “unions are unnecessary” theme. Cloud 9 is pro-employee and has an open door policy. Then there is the “unions are bad” theme—the negative reference to “union bosses” (and the implication of unions as outsiders), unions as raising prices (and thus threatening the employees’ jobs), and the always-present mention of union dues (don’t you want to keep your money?). The prospect of having to strike as well as a union’s inability to guarantee any improvements are additional common anti-union themes not included here. And then there is the attempt to portray workers who support unions as delusional or misguided—they’ve been lied to, pressured, bribed, swayed by outsiders, or just don’t really understand. Note the paternalism inherent in such statements. 

Underscoring the realism of this fictional portrayal, note many of the same themes in this message sent out by CorePower Yoga in response to its instructors talking about unionizing:

But returning to Steve’s visit to Cloud 9 store #1217, being forced to listen to your employer’s anti-union presentation is called “captive audience speech”, and in the United States this is legal unless it’s within 24 hours of a certification election or contains threats or promises. This has long been controversial because unions do not have the same ability to present their message to the workers. But the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act—passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in 2020, but not the Senate, and undoubtedly primed for reconsideration in 2021—would change this situation and make captive audience meetings illegal. If Steve is an outside consultant, the PRO Act would also require Cloud 9 to disclose its relationships with labor relations consultants. And the PRO Act would make many other changes, too, amounting to the most significant change to private sector labor law since the 1940s. This is definitely something to watch in 2021—along with Superstore of course! 

Is the NLRA Racist?

One way to think more deeply about issues of race in work and labor relations is to ask whether the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) is racist. The NLRA was enacted in 1935 as part of the New Deal, and protects private sector workers’ rights to organize into labor unions and collectively bargain.

At its core, the NLRA is about workers, full stop, and the language of the NLRA is colorblind. Moreover, many Black workers have benefited from unionization. For at least the past 20 years, Black workers have had the highest unionization rates compared to Asian, Hispanic, and white workers, and for most of the postwar period, the positive effect of labor unions on household income has been stronger for people of color. Black workers also benefit from grievance procedures, standardized hiring and firing practices, and other policies that can help mitigate discriminatory practices. The AFL-CIO now explicitly champions racial justice.  

But it hasn’t always been this way. Like many other aspects of U.S. society, the labor movement has a mixed historical record with respect to race and discrimination. Historically, some unions advocated for inclusion while others were racist. Railroad and craft unions in the first decades of the 20^th century were particularly known for their racist, anti-Black stances, and in some cases there were still separate, segregated Black and white locals and restrictive membership policies in the 1960s.

White union leaders and members are ultimately responsible for this racist behavior, but there are several ways in which the NLRA systematically disadvantages Black workers relative to white workers. The NLRA allows unions to be the workers’ exclusive representative when a majority of workers favor this. So a majority of workers can significantly influence terms and conditions of employees for the rest. But in spite of NAACP lobbying, the NLRA did not contain an anti-discrimination requirement for unions, and the judicially-constructed duty of fair representation was only a weak substitute in the face of prejudiced union leaders and co-workers. The NLRA, therefore, gave unions significant power over workers—powers that were even stronger for the first decade in which closed shops (allowing unions to control access to jobs) were legal—but fell short of equally empowering Black workers. Indeed, in the 1940s and 1950s, the agency established by the NLRA to enforce it—the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)—repeatedly allowed segregated locals and trivialized racist speech by unions during organizing drives. The courts were no better. For example, in 1959 the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of Oliphant v. Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen & Enginemen in which the U.S. Court of Appeals allowed the union to continue banning Black workers from becoming members. It was not until the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 that such discriminatory practices would be rendered illegal.

The lack of an explicit anti-discrimination provision in the NLRA is often attributed to the need for Senator Wagner and other early NLRA supporters to have the support of southern Democrats in Congress in order to get the NLRA passed. Unions were not very strong in the south, so as long as Jim Crow laws and norms that institutionalized and maintained white superiority were not threatened, then southern Democrats would support the NLRA. The preservation of Jim Crow in the south also led to another feature of the NLRA that significantly harmed Black workers—the exclusion of domestic and agricultural workers from the NLRA’s protections. These were the largest categories of employment for Black workers in the south, and their exclusion perpetuated the continued subjugation of them. 

The intentional perpetuation of racial inequality during the 1930s and 1940s becomes even more apparent when looking beyond the NLRA to other federal policies of that era. The Fair Labor Standards Act (minimum wages and overtime premiums), the Social Security Act, unemployment insurance, the GI Bill, and other programs either excluded agricultural and domestic workers or created programs that were ultimately administered locally, thus allowing for subtle and not-so-subtle discrimination in the application of these programs. As argued by Ira Katznelson, “by not including the occupations in which African Americans worked, and by organizing racist patterns of administration, New Deal policies for Social Security, social welfare, and labor market programs restricted Black prospects while providing positive economic reinforcement for the great majority of white citizens” which widened economic disparity; or as he captures with the title of his book: this was when affirmative action was white. Federal housing policy resulted in the same pattern of discrimination as the Federal Housing Administration used biased decisions about mortgages to segregate Black families in urban areas while subsidizing white home ownership in the suburbs, which widened racial wealth inequality.

Returning to the NLRA specifically, after the end of World War II, unionization of southern workers represented a greater threat than 10 years earlier, so to maintain the south’s racial order, southern Democrats in Congress changed course and teamed with Republicans to pass the Taft-Hartley amendments to the NLRA. The changes to the NLRA made it more difficult to organize workers and contributed to the failure of the labor movement’s Operation Dixie southern organizing campaign. The Taft-Hartley Act also allowed states to pass right-to-work laws prohibiting unions from charging workers dues and representation fees. Right-to-work laws have racist origins in that they were created to try to prevent the creation of solidarity among white and Black workers in the south. Indeed, a vocal supporter of right-to-work laws in the 1940s allegedly inflamed opposition to multiracial labor unions by saying that if left unchecked, “white women and white men will be forced into organizations with Black African apes whom they will have to call ‘brother’ or lose their jobs.”  

There are various ways, then, in which the NLRA—along with other New Deal and immediate postwar legislation—institutionalized and magnified existing power differences between Black workers and white workers in order to perpetuate patterns of inequality based on race. In other words, aspects of the NLRA contributed to institutional racism. In fact, the overrepresentation of people of color in the lowest-paid agricultural, domestic, and service occupations continues to this day. At the same time, the overall picture is complex. Many Black workers have benefited from the NLRA’s protections of unionization, and many whites have been excluded because they, too, work in domestic and agricultural occupations. Many provisions of the NLRA or subsequent legal interpretations have been shaped by ideologies pertaining to neoliberalism or the democratization of work rather than racial hierarchies. And workers of all races and ethnicities could benefit from labor law reform that strengthens the NLRA and other labor policies. But maybe not equally. And therein lies the issue—work isn’t always (only) about race, but we certainly shouldn’t be blind to the complicated ways in which race and labor intersect.

A New Culprit in the Decline of American Labor? Robert F. Kennedy and the Long Cast of Hoffa's Shadow

I just finished reading Jack Goldsmith’s In Hoffa’s Shadow: A Stepfather, a Disappearance in Detroit, and My Search for the Truth (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019) which I highly recommend. Who needs fiction when real-life history produces stories like these? The author is a Harvard law professor whose mother married Chuckie O’Brien on June 16, 1975 when the author was 12 years old. In the author’s own words, Chuckie was “a great father” who “smothered me in love” (p. 5). But on July 30, 1975, former Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa disappeared and Chuckie—Hoffa’s longtime friend and aide in the Teamsters—quickly became a leading suspect in this extremely high-profile case.

In Hoffa’s Shadow chronicles Hoffa’s rise and fall—often with Chuckie at his side—and his disappearance—where the FBI long thought Chuckie was also at his side, unwittingly delivering him to mob hitmen (a fiction often repeated in popular culture, including most recently in Netflix’s The Irishman). The focus is uniquely on Chuckie—his life, his ties to the Teamsters and the mafia, his personal values, his decades-long public mistreatment at the hands of the FBI, and the sheer improbability of any culpability in Hoffa’s disappearance. All of this is quite interesting, but what really makes this book such a compelling read is how deeply personal it is. Goldsmith is exceptionally candid in describing how he idolized Chuckie in high school but at age 21, renounced him and changed his name from Jack O’Brien to Jack Goldsmith out of fear that “the association with Chuckie might jeopardize my legal career” (p. 26). After 20 years, Goldsmith reconciled with Chuckie, who accepted Goldsmith “back into his life without qualification, rancor, or drama” (p. 41). The author eventually convinced Chuckie to let him tell his story, in the author’s hope that it would solve the 45 year-old mystery of Hoffa’s disappearance. Alas, the author ultimately fails on this last account, but in the end that seems like a minor footnote given the depth of insight we get into Hoffa’s leadership of the Teamsters, the relationship between the mafia and the Teamsters, the likely reasons for his disappearance, the troubling extent of the federal government’s use of its own power, and at a personal level, the complex character of Chuckie.

From a labor relations perspective, one thing that jumped out to me is the provocative claim that the field has overlooked “the most fundamental” reason for the decades-long decline in labor union membership. It is well-recognized that the fraction of workers represented by a union (“union density”) peaked in the private sector in the mid-1950s, and since that time has fallen from around 35 percent to 6 percent. Many explanations have been proposed, including structural change (e.g., the decline of manufacturing, demographic shifts, globalization), decreased demand for union representation (e.g., laws and paternalistic human resource management provide some of the protections that unions provide, or unions have failed to keep up with what workers want), and legal and illegal employer opposition facilitated by hostile legal rulings. But Goldsmith argues that “the most fundamental reason [that membership fell] was the identification of the entire labor movement with corruption, violence, and bossism—an identification that crystallized with Bobby Kennedy’s singular crusade” (p. 108). Wow!

What was this singular crusade? Senator Estes Kefauver led a special Senate investigation into organized crime in the early 1950s, and the resulting public attention on the sensational hearings helped propel Kefauver to national prominence (including being selected as the Democratic Vice Presidential candidate in 1956). According to Goldsmith, Robert F. (Bobby) Kennedy saw this as a model for elevating the profile of the Kennedys (which included his older brother John F. Kennedy), and perhaps, too, for Bobby Kennedy to prove his worth within the Kennedy clan. So in 1957, the United States Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in Labor and Management (“the McClellan Committee”) was created to investigate labor racketeering (the corruption of labor unions by organized crime), with Bobby Kennedy as its chief counsel. Enter Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters. Goldsmith quotes historian Arthur Schlesinger as saying that before the hearings even started, Kennedy had already concluded that Hoffa was corrupt and ran the Teamsters solely for his own benefit. As such, Hoffa was “the enemy [Bobby Kennedy] had been seeking” (p. 99).

The reality of Hoffa is seemingly much more complex. Hoffa seemed to genuinely care for the economic well-being of truck drivers and other workers, and fought hard on their behalf—albeit often too hard in terms of taking an extreme ends-justifies-the-means approach, even if this meant hiring mob goons to literally fight employers and giving kickbacks to the mafia to maintain his own power. So of course Hoffa was no angel, but In Hoffa’s Shadow shows the extent to which Kennedy became obsessed with publicly vilifying Hoffa. And each time this failed, “Kennedy got angrier, become more vindictive, and invariably cut more corners” (p. 102). This included sending the IRS on a fishing expedition looking for evidence of criminality in over 3,500 tax returns, and then illegally entering confidential IRS information into the public record.

Students of labor relations know that these hearings resulted in the Landrum-Griffin Act in 1959 which sought to make unions more democratic while also placing a few additional restrictions on union activities (especially banning secondary boycotts). But Goldsmith interestingly argues that the larger effect was that the hearings led by Bobby Kennedy “embedded in the public mind, including the minds of many workers, the idea that unions were flawed institutions exercising illegitimate power” (p. 106). And thus we have Goldsmith’s provocative claim that “the most fundamental reason [for declining union power] was the identification of the entire labor movement with corruption, violence, and bossism—an identification that crystallized with Bobby Kennedy’s singular crusade.” Whether we can trace 65 years of union decline to this one moment is debatable and would represent an influence with remarkable staying power, but it is certainly stimulating to consider its role among other factors.

Goldsmith doesn’t let Hoffa off the hook: “his defiant embrace of criminal tactics and associations [even if done in with the sincere belief that this was to help the rank and file] allowed Kennedy [and others] to paint him as a subversive force…and his performance tarnished the entire labor movement” (p. 107). But Kennedy was anything but balanced, and ignored, for example, the role of employers in fighting workers. Kennedy’s campaign against Hoffa continued in the 1960s with Kennedy’s appointment (by his then-president brother) as U.S. attorney general. In the end, according to Goldsmith, Kennedy “neglected, elided, or interpreted away ethical and legal restrictions that are supposed to channel and constrain the federal government’s colossal power to destroy one’s reputation and liberty” (p. 121). This included a sharp rise in the government surveillance of individuals, including breaking into homes and businesses to plant listening devices, typically without any warrants or legal oversight.

The extent to which this rise in illegal government surveillance connects to Goldsmith’s own work in government is another unique aspect of In Hoffa’s Shadow making for a compelling read. But a larger take-away, in my eyes, is that these revelations implicitly highlight the need for democracy, transparency, and institutional balance. When the government holds all the cards, where are the checks on its power? Or to what end is government power being exercised? These questions are as important as ever when legislation and judicial rulings are seemingly weakening organized labor for political gain, and we seem to have forgotten the importance of the labor movement and other groups for a vibrant democracy. Hidden in In Hoffa’s Shadow, then, is a strong conservative case for labor unions, even if the focal union in this book has historically struggled with democracy and corruption.

So in the end, this book is about much more than Hoffa’s disappearance. Indeed, I assume that “in Hoffa’s shadow” refers to the personal experiences of Chuckie O’Brien. But as we continue to confront questions of power, democracy, and surveillance, it seems that we’re all living in the shadows of Hoffa and Bobby Kennedy, with their lasting implications for labor unions and democracy.

Labor + Community + Environment = Australia’s Green Bans

Earlier this year I was able to attend the AIRAANZ conference in Melbourne, Australia. At the end of one of the conference days, there was an optional Green Ban Walking Tour. I had no idea what the “green ban” part was, but walking around Melbourne after being at a conference all day sounded like a great idea. It turns out that green bans in Australia were an interesting way in which labor unions were fighting for broader community concerns in the 1970s. Not only is this interesting in own right, but a greater community orientation is something that today’s worker centers have embraced, and it’s a mindset that some advocate as a way to revitalize the labor movement in the United States.

A green ban is a protest against property development that is perceived as harming the local community. Most of the history I can find online gives first credit to the New South Wales Builders Labourers Federation (BLF) who responded to a plea from a local group of women about blocking development on a local green space in a Sydney suburb in 1971. After seeing widespread community support, the BLF refused to work on the development, and when the developer threatened to use nonunion workers, the BLF refused to work on that developer’s other projects. In other words, it issued a ban to its members from working on these projects—which was successful, and Kelly’s Bush remains green space today. In Melbourne, however, they say that the first ban of this kind was issued by the Victoria branch of the BLF to stop the development of the Hardy Gallagher Reserve in Melbourne in 1970. Far be it from me to get in the middle of yet another Sydney-Melbourne rivalry!

At the time, strike orders were called “black bans” and even the Melbourne history seems to admit that the label “green ban”—because it was in defense of green space rather than to improve wages and working conditions—was first applied in Sydney. Another green ban in the early 1970s prevented the Royal Botanic Gardens from being turned into a parking lot for the Sydney Opera House.

And then I never would have learned that 19 species of ferns have been named after Lady Gaga!

But I digress.

Green bans expanded to cover redevelopment of existing buildings in addition to the protection of  undeveloped green spaces based on the protection of affordable housing and other facilities that served the existing (often working class) community as well as the protection of historic buildings. Again, this was a tight-knit partnership between labor and community groups, with labor sometimes advocating against its own narrow self-interest by blocking development that would have provided construction jobs. According to a pamphlet I received, these unions asked their rank and file:

Will you stand in solidarity with your fellow workers not just over wages and conditions, but in the streets where they live will you take control out of the hands of employers and make decisions that are in the interests of communities, against the interests of building companies and other employers, when that solidarity is called upon?

The Green Ban Walking Tour in Melbourne, offered by the Earth Worker Cooperative, highlighted a number buildings that were saved. Perhaps ironically, some of the historic buildings that were saved were banks, theaters, and fancy hotels that served the elite, not the working class. But other saved properties have tighter connections to the working class, such as the city baths:

Another Melbourne landmark saved by a green ban that served the working class was Queen Victoria Market:

Though development is again threatening the market:

As concerns with the environment, communities, and redevelopment are again prominent in many areas of the United States, Australia, and elsewhere, and as the future of the labor movement in many countries is also debated, this was a fascinating historical walk with a lot of relevance for today. With respect to labor, what is its role in the community? Can it be more than a voice on the job? The green bans movement is example where it certainly was.

The State of Organized Labor in the U.S.: An Abbreviated FAQ

This past week I had the pleasure of speaking about the current state of labor relations to a local community group. It was great to see their interest in the topic, and the audience asked many good questions and had numerous important observations. I wasn’t sure how to structure my presentation, but they had provided me with a list of possible questions so I decided to approach it like a “State of Organized Labor FAQ.” Here are some highlights:

1. How many union members are there in the United States? What is the trend is union density (the fraction of workers who are union members?

We can answer these questions by this graph I’ve constructed:

The total area shows the number of union members. While less than its peak membership 45 years ago, there are still a lot of union members in the United States (over 14 million, roughly even split between private and public sector workers). Trends in union density (the fraction of workers who are unionized) are indicated by the blue (private sector) and green (public sector) lines. There is a clear divergence in these two trends over the past 50 years. Specifically, public sector density has been relatively stable at around 35 percent for a couple of decades, while private sector union density has been falling since the 1950s, and now stands around 6.5 percent. Comparing the red area with the blue line, we can that the decline in union density is less about losing members and more about failing to keep pace with employment growth.

[Update: On January 18, 2019, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its annual statistical report on union membership. For 2018, total union membership is 14.7 million, with density rates of 6.4 and 33.9 percent in the private and public sectors, respectively.]

2. Why has union membership declined, or not?

Again, looking back at the graph, union density decline is a private sector issue. By why? For starters, note that the decline in private sector density started way back in the 1950s. So this is a long-term issue which likely reflects a combination of factors, and we can’t blame recent things (even as far back as President Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers) for the entire decline. Commonly-cited factors include structural change (e.g., decline of manufacturing, demographic shifts, globalization), decreased demand for union representation (e.g., laws and paternalistic human resource management provide some of the protections that unions provide, or unions have failed to keep up with what workers want), and most controversially, employer opposition (legal and illegal). In the final analysis, it’s likely to be a combination of these factors.

But why the stability in public sector? That sector has also experienced demographic shifts (making it a less satisfactory explanation for the private sector decline), but the economic shifts have been less pronounced in this sector (e.g., the decline of manufacturing is purely a private sector issue). Moreover, robust union density in the public sector also seems to undermine demand-based explanations for the private sector decline. But due to differential norms and an inability to shift much of public sector work (e.g., schools need to remain in their district), there might be less scope for union opposition by public sector managers. This might be a key reason for the difference in the private and public sector trends.

3. Is it imaginable that the software engineers in Silicon Valley could be unionized?

Sure. There are many independent-minded skilled workers who are unionized, such as airline pilots, university faculty, and lawyers. Actors and professional athletes are also unionized. And the recent walkout among Google employees to protest Google’s handling of sexual harassment indicate that collective action is one strategy these workers are already using.

4. Has immigration (documented and undocumented) been a plus or minus or a zero for unions?

Yes. Wait a minute, which is it? This isn't a yes or no question. Well...like many other things in labor relations, it’s complicated. There are cases in which immigration can be bad for organized labor, whether because of desperate workers willing to work for less, immigrant workers who are fearful of being deported and therefore don’t want to make waves, prejudice against immigrant workers by union leaders or members, or other reasons. But there is another side to this story. Many immigrants to the United States come from cultures that are more collectivist and less individualistic than in the United States, and shared experiences of living and working together in specific neighborhoods and jobs can provide a strong sense of solidarity. Indeed, in Minneapolis, CTUL has been very successful in building collective power among janitors and other low-wage workers, many of whom are Latinx, Somali, or members of other non-majority groups, and Somali workers recently forced Amazon to negotiate with them. We should not dismiss immigration as entirely a negative for the labor movement--indeed, quite the contrary. 

5. Do unions make their firms or industries less productive and hence less competitive? Do unions put firms out of business?

A common stereotype about unions pertains to extensive, restrictive work rules, which might reduce productivity. But once again, there is another side to the story and there are ways in which unions might increase productivity (e.g., workers protected by a grievance procedure might feel empowered to speak out about work practices more honestly than nonunion workers). What happens in practice? Everything. In some cases, unionized workplaces are less productive; in other cases, it’s the reverse, or in some cases there aren’t meaningful differences. So it’s really about the nature of any particular situation. Moreover, from a pluralist perspective in which unions are necessary to better balance an otherwise unequal employment relationship, unions are not intended as productivity-enhancing devices so this should not be a major element on which they are judged.

In terms of whether unions put companies out of business, that too is always a complicated story. Sometimes a strike might prove to be the final straw, but there could have been business-related problems for a longer period of time. In the 1990s in the Twin Cities, Country Club Markets closed after a strike, but there were many factors at play, including a lack of investment back into the business. Indeed, it’s not in a union’s self-interest to systematically put companies out of business, and research does not find that unions destroy firms.  

6. Can unions engage with younger workers?

Yes. In fact my own research suggests that we overstate the labor movement’s lack of connections with younger workers. For details, see my blog post on unions having more younger workers than they think.

7. Where is Jimmy Hoffa buried?

Envision here a picture of the end zone at Giant’s Stadium in New Jersey. But of course I don’t have an answer to this, but given that some people in audience grew up in Detroit, I thought this would be funny to throw in. Moreover, it gave me the opportunity to point out the following. In response to some union corruption (which it’s important to not overstate), the Landrum-Griffin Act was passed in 1959 and essentially has the philosophy that requiring greater disclosures and transparency among unions will prevent union fraud (it’s harder to commit fraud when others can see what’s going on). Sounds sensible, but it took lawmakers until 2002 to treat companies in the same way (that is, Sarbanes–Oxley has essentially this same underlying logic). Seems like a big double-standard. In contrast, what I often emphasize is that unions are like other private, public, and nonprofit sector organizations: most are effective, most are good, but a small number are not. The same can be said for leaders of unions, businesses, public sector agencies, and non-profits. Unions should not be singled out, especially when it comes to corruption or other negative behaviors.

8. Why the controversies over right-to-work laws, free riders, and agency fees (fair share fees)?

Misleading named, right-to-work laws prevent unions from negotiating contract clauses that require workers from paying any union dues, even though the union has a legal obligation to represent them. Most right-to-work laws were passed in the 1940s and 1950s. But the issue sparked back to life around 2012 when a number of Republican governors and state lawmakers began championing laws in states with traditionally strong labor movements, such as Wisconsin and Michigan. Debates over right-to-work laws are very divisive, with proponents arguing that they are necessary to protect individual liberty and opponents countering that the true goal is to weaken unions. The controversies have become amplified because it now really more of a political issue than an economic one, with some conservative strategists being bold in revealing their desire to destroy the Democratic Party. In addition to state-level legislative initiatives, there has also been a paired movement to achieve right-to-work through the courts--a movement that achieved success when the Supreme Court made the entire public sector a right-to-work jurisdiction with its 2018 ruling in Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Council 31. Though in the longer-run, this Janus decision could actually make unions stronger. 

9. Is labor relations still relevant.

YES! See my blog entry on why students should study labor relations. Or my posting on why HR-OB still needs IR. 

And finally, in my presentation I emphasized what I have long emphasized: to really understand labor unions (and many other employment-related things), we need to appreciate different frames of reference. These provide competing lenses through which one can evaluate labor unions in very different ways. That’s essential for understanding, and for evaluation.

Paid Family Leave: The Lack of a National Policy Isn’t the Only Barrier

Paid family leave is back in the U.S. news again, this time with a proposal by Senator Mario Rubio called the Economic Security for New Parents Act, which would provide paid leave to parents who agree to delay taking social security benefits by an amount to offset the paid leave. I’m not going to get into the merits and controversies of this approach (for that, see this by the proposal’s originator, Kristin Shapiro, and this piece).

Rather, my key point is that simply offering a family leave policy does not automatically alleviate workers’ concerns about income loss or other potential negative consequences of taking a leave. So while new ideas about universal policies are important—and actually enacting policies would be even better!—we also need to better understand the factors that prevent workers from taking a leave, and ways to reduce these barriers.

So to think about the barriers to a leave, Tae-Youn Park (Vanderbilt), Eun-Suk Lee (KAIST), and I develop a four-part framework consisting of all A’s: availability, awareness, affordability, and assurance. These four elements reflect the key considerations for whether any worker takes many kinds of leave from work: 1) the policy needs to be available, 2) if available, the worker needs to be aware of it, 3) even if aware of an existing policy, the worker needs to believe he or she can afford a leave, and 4) even if affordable, the worker needs to have assurances against negative consequences that might result from taking a leave (e.g., a promotion going to someone else). We think this framework can help guide research into leave-taking barriers.

In a paper titled “What Do Unions Do for Mothers? Paid Maternity Leave Use and the Multifaceted Roles of Labor Unions,” the three of us focus specifically on the potential impact of labor unions. For starters, based on existing research on what unions do, it’s clear that unions have the potential to positively affect all four of these key steps (and not only in the United States). They can bargain for (better) leave policies; help spread awareness through newsletters, one-to-one interactions, and the like; make leaves more affordable through higher wages and better insurance coverage; and combat reprisals through bargaining, grievance procedures, and other means. But what happens in practice?

To find out, we turned to the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97) which, importantly, is a nationally-representative sample. Due to some data peculiarities, we are only able to analyze women taking paid maternity leave, but future analyses of paternity leave taking would also be valuable. Our final data set has 27,472 observations from 4,108 female workers across a 15-year period. Ultimately we find that union-represented workers are at least 17 percent more likely to use paid maternity leave than comparable nonunion workers, and that unions facilitate this leave-taking through the availability, awareness, and affordability channels. We also find that mothers who take a paid maternity leave experience a post-leave penalty—specifically, their wage growth is slower when compared to those who did not take a leave. Surprisingly, we did not find that labor unions lessen this penalty, which would be one aspect of the assurance dimension.

At one level, this research is about what unions do with respect to the important issue of helping new parents take the amount of leave they deserve after a birth or adoption. In looking at the aggregate picture, they appear to be helping in some ways, with perhaps room for expanding their activities. What happens on a case-by-case basis, we cannot observe. But at a higher level, this research is about continuing to deepen our understanding of the barriers to parental leave taking, which can help with policy design when (hopefully!) a policy is (finally!) enacted in the United States.

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Source: Tae-Youn Park, Eun-Suk Lee, and John W. Budd (forthcoming) "What Do Unions Do for Mothers? Paid Maternity Leave Use and the Multifaceted Roles of Labor Unions," ILR Review (https://doi.org/10.1177/0019793918820032).
Click here to read the full paper.

What Happens in the Aftermath of the Janus Ruling?

In 2018, all eyes in the labor relations community were focused on the Supreme Court in anticipation of its ruling in Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Council 31. Workers who are represented by a labor union cannot be forced to join a union and pay full dues, but in the absence of a right-to-work law, it has been possible to require them to pay an agency fee (equivalently, “fair-share fee”) to cover the costs of representing them. The question in Janus was whether mandatory agency fee arrangements in the public sector violate an individual’s free speech rights. This is only a question relevant to the public sector because the Constitution only prohibits the government from infringing on speech—there are no prohibitions against a private sector employer limiting an employee’s speech.

The free-speech argument against public sector agency fees is that mandating these payments means that a governmental body is forcing someone who does not belong to the union to subsidize the speech of others (the union) who they don’t agree with. Note carefully that this requires seeing public sector collective bargaining as rising to the level of public expression that enjoys constitutional protections. Opposed to this view is a counter-argument based on seeing collective bargaining as part of the employment relationship, not part of public discourse. So if states want to allow agency fees and prevent free-riding, then this should continue to be within their authority as regulators of the public sector employment relationship, consistent with other precedents in which public sector employees do not have free speech rights when speaking as workers rather than citizens.

When the Janus decision was issued last week, no one was surprised by the verdict: five conservative justices outnumbered four liberal justices in declaring that mandatory  agency fee arrangements in the public sector are unconstitutional free speech violations. This makes the entire U.S. public sector a right-to-work sector in which public sector unions will only be financially supported by union members. As such, this is arguably the most significant Supreme Court ruling affecting labor relations in a long time. It is also a highly-charged decision because Janus and related cases have been funded by conservative political groups seeking to weaken the labor movement as a counterweight to Republicans in the political arena. Indeed, President Trump’s tweet in support of the ruling boasted “Big loss for the coffers of the Democrats!”:

So this case is about much more than individual free speech. But will it be successful in weakening the labor movement?

In the short-term, Janus is likely to reduce the financial strength of public sector labor unions in non-right-to-work states (agency fees were already prohibited in right-to-work states) as nonmembers stop paying dues. Labor unions might also have to spend more time and money fighting additional lawsuits that will likely be filed by conservative groups seeking to get previously-paid agency fee amounts returned to workers. But it might not be all bad news for organized labor.

Some states might take legislative steps to lessen the impact of the Janus ruling. Possibilities include not requiring unions to represent nonmembers in grievance hearings; allowing unions to charge nonmembers for specific services such as grievance representation or arbitration; giving unions time during new employee orientation to meet new workers; making it difficult for anti-group workers to contact workers; and giving union members paid release time to recruit others into the union. It might also be legal for public sector unions to negotiate an agency fee arrangement that includes an opt-out clause allowing objectors to donate their fee to a charity.

At an even more fundamental level, recall that the Janus decision relies on elevating collective bargaining to a level of public speech that is entitled to constitutional protection. Ironically, then, this could bring new levels of legal protection to public sector collective bargaining. For example, state laws that restrict collective bargaining to narrow occupations or prohibit it altogether might be now be unconstitutional violations of free speech. Attempts to legislate further limitations on public sector bargaining, as in the case of Wisconsin, could also be challenged on this same basis. These issues will take years to work through the legal system, however.

So without waiting for favorable legislative or legal action, what can the labor movement do? The labor movement has had several years to prepare for this kind of ruling, and the primary response is to focus on internal organizing. This emphasizes relationship-building with bargaining unit members so that workers feel that they are a necessary part of a vibrant organization that effectively represents their interests. When this is successfully, not only will workers join their union and pay dues, but they will also be more engaged which further creates a more dynamic organization. Janus might also contribute to a feeling among public sector workers that they are under attack, making them receptive to collective action, as was demonstrated earlier this year in the statewide teacher strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona. So there is the distinct possibility that the labor movement ends up stronger than it was before the Janus decision.

How Many Things are Inevitable if Workers Unionize? Just One.

Looking back on the now-defunct (or hibernating) University of Minnesota faculty organizing drive, it’s striking the number of things that were said that implied that certain good or bad outcomes were inevitable. From the vantage point of someone who studies and teaches about labor relations, I only see one thing as inevitable if any group of employees vote in favor of unionization—namely, representatives of the business and of the employees will be obligated to bargain in good faith over terms and conditions of employment. That’s it. Everything else is up to numerous participants in the process—in the University of Minnesota case, this would include faculty, deans, a president, regents, union leaders, and others; in other cases this could include CEOs, other corporate leaders and supervisors, or in the public sector, governors, mayors, school board members, etc.

Let’s consider some things that were said during the University of Minnesota faculty (UMF) organizing drive that implied something was inevitable:

A lengthy process will continue to drag on. Yes, union organizing drives are typically lengthy affairs. The UMF organizing drive started back to 2014, and the union filed for an election in January 2016. The parties disagreed over the definition of the bargaining unit (in particular, should contract faculty be together in the same unit as tenured and tenure-track faculty), and the state Bureau of Mediation Services (BMS) finally issued a ruling in September 2016. The following month, the University appealed this ruling to the Minnesota Court of Appeals, which then took a year to overrule the BMS ruling. Shortly afterwards (October 2017), the union withdrew the petition seeking an election. So after three years, the drive was formally over and an election was never even held.

So yes, organizing drives are often lengthy affairs. But does a drive have to drag on? Is this inevitable? No. The ball is essentially in the employer’s court. In the UMF case, an election could have been scheduled quickly if the university had agreed to the definition proposed by the union. Employers like the university may feel that they have good reasons for challenging and appealing the unit determination process. But then administrators or corporate leaders need to recognize that they are making the choice to lengthen the process. [As a footnote, in the UMF case, we also have the Minnesota state legislature from several decades ago to thank for unnecessarily limiting flexibility and creating additional legal controversy by oddly trying to write the bargaining units into state law.] Bottom line: a lengthy process is likely, but it’s a choice, not an inevitability.

A rigid, one-size-fits-all collective bargaining agreement will be negotiated. It is common to stereotypically associate labor unions with rigid contracts that spell out specific outcomes in great detail. In the UMF case, this translated into a fear that unionization would take autonomy away from colleges or departments and mandate one-size-fits-all compensation structures, evaluation procedures, and the like. This certainly could happen. But it’s not inevitable. Professional athletes and Hollywood movie stars are represented by unions, and have collective bargaining agreements that allow for individual variation in compensation and other terms. Policies rather than outcomes could certainly be negotiated that empowered employees while allowing colleges to tailor practices and outcomes to their unique cultures, market conditions, and priorities. It all depends on who gets involved on both sides of the table and the choices they make. Bottom line: rigid collective bargaining agreements are possible, but not inevitable.

 Everyone will have to pay union dues. In the United States, if a union is voted in, it is true that it must represent everyone, and if negotiated, a collective bargaining agreement must apply to everyone. So individuals can’t opt out of being covered. But can they opt out of paying dues? In right-to-work states, they can. In the UMF case, Minnesota is a fair share state which means that unions are allowed to collect a fair share fee to cover the cost of representation, not to exceed 85 percent of regular dues. It’s likely that the Supreme Court will rule that this is unconstitutional and that no public sector employee can be forced to pay even a fair share fee (Janus v. AFSCME). In the meantime, it is true that public sector employees in Minnesota can be forced to pay at least the fair share fee, and the same is true to private and public sector employees in other non-right-to-work states. But a union does not have to force this issue; rather it’s something that is negotiated into contracts. In reality, unions likely do prioritize this (after all, they have expenses representing all workers). But once again, this is a choice. Bottom line: mandatory dues requirements are highly likely in non-right-to-work states or sectors, but are not inevitable.

Better off employees and colleges will lose out to worse off employees and colleges. Unions commonly try to benefit the worst off. After all, that’s what social justice is about. But whether this comes at the expense at employees and colleges who are currently better off depends on where the resources come from. It typically seems that university budgets are a zero sum game. If that’s accurate and unchangeable, then winning greater gains for the worse off will likely represent a redistribution away from the better off. But if new resources are created (for example, by stronger lobbying at the legislature) or found elsewhere (for example, administrative expenses), then it’s this doesn’t have to be a zero sum gain. Moreover, the extent to which this is a priority in the union, and how it is pursued, depends on who gets involved and how the agenda is shaped. Similar dynamics occur in any heterogeneous bargaining unit (for example, skilled crafts and assembly line workers; RNs and LPNs; etc.). Bottom line: uncertain.

The best faculty (workers) will leave and it will be harder to recruit new faculty (workers). There isn’t any direct evidence on this. If the faculty unionize and the relationship becomes adversarial, and rigid, one-size-fits-all policies and high levels of redistribution are negotiated, then yes, the university could become less attractive to certain faculty (and more attractive to those who have less power otherwise). If the relationship is productive and things are negotiated that further support and empower faculty in flexible ways, then unionization might be attractive to some people and a non-issue for others. There are many things that determine whether a job is attractive. Bottom line: Possible, but certainly not inevitable.

In conclusion, there is no doubt that there is much at stake in any organizing drive. Unionization could possibly transform important policies, procedures, and relationships. It’s certainly reasonable to debate whether these changes would be for the good, or not. But it’s better to debate them in the context of what might happen and by recognizing that this depends on the choices that many people will make. Not much is inevitable.

Employment Relations in a Post-Industrial Post-Democracy Era?

If one had to come up with a shorthand for the values of the field of employment relations, a strong contender would be “industrial democracy.” For starters, employment relations scholars seek to understand the rules of the workplace. Organizations are therefore seen as industrial governments that can be autocratic, technocratic, or democratic. The employment relations ideals of fairness and self-determination are best served by the democratic form of industrial government (“industrial democracy”) in which unilateral, unchecked managerial authority is replaced by orderly rules, participatory rule-making, checks and balances, and due process in dispute resolution. That (non-Marxist/critical) employment relations scholars see the employment relationship as analogous to a pluralist political society in which multiple parties (e.g., employers and employees) have legitimate but sometimes conflicting interests reinforces the preference for decision-making and dispute resolution processes that respect a diversity of rights and interests.  

The main vehicle for delivering industrial democracy has typically been labor unions  because imperfectly competitive labor markets and capitalist legal systems favor employers over individual employees. Labor unions that are legally and financially independent of management are the needed counterweight to managerial power, and are therefore necessary for giving employee voice legitimacy through the negotiation and enforcement of collective bargaining agreements. Consistent with this thinking, labor unions have a long history of promoting collective power as a way to bring democracy to the workplace, and to strengthen political democracy by creating independent and responsible rather than subordinate and repressed citizen-workers. 

We’ve already seen what happens to employment relations and labor unions when the “industrial” part of industrial democracy disappears. That is, the decline of manufacturing and traditional blue collar occupations have paralleled the steady decline in private sector U.S. union density. Though the relationship isn’t necessarily causal, it’s hard to deny that labor unions have struggled as the nature of the economy and the workforce have shifted, and probably not coincidentally, the size of the field of employment relations has simultaneously declined.  

But clearly there should be an important space for post-industrial worker voice as well as for employment relations scholarship. Unions are experimenting with different representation strategies, new institutions (especially worker centers) are emerging to give non-traditional workers a voice, and employment relations scholarship is broadening beyond a traditional focus on labor unions.

But perhaps a new challenge looms…the decline of support for democracy. In “The Democratic Disconnect” (Journal of Democracy, July 2016), Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk report disturbing trends from individual responses to the World Values Survey. For example, 26 percent of U.S. millennials characterize choosing leaders in free elections as unimportant and 24 percent indicate that democracy a bad way to run a country. These percentages are significantly higher than those reported by older generations. Similarly, 72 percent of Americans born before World War II say that it’s essential to live in a democracy, but among millennials that percentage plummets to 30 percent.

I incorporated these statistics into a presentation I made earlier this month entitled “Two More Problems Facing the Field of Employment Relations, and the Need for Inclusion” at the annual conference of the Labor and Employment Relations Association (LERA). To be honest, I did this primarily to be provocative, and maybe we shouldn’t place much weight on attitudinal surveys. But other indicators keep popping up. In "Why Republicans (and Trump) May Still Win Big in 2020 —Despite 'Everything'," Grover Norquist outlines how the Wisconsin strategy to eviscerate public sector unions (via Act 10) provides a desired model "for Republican political dominance" because "if Act 10 is enacted in a dozen more states, the modern Democratic Party will cease to be a competitive power in American politics" (Ozy, May 28, 2017). In other words, Norquist is championing a blueprint for one-party politics. Other examples consistent with a decline in support for democracy include trends toward greater restrictions on free speech ("Under Attack," The Economist, June 4, 2016) and toward increased support for dictatorships ("America’s Foreign Policy: Embrace Thugs, Dictators and Strongmen," The Economist, June 3, 2017). 

The industrial change was a compositional one, not one in fundamental values. But if support for democracy is truly declining, this could be much more damaging for industrial democracy and for the field of employment relations. The tendency to defer to strong leaders in the name of efficiency and expediency is even stronger in business than in government. If democracy isn’t robustly supported in the political arena, it will presumably be even harder to generate support in the workplace. If achieving post-industrial workplace democracy has been a challenge, imagine the challenge of post-industrial post-democracy. 

So what's to be done? I don’t think there are any easy answers. We need to monitor these democracy-related trends, and if they are real, they need to be reversed. The industrial democracy values of employment relations continue to need champions. Whether post-industrial or not, the values and value of industrial democracy need to be explicitly recognized, not taken for granted.  

Labor Unions Have More Younger Members Than They Think, And Why This is Important

With Donald Trump joining a Republican-majority Congress in office this week, the U.S. labor movement is braced for adversity. Who knows what lies ahead. At a minimum, labor will face a less sympathetic legal system when the composition of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and judiciary reflect Trump appointees. Bigger changes at the federal level could include a de-funded NLRB and a national right-to-work law, while in the public sector a new Friedrichs case could result in a national public sector right-to-work mandate to go along with continued state-level legislative efforts to weaken public sector unions.

Undoubtedly, labor union strategies to survive and even revitalize in this era will need to be multi-pronged. Any strategy, however, is likely to have limited success if it fails to consider how to represent workers throughout the job switches and other major changes that occur over the full life cycle of workers in the new world of work, organizations, and employment. In many countries, from Asia to Europe to North and South America, workers are most likely to be unionized in their forties. In the United States, there are more than twice as many union members in their forties than in their twenties. Union leaders that want to be responsive to the majority of their rank and file members consequently negotiate seniority rights, seniority-based wage schedules, and health and retirement benefits that benefit middle-aged and older workers more than younger workers. Those interested in the future of collective voice and union representation should be asking whether this middle-aged and older worker bias has
contributed to the decline of unions by ignoring how workers experience unionism over their life cycles.

Taking seriously the role of younger workers in union revitalization efforts requires recognizing when workers are first unionized and how these early experiences affect later attitudes toward labor unions. In contrast to conventional wisdom that associates unionization with middle-age, my research using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 has shown that the average age when workers begin their very first unionized job is 23 years old. Among those who had been represented by a union by the time they were around 40 years old, more than 85 percent were first represented before they were 30 years old. By age 25, nearly 50 percent of the entire sample had held at least one unionized job, and by age 40, nearly 65 percent was unionized in at least one of their jobs, and ex-unionized workers outnumbered currently-represented workers by three to one.

I think this bears repeating. By age 25, nearly 50 percent of a nationally-representative of workers that I analyzed had held at least one unionized job, and among the nearly 65 percent (yes, 65 percent) who had been represented by a union by the time they were around 40 years old, over half were first represented before age 23, and more than 85 percent were first represented before they were 30 years old. Any direct experiences that workers have with unions presumably shape their lasting attitudes towards unions, positively or negatively. So if younger workers are being neglected by their unions, unions run the risk of alienating a larger number of workers than previously expected. Labor unions should therefore adopt a life-cycle rather than job-centric representation strategy. Tom Kochan  has explained how this can work:

Once recruited, the relationship with members could be maintained for life by providing the labor market and educational services and benefits individuals and families need as they move through different stages of their careers and family lives. Consistent with the history of the way many unions began, these types of organizations might serve as mutual benefit societies by providing workers with health insurance, savings programs that build retirement security, life-long education, work-family supports, and the social networks and information needed to find jobs when required. They would also provide quick and effective advice and representation to solve problems and if necessary represent workers in trouble, individually and collectively. (Restoring the American Dream: A Working Families’ Agenda for America, MIT Press, p. 151).

My research on first union experiences reveals that U.S. labor unions have an important, and probably overlooked, opportunity to develop a supportive, firsthand relationship with quite a large fraction of the U.S. workforce. Admittedly, the labor movement faces significant complexities in fully embracing young workers with the goal of developing lifetime support. Workers who first encounter unionization as teenagers do so disproportionately in wholesale and retail trade which means that specific unions might bear the burden of devoting resources specifically to younger workers. Even when these unions realize the importance of workers’ first unionized experiences, high turnover of younger workers can make it difficult to build strong connections. U.S. labor law also favors a job-centric membership model.

Nevertheless, the labor movement and other interested parties should understand when and how workers first experience unionization, and construct representation strategies that fit with the life cycle realities of today’s workers. Given what’s likely to be a hostile legislative and judicial environment for U.S. labor unions in the coming months and years, this is probably more important than ever for the future of the U.S. labor movement.

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Additional reading: John W. Budd (2010) "When Do U.S. Workers First Experience Unionization? Implications for Revitalizing the Labor Movement," Industrial Relations, vol. 49, no. 2 (April), pp. 209-225

And the University of Minnesota faculty organizing drive drags on, or, bananas aren’t apples, but they are more like apples than like airplanes

When I taught labor relations last winter, the union organizing drive among University of Minnesota faculty was a very timely topic. After having been away for the summer, some of the students from that class asked whether faculty were unionized yet. But the answer brings to life one of the realities of union organizing in the United States—it’s a slow process. SEIU Local 284 filed a petition seeking an election with the State of Minnesota’s Bureau of Mediation Services (BMS) on January 20, 2016. Over 34 weeks later, an election is not yet in sight.

In any union representation election, the election unit needs to be defined. That is, what jobs are included and excluded from what will be the bargaining unit if the union wins. This definition is initially presented by the union when requesting an election, but an employer can object on the basis of there not being a “community of interest” among all of the included workers. A major sticking point in the faculty organizing drive is whether the bargaining unit should only include tenured and tenure-track faculty (the University’s position) or should also include full-time and part-time instructors (“contract faculty”) (the union’s position). In other words, the University asserts that regular faculty and contract faculty do not share a community of interest whereas the union argues that they do. Undoubtedly, regular and contract faculty have things in common (an educational focus, instruction, academic achievement as a position requirement) and not (tenure versus annual contracts, sharply different degrees of research responsibilities). So where to draw the line?

Unfortunately, an already-slow process has been made worse by the curious choice of the Minnesota legislature to enshrine the University of Minnesota bargaining units in state law over 30 years ago. It’s clear that tenured and tenure-track faculty are in what the law defines as Unit 8. But what about contract faculty? The University claimed that they are in the “Academic Professional and Administrative Staff” unit (Unit 11) by law, so there is nothing for BMS to decide. The union claimed that the law is so old that contract faculty are new positions that need to be classified by BMS. Over multiple objections by the University, BMS agreed with the union. So a lengthy hearing was held last spring, and BMS finally issued its ruling earlier this week.

In its ruling, BMS largely sided with the union and placed contract faculty into Unit 8 along with regular faculty (although extension faculty were excluded because they are not located on the Twin Cities campus). So unless the University is successful in an appeal, an election will occur some day and will uniquely include regular and contract faculty in the same unit. But that’s still a ways off because (a) the University will probably appeal, and (b) there still needs to be more hearings over excluding supervisors (which could include me as department chair) and determining whether instructors who teach minimal classes are real employees and therefore included. So again, union organizing can often be a lengthy process.

So what about the BMS ruling? How could they put regular and contract faculty together? If this occurred in the private sector, my guess is that they wouldn't have been placed together because they would have been seen as having distinct communities of interest. But in the private sector (and probably in most states), nothing is pre-specified so the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) could put them together, or keep them separate. What the University seemingly failed to appreciate in this case is that Minnesota law has already limited the bargaining units. So BMS really wasn't deciding whether faculty and instructors go together, it was really deciding whether instructors go with faculty or go with the “everything else leftover” professional and administrative unit that also includes accountants, cartographers, athletic trainers, and over 300 other job titles. The university kept arguing that instructors aren’t faculty. But BMS ruled that they are even less like accountants and athletic trainers. Or the way I’ve bastardized it, bananas aren’t apples, but they are more like apples than like airplanes.

So whether or not this ruling makes it more or less likely that the faculty will vote to unionize remains to be seen. And if the faculty do unionize, it will undoubtedly be an interesting case study of how to include regular and contract faculty interests in bargaining and representation. In the meantime, the events of this year clearly illustrate how this can be a drawn-out process. And at a broader level, this also illustrates why legislators should be careful not to overly prescribe matters and to instead craft laws in ways that are flexible and adaptable.

The Soul and Scope of Labor Union Strategies

The faculty organizing drive at the University of Minnesota has heated up with the recent launch of a website for faculty opposing the drive. The presence of an organizing drive anywhere naturally raises questions of what will a union do for the workers, and more broadly, how will they do it. Indeed, the traditional collection of union strategies is under great pressure to change in the 21st century, and the labor movement has been debating and experimenting with alternatives.

Unfortunately, these debates often confuse different dimensions of union strategies. The traditional collection of union strategies combines a workplace focus with passive rank and file participation. Alternative strategies can change only one, or both, of these dimensions. To understand these debates more clearly, then, it is important to clearly distinguish between what I call the scope and the soul of employee representation (see table below). The scope of representation describes the breadth of the representation activities—in particular, whether union activity is concentrated in the workplace or in the broader political and social arenas. A business unionism focus on collective bargaining is a workplace scope of representation; an alternative approach embracing community and social activism represents a broader social scope. The soul of representation captures how the representation is pursued or delivered, especially regarding the extent of rank and file participation. The rank and file are passive in the servicing model; alternative strategies seek to instead actively engage the rank and file in union activities.

The upper-left quadrant is where U.S. unions have traditionally been. Staying within a workplace focus (left-hand column) but moving away from a servicing approach in which union members passively consume union services yields a set of alternatives I have labeled "employee empowerment unionism." Rather than establishing standardized outcomes, such as tying wages to jobs or layoffs to seniority, employee empowerment unionism establishes the framework of procedures in which workers are then empowered to determine their own outcomes. Consider union strategies in professional sports. These unions focus less on negotiating specific outcomes and instead have established the parameters within which individual players negotiate their own salaries. These parameters include minimum standards and provisions for resolving disputes. A similar model is used for actors and might also be appropriate for college professors, doctors, and other occupations. Union involvement in establishing standards for a team to select new members or a team leader is another example in which the union’s role is not negotiating outcomes, but negotiating processes for empowering individual employees. As yet another example, the clerical workers union at Harvard University bargained for a problem-solving system that replaces a traditional grievance procedure with a framework that empowers employees to resolve their own workplace problems.

Some see labor unions as more than workplace mechanisms for winning economic gains; rather, unions are viewed as integral participants in a community’s and country’s civic and political activities. In the format of the table, the scope of representation is the broader social and political arena. The pursuit of equity and voice is not limited to negotiating favorable contract language governing the rules of the workplace, but extends to broader concerns of social justice throughout society. But what’s often overlooked is that even within social unionism, what I call the soul can be union leaders with passive rank and file participation, or it can be active union member participation. Union support for political candidates or lobbying for minimum wage increases without grassroots participation are examples of social unionism with a largely passive rank and file. In contrast, "social movement unionism" embraces labor unions as part of a broader social movement of community, social, and political activist groups that relies on active grassroots participation and mobilization. Organizer Jane McAlevey prefers the label “whole-worker organizing” because it seeks to integrate rather than separate out work issues from the rest of a person’s life and thereby “seeks to engage ‘whole workers’ in the betterment of their lives” (Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement, 2012, p. 14).

Within each of the quadrants of the table, there are a variety of specific goals, objectives, and strategies that could be pursued. So unions and the workers they represent, or who are seeking representation, have lots of choices. In thinking about these choices, it's useful to distinguish between the soul and scope of representation.

Note: For the faculty organizing drive at the University of Minnesota, here are links to the websites of the supporters, those who oppose the drive, and the administration.