Some Thoughts about Unions

What’s going on in Wisconsin

As I watch the nightly news from sources I have learned to trust, I am appalled by what the governor of Wisconsin is doing to break the public employee unions and it looks like it might spread to other states. The bright spot in all this is the reaction of the majority of the people in Wisconsin who are basically saying “you have gone too far.” When you look closely the issue in Wisconsin is not money, but a person’s right to collective bargaining. Collective bargaining under the leadership of unions has taken a horrible beating in recent years as they have been called the bogeymen of our economy. In my opinion, this is untrue. In fact unions never got anything for their members without compromise and the consensus of company management. That’s why the process is called collective bargaining. 

A Short History Lesson

For the most part, unions came about in the U.S. during the 1920s and 30s for one simple reason; industrial workers were treated like slaves by their employers. They were required to work 15 hour days, 6 days a week for a poverty wage. There were no benefits; no sick days, no insurance of any kind, no retirement and no employment safe guards of any kind. Unions where formed to give some kind of protection to workers at the peril of the organizers and members. The history of that time is full of confrontations in the street. Policemen and soldiers were used to force people back to work and away from collective bargaining. General Motor’s Flint Michigan plants were the scene of many walk outs and considerable blood shed in 1937. A good source on all of this is A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn.

The novel by John Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath,is an incredible documentation of the plight of the rural poor in America during the 1920-1930. The events and conditions portrayed in the book should be considered carefully by all of us today. If the right wing politics and the wealthiest Americans get their way we will see these things again on a larger scale and it won’t be only migrant farm workers being impacted.

As a teacher in a technical college years ago, I became directly involved in collective bargaining for the faculty of that institution. What we went through to get fairness in salaries could fill a book. The greatest motivation of the school board was to keep their personal property taxes as low as possible. Most of the board members were large ranch and farm owners. They seemed to have little regard for the quality of education provided our students or the well being of their employees, the teachers. Money was the most important issue, money in their pockets. By the way, they were the wealthiest men in the county. Without the combined strength of all the teachers and support from the Teachers Association we would have been unable to get salary equity with other teachers in the state, which even at best was one of the lowest in the U.S.

What I have experienced first hand

After college I went to work for Ford Motor Company in the Detroit area. There I had the opportunity to experience unions and their affect up close and personal. In fact my last job in Dearborn required the direct supervision of 36 United Auto Worker members. They were auto technicians and support personnel, all with good benefits and wages. Were they over-paid? Maybe. Maybe a better question would be, would they have been underpaid if they had not been union employees?  One thing I do know is that my salary and benefits as a non-union employee were directly related to what the union negotiated every three years. Years later I was able to experience the affects of not being under the Union Umbrella when the car companies found a loophole in providing benefits for white collar workers. I became what was called a "contract employee." People could be legally hired as non-employee employees and in this way paid a lower salary with virtually no benefits. If fact, my retirement from Ford came about because Ford eliminated all company employees in the organization I worked for and replaced them with contract people. It’s good I was retirement age.  

It takes incredible deceit to get people to go against their own best interests.

As I sit in front of the TV and computer and watch the reports of the political support given to politicians like Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin and House Speaker Boeher etc. by so many middle class Americans, I am dumfounded and stunned that so many working class people support these guys. When Boener say’s “so be it,” it seems the people he is targeting for job loss cheer! Maybe this blind action comes from a lack of education about our own history. Even prominent politicians don’t seem to know our real history; in fact they get away with misrepresenting it continually.

What Unions have done for all of us.

All of us who have worked for wages or a salary have received benefits from what unions have helped their members to achieve:  40 hour work weeks, holiday pay, minimum wage, retirement packages, health and medical benefits, workplace safety, etc. The union agreements have provided the competition that made it necessary for non-union companies to also provide these benefits.

We Americans need to wake up and realize that the purpose of business is to make a profit--benevolence is not in their mission statement. The banking crisis yells this at us, yet we seem to ignore the bankers' shenanigans and we discard all the safeguards that were put in place at one time to prevent their greed from destroying us. If average citizens don’t have leverage equal to the power of big business and banking they will always lose. That is why we have government. United we stand, divided we fall!