We'll start this year off with a continuation of a discussion started last year, about unions. In the comments section, and on his own blog, Chris Wage took me to task for my claims that in many, if not most cases, unions do more damage than good. Chris left the discussion behind when I pointed out a couple of gaping holes in his argument, ceding the field to facts and logic. Or maybe the holiday egg nog called louder than the debate. Who knows?
However, in the course of the discussion, he implied a couple of times that unions were a response to unrestrained capitalism, as if collective bargaining as practiced in the US, i.e. strikes, were somehow apart from capitalism.
This is a common perception, but I think it is actually a misperception. Trade unions predated the Communist revolution and in fact owe their roots more to the artisan and crafters' guilds of Medieval Europe than to Karl Marx. In fact, trade unions as we define them were strictly outlawed by the Soviets. Oh sure, there were organizations called trade unions, but as this report from the Soviet Congress makes clear, their primary purpose was to indoctrinate the "uneducated" workers in communist principles.
The most important role of the trade unions in Soviet Russia remains their role as schools of communism.
At the present moment, the trade unions are already fulfilling certain functions of purely state agencies (the working out of pay scales, the distribution of work clothing, etc.). In the Soviet state, these state functions of the trade unions will gradually be increased.
Being a proletarian dictatorship, the Soviet state is a lever of economic revolution. Therefore, there can be no possibility of any opposition between the trade unions and the organs of Soviet power.
...any opposition between the trade unions, as the economic organization of the working class, and the soviets, as its political organization, is completely absurd and is a deviation from marxism in the direction of bourgeois - specifically, bourgeois tradeunionist -prejudices.
In short, no strikes were tolerated in Soviet Russia. Odd stance for a workers paradise, don't you think?
So, instead of being institutions geared towards ensuring the rights of the workers, Soviet era unions were actually little more than Communist Party indoctrination groups. In fact, the legacy of the Soviet version of trade unions is seen today as one of the greatest factors holding back modern labor relations in Russia today. It seems that the trade unions were so ineffective at garnering basic employee rights for its membership that most Russian workers feel more comfortable negotiating directly with their employer, rather than working through a union.
Imagine that.
But we shouldn't be too surprised. How many strikes have you heard about from Communist countries where the striking workers didn't wind up dead or imprisoned? CHina is one of the last hard line Communist countries, so the ability of the worker to strike should be enshrined in Chinese law, right?
Independent trade unions are illegal in China, with all workers belonging to the Communist Party controlled umbrella body All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU).Workers who go on strike over pay and workplace abuses are dismissed while organisers of labour protests face imprisonment.
Hey, if WalMart let's your union in, just how effective can it be, really?
No, the American unions may have been sold with Communist rhetoric, but they are entirely a product of free market capitalism. And because of that, not only did they actually function as advertized, improving the lives and well being of the workers, they did so independant of or at worst in spite of political indoctrination, or government regulation.
Still not convinced? OK, look at it this way. Labor is a commodity like any other. Some people are buying and some are selling. When the two sides can agree on a mutually beneficial price, then we can do business. If the two sides can't find agreement, then things stop until something in the situation changes. Now then, several decades ago, businesses banded together to force the price for labor lower. This was called collusion and the labor folks said it was a bad thing. The short term advantages for the busness owners quickly evaporated as worker became unwilling to sell their labor so cheaply and banded together to force the price back up. This was called solidarity and the labor folks said it was a good thing.
It's the same thing, folks! Collective bargaining by labor was the inevitable response of free market capitalism to collective bargaining by management. The system became imbalanced and market forces reacted to correct the imbalance. The beauty of the system is that it worked robustly and automatically: owners and management fought the changes, without success, and government tried to regulate them, again without notable success. The market ticked merrily along as wages increased to a level that allowed the workers to buy the things their labors produced, resulting in an economic expansion never before seen in history.
And the system is still regulating itself. Now that the pendulum has swung back, and the system is more in balance, union membership is dying out. To be sure, unions will fight against this trend, but ultimately, their struggles will be as futile as those of the forces that resisted unionization in the first place. Short of government intervention, unions that have performed their function will wither away and die, leaving the individual workers in charge of their own fate.
This trend will be accelerated by the fact that businesses are now more savvy about the long term benefits of strong management/labor relations. The companies that can create a co-operative dynamic between the two sides rather than a competitve one will be the companies that lead the next economic expansion.
Posted by Rich at January 2, 2006 1:52 AM | TrackBackHowever, in the course of the discussion, he implied a couple of times that unions were a response to unrestrained capitalism, as if collective bargaining as practiced in the US, i.e. strikes, were somehow apart from capitalism.
I wouldn't say that's what I think -- rather I think that I agree with your characterization of labor's existence in this country entirely: if you start with an arbitrary neutral point loosely based on the foundation principles of free market capitalist theory, there are two complementary halves of the system that has evolved from it. The unions are not the only ones utilizing collectivism (in the loosest sense of the word) to their advantage -- the collusion of "monopoly capital" is a force to which union organization is the counterweight.
It's not a perfect system (naturally I'm not one to condone the status quo), but I believe unions do serve a useful purpose in this context, and I think we agree on that. (I actually wrote this bit before I read on in your article to find you basically saying the same thing.)
You're right to observe that trade unions predate Marxism or Communism -- indeed, Marx hardly saw the unions of today as an idealized goal -- he saw the organization of labor in his day as a potential stepping stone for dismantling the state entirely.
I think where we disagree is on the simple point of whether or not unions have outlived their purpose. I haven't seen much compelling evidence to support your assertion that the system now is in some sort of self-regulating "balance". Maybe I am misunderstanding what you're saying. If the collusion of capital is balanced by the collusion of labor, how can you argue for the obsolescence of one without demonstrating the evaporation of the other?
Posted by: Chris Wage on January 8, 2006 1:58 PMI think where we disagree is on the simple point of whether or not unions have outlived their purpose. I haven't seen much compelling evidence to support your assertion that the system now is in some sort of self-regulating "balance". Maybe I am misunderstanding what you're saying. If the collusion of capital is balanced by the collusion of labor, how can you argue for the obsolescence of one without demonstrating the evaporation of the other?
Or it could be that I'm not doing a very good job of saying what I'm thinking. It's not so much that unions are obsolete, as it is that their function of checking the disproportionate power of monopolistic capitalism has been accomplished, and their continued existance creates a roadblock towards a more efficient mode of business.
As has been demonstrated repeatedly in the marketplace, a labor management model based on co-operation is, generally speaking, significantly more effective than the old fashioned competitive model. Companies that value their employees and work to create a feeling of employee ownership are more productive, have lower turnover, and demonstrate higher levels of initiative and innovation, giving them a huge competitive advantage in the marketplace. Since the entire structure of labor unions is based on the old competitive model, they become a roadblock towards that goal.
As for management, we are already seeing signs of changes that indicate acceptance of the co-operative model (Total Quality Management, Conduct of Operations programs, Employeee Empowerment programs, etc.) Companies that integrate this new managment style will enjoy the competitive advantage over those that don't, which, in a free market, will doom those companies mired in the old competitive paradigm to extinction.
So, while I see unions withering away, I also see the last vestiges of the exploitative side of capitalism also withering away.
Posted by: rich on January 8, 2006 9:40 PMIt's not so much that unions are obsolete, as it is that their function of checking the disproportionate power of monopolistic capitalism has been accomplished, and their continued existance creates a roadblock towards a more efficient mode of business.
I still don't see how there's evidence of such an equilibrium achieved. It's like if a dam were poised to burst from the overwhelming weight of a lake behind it, and we buttress the dam, and then say "phew, we fixed that problem, now let's dismantle this buttress".
I like the idea of an idealized co-operative relationship between capital and labor, but I see very little evidence that such a model has been pervasive in the least, much less prevailed.
Incidentally, you may find this post interesting, which in some ways mirrors our discussion..
Posted by: Chris Wage on January 8, 2006 11:08 PMInteresting discussion, but let me turn it around; if management is acting unfairly by trying to extract maximum work for minimum pay, why isn't labor acting unfairly by trying to extract maximum pay for minimum work?
In this reciprocity, I again see the competitive structure of the union/management model rather than a more effective co-operative model. To expand on your analogy, instead of buttressing the dam, which does nothing productive and results in more pent up energy, why not build sluice gates and a hydroelectric plant to produce electric power while reducing pressure on the dam?
Everybody wins.
Regardless of whether you have seen the co-operative model in action (I have, but that may be just because of the industries I've worked in), do you see that the antagonism implicit in a union structure makes the transition to the more effective co-operative model much more difficult? And if you believe that a co-operative model is one that is to be desired, wouldn't you want to remove impediments to its formation?
Posted by: rich on January 9, 2006 12:26 AMThanks for the link, Chris. If I can attempt to answer your last question, rich, I'd say that *nobody* would be acting unfairly by attempting to maximize their returns, in a free market. The problem is that this isn't a free market. It's a system where the rules of the market are rigged by employers so that labor has to sell itself in a buyer's market. Instead of jobs competing for workers, workers are competing for jobs. If it were the other way around, the increased bargaining power of labor would be enough to turn most workplaces into de facto worker co-ops.
I can't comment on your experience with TQM, because I don't know what industry you work in. But working in service jobs like hospitals, retail, and the like, I've seen them pay lip service to all of Deming's ideas while in practice creating a living sweatshop hell of deliberate understaffing and mandatory overtime. Most management theory fads that talk about worker empowerment translate, in practice, into Taylorism. The reason is that they're implemented by bosses.
I worked at a hospital once that had THREE offices next door to each other, each with the word "Quality" in the title on the door. And it was the worst case of micro-management and middle management featherbedding of any hospital I've ever worked in.
Posted by: Kevin Carson on January 9, 2006 1:43 AM