September 5, 1995
"Unions Can't Lock Out the Future -American Labor Preoccupied with Internal Matters, Must Log On to the Information Age"
San Jose Mercury News
By Timothy Taylor
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AMERICAN union power has been going downhill for 40 years. After World War II, when the U.S. government strongly encouraged the formation and growth of labor unions as a method of accelerating military production, about 35 percent of the U.S. workforce belonged to a union. Today, only 16 percent of all U.S. workers belong; in private industry, the total is only 11 percent.

The one growth area for unions has been government; while only about 6 percent of government workers belonged to unions back in 1960, that figure has now climbed to 38 percent.

Sagging union membership in the United States is even more striking when contrasted with other industrialized countries. As the table shows, the U.S. doesn't quite have the lowest level of union membership; France and Spain hover a bit lower.

But in the United States, unions negotiating with individual companies are the only form of collective bargaining over wages and work conditions, while France and Spain also have a variety of other mechanisms, including national, regional, sectoral and single-company agreements.

Since the late 1980s, for example, France has had economy-wide, multi-industry negotiations to determine wage increases. When broader forms of collective bargaining are considered, the United States ranks at the bottom of the industrialized world.

For some folks, this news is a combination of glad tidings and just desserts. In their view, unions are nothing more than an entrenched and politicized leadership that seeks to block modernization and change.

Surely, a few individual unions and union leaders do fit that caricature. But the international comparisons show that such all-inclusive slurs on unions and collective bargaining are wrong-headed.

After all, it hasn't exactly crippled the German economy to have double the unionization rate of the United States - nor to have 90 percent of its workforce covered by collective bargaining arrangements of some sort. The Japanese economy has grown extremely fast with far more unionization than the United States. For that matter, America in the 1950s combined far stronger unions and robust economic growth.

In other countries, unions and collective bargaining are often given credit for reducing conflict in the workplace and promoting consensus in society as a whole. Moreover, strong unions and collective agreements can help workers embrace training and modernization, because they have confidence that their interests have been represented.

The key question is not whether unions are inevitably good or bad - an argument that sheds more heat than light - but whether American unions are reinventing themselves in ways that will benefit their members and society. This summer has brought two major stories about the U.S. labor movement.

One is the proposal, announced at the end of July, to merge the autoworker, steelworker and machinist unions. Mergers do expand the personal empire of top leadership. But just as merging three money-losing companies can create only a larger loss-maker, combining three declining unions doesn't do anything, in and of itself, to strengthen the labor movement.

The other major labor story concerns the resignation of longtime AFL-CIO leader Lane Kirkland. An election in October, between Kirkland protegee Thomas Donahue and relative outsider John Sweeney (president of the Service Employees International Union), will determine the new leader for the American labor movement. It's the first significant split in the national labor leadership since the 1930s, which tells something about how ossified big labor has become.

The two candidates are both calling for better union organizing and public relations and motherhood and apple pie. They are less clear about what actual policies the unions of tomorrow will advocate.

The most visible labor stand of the last few years has been a shrill opposition to NAFTA, GATT and free trade. But America's workers aren't going to become better off by sealing themselves off from the world, nor by denying Mexican or Chinese workers a chance to sell their goods in American markets. Unions were strong supporters of free trade until the mid-1960s; they should rediscover the wisdom of that stance.

There is no scarcity of issues where a thoughtful voice for American labor could have considerable impact. How can the broadest group of American workers use the new information and communication technologies to improve their productivity and wages? How can workers have access to the training and retraining and advanced capital equipment they need? How can society assure benefits like retirement, health care, education, vacation and day care, in a world where many workers will be switching between employers?

Combine these issues with the traditional labor concern for fair wages and a safe workplace, and you might have a political and social movement that would be at least as important as Ross Perot all by himself, even if not as central as, say, the Scandinavian unions are in their countries.

But at least for this summer, the top levels of the American labor movement seem preoccupied with internal matters, like mergers and elections, rather than with the sort of creative thinking and outreach that could play such an important role in shaping the 21st century workplace.

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