Why the U.S. Economy Still Needs Unions

Again this year, there wasn’t much for unions to celebrate anywhere in America on Labor Day as labor leaders continued to search for ways to revitalize their weakened but still economically and politically influential organizations.

These are dark days for unions in this country as their membership continues to dwindle relative to the total work force. At the same time, paradoxically, the strength of unions as symbols of freedom in communist Poland is now enormous and they are even showing signs of life in other communist countries, including the Soviet Union.

Harvard economics Prof. Richard Freeman, who is sympathetic to unions, has gathered a mass of statistics that leads him to speculate that this country might well become the “union-free nirvana sought by rabid foes of unionism� if something isn’t done to reverse current trends.

Freeman isn’t optimistic about labor’s future, at least not in this country where many people fail to realize that viable trade unions are crucial elements in a democracy.

Better times lie ahead for U.S. unions and the entire nation, though, if more corporate executives modernize their labor relations policies and learn that productivity could rise if they would stop spending so much money and time trying to destroy the American labor movement and try instead to cooperate with it.

It isn’t a simple lesson because it involves a willingness of management to give up some of its cherished power to control the lives of others.

More and more executives are finally learning that workers must be treated as intelligent, responsible adults who should share in the decision-making process at almost all levels of their companies.

But learning that lesson leaves unanswered a question that is critical to the future of unions: Is there a role for unions in companies that are sincere in cooperating with workers and sharing decision-making?

Too often, executives are able to persuade many of their employees that unions are unnecessary when their companies adopt what--on the surface, at least--is a more enlightened, non-adversarial method of labor-management relations.

That recently happened, for instance, at the Cyprus Minerals Co.’s huge copper mine in Miami, Ariz., and at the Nissan auto plant in Smyrna, Tenn.

At the Cyprus mine near Phoenix, workers voted to end 50 years of union representation. At Nissan’s relatively new plant, which had no union, a majority of workers voted against representation by the United Auto Workers.

In both cases, sizable majorities accepted their companies’ dubious assurances that unions are outmoded because old-style dictatorial bosses are out and, instead, “charm school�-trained managers, as Cyprus workers call them, who really respect workers, are in.

But that kind of employer-ordered workplace democracy is a fragile thing that can be snuffed out by corporate executives as quickly as they decreed it.

Workers usually need a union as a power base of their own, somewhat akin to the base that managers have with company stockholders and boards of directors.

A well-run union could provide leadership and professional talent to help make sure that management’s promises of on-the-job democracy are more than just a benign dictatorship that would crack its whip of power if profits drop.

And even where management’s promises are kept and are long-lasting, workers without a union have no voice in one of the most important decisions affecting their jobs: setting their wages and benefits. So certainly unions can play an important role even in companies that adopt industrial democracy.

Obviously, unions don’t automatically assure fair treatment for workers, whether or not a company agrees to worker-participation programs. And too often, both union leaders and members reject full labor-management cooperation, fearing that management’s real goal is to get rid of the union.

Pessimistic Figures

Nevertheless, the cooperative system works best, according to numerous studies, when employers and unions together create labor-management partnerships that increase job satisfaction, productivity and corporate profits.

With steadily rising foreign competition, U.S. companies need all the help that they can get from their employees.

Unions need stronger, rigorously enforced labor laws, and they themselves should, among other things, start taking the lead in developing those labor-management partnerships if they are to regain their ebbing strength.

A few figures underscore Prof. Freeman’s pessimism. Generally known is the fact that unions today represent only 16.8% of the work force, compared to a peak of 35.5% in 1945.

Less well known, however, is that in those earlier years almost all union members worked in private enterprise and relatively few were in government jobs.

Now, 37% of workers in federal, state and local government are unionized, compared to only 12.9% of those in private enterprise. That reversal came about largely because, unlike private sector employers, government managers don’t pour vast sums of money into battles against unions.

Freeman estimates that unless unions are able to reverse current trends, their future will be bleak, indeed, and that they will represent only 8% or less of all workers in the private sector by the year 2000.

Best for the Country

Such further shrinking of the labor movement might be averted by a number of possibilities, including more effective labor laws and more imaginative, energetic union organizing campaigns.

But best for the entire country, including unions, would be an era of labor-management partnerships and an end to the kind of costly labor warfare being so furiously fought in bitter strikes at such anti-union companies as Frank Lorenzo’s Eastern Airlines and at Pittston Coal.