Look for the Union Label

There was an ad where they would sing a song with this title. I only remember a parody version of it. The idea was to convey the notion that products made by unionized companies were better. That was a good message, and unions did their members a service by spreading it.

Union membership has been in decline for several decades, and I would argue that the decline in the middle class has coincided with it. There seems to be a lot of antipathy towards unions by average Americans at the same time that union members are average Americans. In the recent government bailout of GM and Chrysler, unions were forced to restucture contracts as a condition of receiving the funding. At the same time, Wall Street firms received 100 cents on the dollar on their derivative defaults, and not one executive was forced to reduce his contractually obligated bonus.

I'd lay odds that the Tea Party contingent would be angry about union members getting a 3% increase in their pensions if it cost CEO's 3% of their bonuses. Why are unions demonized so much? The very concept of a union is an American value. The workers getting together and telling the owner of a company that they demand rights is exactly what we did to King George III.

We have no problems when a CEO saves his company $11 million by cutting several thousand jobs and getting a bonus of $12 million. General Motors adds $4,000* to the cost of each car for the health insurance of the employees which makes it hard to compete with BMW because the government pays for their health insurance. We complain about the union rather than demanding our government level the playing field with Germany. Does this make any sense?

One of President Obama's campaign issues was the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), also known as card check. I'll address why it hasn't passed in a later post, but one reason is the unpopularity of unions. As much as the right has demonized unions, union leadership must share in the liability.

I think many unions have forgotten their mission, or have misinterpreted it. Let me cite a few of examples of what I mean. The Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) fought for years to prevent drug testing for steroids in baseball. The United Federation of Teachers (UFT) makes it nearly impossible to fire teachers. Actors Equity Association (AEA) has prevented thousands of members from working.

The MLBPA protected the members who were cheating (using steroids) at the expense of the members who were not. If the New York City school system were able to rid itself of incompetent and sometimes criminal teachers in a timely manner, there would be more money to pay the good teachers. There are a lot more non-union acting jobs out there than union, yet AEA spends more resources policing members who work at non-union jobs than they do on policies that would encourage the non-union theaters to hire their members.

Union membership should convey a level of professionalism. Unions should defend that idea. Rather than universally protecting members, they should be protecting the notion of professionalism that membership carries. This way, they can say the reason you want to hire union members is that you get better results. These days, the union seems more interested in collecting the dues and having the numbers of membership.

You serve memberships interests better by rooting out the bad apples, than by defending them.