Laboring Through Some Thoughts Today

First of all, Happy Labor Day, everyone! At a time when laborers are under what may be as great of an attack as they have faced in decades, now more than ever is the time to celebrate laborers. Unfortunately, unlike the ways that the U.S. media and institutions fall all over themselves to celebrate the military on Memorial Day (and somewhat misguidedly on Independence Day), to celebrate reasons to give thanks on Thanksgiving (despite the insensitivities of doing so), and to declare the United States a land of great equality on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (despite the civil rights inequities that persist in this country), there seems to be an embarrassingly inadequate amount of celebration of laborers by U.S. media and institutions today. Indeed, with thanks to Korryn Mozisek for bringing this to my attention, some have even called out Major League Baseball for such a lack of engagement with Labor Day.

Meanwhile, on a related note, if you've read this blog in the past, you may have seen where I have taken issue before with things suggested by BG News faculty columnist Phil Schurrer. While I haven't written about them here, it is worth noting that I have had many more disagreements with things that Phil has said in his columns in the time since I wrote that letter to the editor (and also that Phil and I had an amicable lunch shortly after that letter to the editor).

I do, though, want to start this blog post by agreeing with something that Phil said in his column that appeared in the BG News one week ago. After spending the column largely extolling the virtues of "right to work" situations in which union membership is not required, he argues that mandated union membership and/or mandated payment of union dues limits the choices of workers. His argument thus suggests that "right to work" allows workers more choice in this regard.

I agree. Mandated union membership and/or mandated payment of union dues do place some limitations on choices, and if one has the right to choose to work amid a strike or other collective bargaining action, then, yes, one has more choices. However, Phil's broader arguments about this going against the supposed "right to choose" rhetoric of liberals and progressives is an unfair application of a principle of purity to a situation that is a compromise to begin with.

Namely, unions themselves are a compromise position with our system of free market capitalism. Indeed, though Phil associates unions with liberals and progressives, and that is the dominant association in U.S. culture, in some ways unions are actually a rather conservative approach to management-labor conflict. Unions ultimately help keep the system of capitalism in place, but they attempt to provide labor with a greater voice in determining their working conditions within that system. As they help keep the system in place, they are, then, by definition at least somewhat conservative--i.e., they help to conserve the system as it is already established, which is at least one reasonable way of defining "conservatism." They are one choice among many for addressing management-labor conflict and representing workers voices. Other choices could include such things as reconstituting the structures of organizations to ensure more involvement of workers in decision making, significantly more fully developed government involvement in the processes of management and labor in an attempt to ensure that workers' needs are being met, redefinition of the very terms "management" and "labor" that affect the structures of work life and decision making, and a whole host of other possibilities that would be more radical and less conservative than the establishment of collective bargaining organizations.

As such, as I have suggested, unions are thus a compromise position rather than a more ideologically pure position that would call for significantly more radical social, economic, and/or political change. Like all compromises, they involve give and take from the parties involved. As compromises, they by definition compromise the purity or principles, with the hope that the tradeoff is worth the compromise. So, then, yes, unions do limit certain kinds of choices, but they do so with the hope that the other benefits (which would, by the way, include access to many other kinds of choices by virtue of the opportunities gained through collective bargaining) outweigh this particular loss of choice.

Meanwhile, Phil is awfully selective in how he applies his critique here. If he wants to critique this compromise that unions make and suggest that the "right to work" should not be compromised by unions, then I'm certainly willing to listen. But shouldn't we then also be applying this to the opposite side of the labor-management distinction? More specifically, shouldn't we also then be demanding a "right to work" of employers (and particularly of corporations)? If unions must offer individuals the "right to work," then I would think it's only fair that employers offer that as well. In this scenario, employers who wish to lay off workers must offer employees the right to work instead of just laying them off. Additionally, employers must show just cause in terminating employment of individuals because, unless those individuals have done things egregious enough to warrant termination (like violating others' "right to work," for example), they have a "right a work." If we want to add that to the conversation, then perhaps we have a lot of potential for a productive conversation.

Of course, doing so would harvest the potential for a much more radical alteration of the very structure of management and labor in the United States. It would also contain much more potential to upset the balance (or, more appropriately, imbalance) of power that employers--especially corporations--maintain. Yet, wouldn't that seem to be exactly the kind of upset that we need?