the following is my response to a debate generated by the UFW scandal as reported in the los angeles time. i thought i might as well post it on my own blog.
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I find it problematic to say that, generally, unions, despite initial gains, do not improve the overall labor standards of workers. There is an entire body of literature within labor history that would refute that point.
I would not say that unions are inherently good and necessary. Rather, I think it important to look at different historical moments to examine and understand how unions have been useful and when they have failed. I think that history reveals various cycles of effectiveness, depending on variables such as the economy, the political environment, etc.
With regard to the UFW, it seems counterintuitive to read that Cesar Chavez, a Mexican American hero, would take an anti-immigration stance. In terms of labor organizing, however, it makes perfect sense. Farm worker unions needed leverage against a powerful agricultural industry. In the late 1930s, for example, farm worker unions were gaining strength and momentum to lobby for greater farm worker rights (higher wages, better working conditions, etc). Union efforts were undermined by the bracero program, which was introduced as an answer to the labor shortage caused by WWII in the 1940s. All of a sudden, farmers had a legal and ready supply of farm labor willing to work for less than what native-born workers were demanding. Farm workers lost their leverage; they were no longer scant in number, but could easily be replaced if they did not work for the low wages being offered them.
(I could go on about the bracero program and how many farmers did not live up to their end of the bargain in providing adequate wages, clean and affordable housing, etc, but that's another post...)
Under Cesar Chavez's leadership, it was in the UFW's best interest to have a stable work force, who knew the history of the farm labor struggle, and believed that they had the right to demand more humane working conditions. They had to be wiling to assert their rights as U.S. workers even though conditions in U.S. fields were superior to the conditions they faced in Mexico. Much of this is still the case with regard to farm labor organizing.
You cite a conservative economist who asserts that in order to improve worker productivity, they must learn English and develop particular (professional?) skills. That makes perfect sense. We have to keep in mind, though, that many farm workers are performing physically taxing labor just trying to make ends meet. Many are hesitant to go to job trainings because of their immigrant status. Many don't have transportation (as evidenced by the yearly reports of farm worker deaths as they pack themselves into the back of someone's truck on their way to work).
For many farm workers, belonging to a union is their way of standing up for themselves, and, hopefully, of bettering their work conditions.
All of this said, I do think it's a shame when unions are revealed to be corrupt.
If this post has made me sound like an unabashed union supporter, allow me to clarify that I am not. I simply object to rampant generalizations that posit unions as inherently bad and business as inherently good. It's important to recognize the various shades of grey between these two extreme categorizations. I also believe that it important to be critical of BOTH sides when necessary and to recognize that they each have moments of corruption and integrity
6 comments:
agree with everything you say so I don't really have anything to add, but just wanted to say I was impressed. I'm sure HP will be around soon to bore you with a thousand unrelated quotes, but you're obviously the one with the knowledge of the history and what the movement achieved. It's a shame that unions today don't do the same good.
It's frustrating because there is still much work to be done in the fields. I have first hand experience. I worked for several years during the summers alongside my parents. Yo miraba como toda la gente andaba en chinga. It's a shame. That's what upsets me the most. It's good to see though that this issue is being discussed in the open...in a way it's going to keep unions accountable. To think that I applied to be a UFW organizer only to never get a call back.
I love what you had to say!!
jennifer,
First of all, I just want to say thank you for your fair and well thought out response. I appreciate the opportunity to dialogue with you on this important matter and although we may disagree strongly, I respect your position and your passion. I am only disagreeing with your views and not your ultimate objective, of which I assume we both share.
Reading your response I am starting to get the impression that we are speaking past each other. You seem to keep focusing on the union members and the great things unions have done for them. However, my focus is not with the union members (nor necessarily with businesses), my focus is primarily the non-union members, the group of people that are harmed by unions. In other words, I am willing to grant that unions have helped - I would even say sometimes too much - their members in various ways, but they do so at the expense of non-union members. In addition, since non-union members tend to be much poorer than union members, unions have in effect robbed from the poor to give to the already less poor, so on net total unions are bad.
For example, let's say that there are two groups of people, group A and group B, both willing and able to do the same task. They are equally educated, equally qualified, and equally able to do a certain task but group A is poorer than group B. Now let's assume that I have devised an economic system whereby I take some of the wages that group A makes and I give those wages to group B. Now, if you came along and argued that group B is better off, I would have to agree. But group B's gain was at the expense of group A, and that is how unions function (where are the egalitarians when you need them?).
You admitted as much when you defended Cesar Chavez's (and the UFW) cruel and inhumane treatment of 'illegal immigrants'. You recognized that the unions could not get what they wanted, they could not get the benefits they so needed, without hurting a much poorer sector of society: Mexican immigrants who have already risked life and limp and left family behind to work in those fields. This gain for one sector of the economy at the expense of a much poorer sector is not unique to that specific situation; it is inherent in how unions operate.
Milton Friedman, the most recognized and respected economist of the twentieth century explained it this way:
“If unions raise wage rates in a particular occupation or industry, they necessarily make the amount of employment available in that occupation or industry less than it otherwise would be — just as any higher price cuts down the amount purchased. The effect is an increased number of persons seeking other jobs, which forces down wages in other occupations. Since unions have generally been strongest among groups that would have been high-paid anyway, their effect has been to make high-paid workers higher paid at the expense of lower-paid workers. Unions have therefore not only harmed the public at large and workers as a whole by distorting the use of labor; they have also made the incomes of the working class more unequal by reducing the opportunities available to the most disadvantaged workers”. — Milton Friedman in “Capitalism And Freedom“
So how exactly do unions do this?
The first and probably most problematic is what unions do to the labor supply.
What does everybody do when something gets more expensive? Simple, they buy less of it. And that basic principle is no different with regards to labor, and industries. So by unions making labor more expensive, by artificially jacking up the price of labor either by asking for higher market wages or costly tenure or inefficient labor planning or unneeded benefits etc they push companies to hire less people. This has a direct impact on non-union workers since a significant factor that keeps wages high is competition. But when you reduce the amount of available jobs in an industry, it reduces the competitive edge for non-union workers, and the non-union employee now has less bargaining power to ask for higher wages, hence his wages are artificially pressed down by union wages.
Than there is the long term labor problem. Unions, by artificially raising wages, push companies to find other alternative machine made methods to do the same thing. In the supermarket industry, for example, you have companies heavily investing in automatic checkouts trying as hard as they can to eliminate cashiers. Something, that many people say, is within 5 years of completion. This again reduces the demand for labor and has a direct impact on the poor non-union member’s competitive edge to bargain for higher wages.
Than you also have the issue of free trade. When you are competing globally, every artificial increase in wages has a direct impact on how competitive you are globally. So the higher unions raise the cost of labor, the more incentives they create for companies to go elsewhere.
In addition to all of this, they also cause significant problems to the company. Take the auto industry, the grocery store industry, and more recently the airline industry. These are the private sector areas that are most heavily influenced by unions, and it is no coincidence that it is these industries that have the most problems, many of them being close to bankruptcy or have already went bankrupt (just look at what unions have done to the once really hot auto industry in Detroit). In addition, unions reduce the ability of companies to respond quickly to market pressures, forcing many to go bankrupt and you are than left with a situation where you are worse off than before (I haven't even started to count the higher prices on goods that unions cause; this again, directly harms those with the least amount of money, the poor non-union workers).
Since one of the primary methods to raise wages is competition, all of these reductions in the demand for labor directly harm the non-union workers, especially the really poor ones since they already have a limited amount of bargaining power to begin with.
With all of that said, I do want to close on a positive note. If unions really did care for all members of society, including the much poorer non-union members, there are much more effective means of accomplishing their task than how they currently operate. For example, as the economists I quoted before mentioned, why don't unions work to increase their member's productivity? Increasing productivity is a great way to increase the wages of employees without harming the competitive edge of non-union workers. Union leaders, instead of spending the fees and donations they get from their members to live a more extravagant lifestyle, they could use that money to pay for classes that teach English. Or pay for transportation if union members needed it, or pay for basic schooling, or advanced schooling, or even fight to make pensions and health insurance transportable from company to company so a worker wouldn’t be trapped by benefits in a job or industry he didn’t like. They could pay for the necessary schooling for farm workers to find better jobs in other less work intensive industries. Or work to find methods to increase on the job productivity...etc
By fighting to increase productivity instead of reducing competition they accomplish two things: they increase the wages of their union members, and in addition to that, they leave unharmed the non-union members.
HP -
i appreciate your willingness to so fully engage in the union/UFW debate.
i still absolutely object to your sweeping generalizations about unions and the economy without taking into consideration the economy/politics of different time periods and differing geographical locations.
while it is tempting for me to go point by point and discuss why i disagree with you, i'm just going to leave it here.
LOL. I know that HP is just rocking back and forth in his chair, waiting for you to say something specific. He'll probably write back again anyway. Notice how he wrote all that out in microsoft word and copied and pasted it on here. Poor guy. He even broke it down to "group A" and "group B." You gotta love him.
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