October 27, 2009 05:58 AM UTC

Wither Unions?

•  
• by: DavidThi808

With the upcoming grocery strike, we’ve had an interesting discussion about unions here. I figure, let’s break it out in to its own diary.

What is the future of unions?

The number one problem unions face is that their leadership by and large is living in the past. They are applying the solutions of the past to an economy that has radically changed.

Add to that the response to the observation that their marketing is not working is – well it should. Should is irrelevant – if it sucks then you need to change your approach. And the present union marketing sucks. Or to be more accurate, is invisible.

Next problem is that the nature of work has changed. 50 years ago on an assembly line workers were essentially fungible. And the difference in performance between the best and worst was under a factor of 2. So many workers were comfortable with the trade-off of equal pay for better job protections.

But now for many jobs that difference is a factor of 10 or 100. The difference between Steven Spielberg and a recent film graduate is gigantic. But it holds for many jobs from programmer to marketing to sales to designer. And people that are 10 or 100 times better will not accept the same trade-off.

Part of it is money, but an even larger part is working with people as good as you to design cool things. People designing products like the iPhone can only make things that cool if the whole team is superb. Being able to work in that group is a gigantic reward in itself.

This means the whole idea of job protection is a negative to people in this category. Because job protection is viewed as forcing you to keep those who aren’t as good on your team.

You also have the clear fact that unions are not an unalloyed good. Every parent who has children in public school knows that the teachers union keeps in sub-standard teachers. Every parent knows that children, especially poor children, suffer from this. Unions are viewed as a negative for our children’s future – hard to find something that goes more to the emotional core for people.

Next you have the union approach of workers vs the company. Yes there are a lot of companies where management also takes that tack and a union is of interest there. But you have many others where management and the employees work together to make the company successful. The whole idea of a union is anathema in that situation because of it’s combative approach.

Finally you have change in educational level required for jobs. It used to be that the vast majority of jobs (ie the workers) required a high school degree at most. Now a gigantic chunk of jobs require a college degree. That is a different viewpoint and approach to life and work. The unions are using what appealed to a high school graduate in 1950 on college graduates today – and are surprised it doesn’t work.

Go talk to people who work at CostCo or Apple or Microsoft and ask them what they would want from an employee advocate. I think in many cases they would have trouble coming up with something. The biggest complaint at Microsoft for a couple of months was that they cancelled the company Christmas party (too many employees – there was no place large enough).

I don’t think people will join a union to get a Christmas party.