Next Generation Unions 7 and Professional Associations

"Next Generation Unions"^[7] and Professional Associations

Before discussing the role of unions in this new institutional framework, let's deal with some basic issues. Unions are just as necessary and valuable today and in the future as they have been in the past. This is a deep value shared not only by members of this association but by the majority of the American public and by many leaders in the business community as well.^[8] Unions provide a critical service to a democratic society as well as to their individual members. America is now paying the price for allowing union representation to fall to such low levels. No task is more important to our profession, and indeed to American society, than building the next generation of labor organizations. The good news is that there is an enormous amount of innovation and internal debate taking place within the labor movement today over how to achieve this objective. This bodes well, not just for the future of the labor movement, but for American society as a whole.

Unfortunately, unions have an image problem and a strategic challenge. Workers, employers, and the public in general, and indeed, many union leaders, see unions as primarily defensive organizations to be called on for help only when a majority of workers in a specific bargaining unit distrust the employer sufficiently to engage in the high-risk, high-conflict battle needed to achieve union recognition and a collective bargaining contract. To be sure, unions need to continue to provide protection against arbitrary treatment at work. But the next generation unions must address the full range of dimensions included in figure 16.1. They must focus on enhancing dignity, voice, social interaction, economic security, productivity, and family and community responsibilities. Serving this broader set of objectives requires that unions have a positive vision of their roles. This positive vision must become the central reason why employees join, participate in, and retain their membership in the next generation unions, not whether or not they distrust their present employer.

Figure 16.2 illustrates the multiple purposes that I believe the next generation unions need to carry out for American workers and society. Space and time allow only a brief listing here:

Figure 16.2: Multiple Purposes of the Next Generation Unions

1. Collective bargaining will remain a bedrock role for unions. But it may be only one of an increasing array of services provided, and it may be that not all union members will want, need, or have access to collective bargaining as we know it today. To remain focused on defining unionism synonymous with gaining collective bargaining status, as it is structured today, is neither consistent with the historical traditions of American unions^[9] nor responsive to the stated preferences of a majority of the unorganized workforce.^[10] To do so will only lead to further union decline.

2. Given that over 70 percent of American workers want a direct voice at work,^[11] the next-generation unions need to champion and support direct employee involvement and participation on the job to enhance worker learning; contribute to improved productivity, quality, and customer satisfaction; and to build a workplace culture that satisfies employees' expectations for voice, respect, and social interaction at work.

3. Unions need to engage corporate decision makers at the strategic level, where the real power resides and the critical choices are made that shape employment outcomes and long-term prospects. In some cases, this means forming partnerships with individual employers as previously discussed, such as Xerox, Levi Strauss, AT&T and its numerous offspring, Corning, Saturn, Kaiser Permanente, and others. But note, as this list suggests, these do not always last forever. In cases where the boundaries of the firm are uncertain (e.g., Levi's, AT&T's and its offspring's), unions need to rely on other devices, such as sharing information on working conditions in the full supply chain or building networks that cut across firm boundaries to coordinate efforts at a community or industry level. In still other cases, this requires amassing the knowledge and resources needed to engage the investor community or international financial agencies with capital investment and development strategies that work for the workforce as well as the investors. Given that the level at which capital allocations and other strategic choices are made is where the power lies, we cannot expect unions to do well in representing workers unless they too are active at this level. To do so requires new skills and knowledge as well as new strategies.

4. If the firm is declining in centrality, the local community and political affairs will grow in importance. The Webbs were right.^[12] As they predicted more than one hundred years ago, government enactment and community participation are growing in importance for unions. If macroeconomic policies and, increasingly, international macrofinancial and trade policies are growing in importance, then unions need to strengthen their abilities to influence decisions and events at these levels. But equally important, if local community and labor market mobility are important, unions need to become more important actors at this level as well. This is what the living wage campaigns are all about. Unions need to continue working in coalition with community groups to make this role successful.

5. If job security is more uncertain, workers' abilities to move at low cost across employers become a more critical source of bargaining power and career security. For some workers, exit will be as important a source of bargaining power as voice inside the firm is for others. Unions of the future need to provide the full array of labor market mobility services—networks of contacts and job opportunities; portable pensions and benefits; education and skill accumulation and lifelong learning; and perhaps other personal legal and financial assistance as well. If the locus of social interaction and identity from work is shifting from the workplace to the occupation, unions need to once again become occupational community-building entities, much like the garment unions did in helping immigrants assimilate and make their way in a foreign environment during the early years of the twentieth century.

   These different functions may not necessarily be performed by the same organizations. There might be specialization, core competencies, if you will. Some unions may choose to organize in traditional ways, relying on traditional employee motivations, while new organizations, professional associations, networks, etc., grow up that recruit, represent, and service members in new ways. I believe this would be a second-best solution. But if this is the case, then there must be active strategies for linking and cooperating across these different boundaries and mutual respect and support among the different organizations in the network—unions, professional organizations, others yet to be named or invented. Or we might see the labor movement as the hub of a wheel that coordinates the work of different groups.

   For this vision of the next generation unions to become a reality, at least three things need to change. First, unions need to expand the ways they recruit and retain members. They need to recruit individuals and stay with them over the course of their careers rather than limit their organizing to the high-stakes, all-or-nothing, 50-percent majority it now takes to get one new member. The union-member relationship should be like that of a university student-alumni relationship—once a member, always a member. The fact is that there are nearly twice as many former union members in the labor force as there are current members.^[13] Second, substantial change in labor law is needed to make it possible for unions to play these different roles effectively, a point to which I will return later. Third, American management culture needs to change significantly to accept the simple idea that workers should have the same freedom of association at work as they have in civil society.

   If unions adopt this more positive vision and these varied approaches and are accepted as legitimate participants in labor market, workplace, and community affairs, America would be well on its way to ensuring that the next generation unions find their rightful place in the economy and society of the future.

^[7]Credit is due to Amy Dean for first coining this term.

^[8]Gallup poll surveys and many other surveys continue to report that a majority of Americans continues to agree that unions are valuable institutions in society. For a statement on the importance of unions to a democratic society, jointly written by a group of leading business and labor leaders, see Collective Bargaining Forum (1999).

^[9]Cobble 2000.

^[10]Worker surveys and opinion polls have been consistent on this point for many years. For the most complete recent documentation and analysis of worker preferences for participation and representation on the job, see Freeman and Rogers (1999). See also the various polls conducted for the AFL-CIO by Peter Hart Associates.

^[11]See the data reported in Freeman and Rogers and the Peter Hart polls.

^[12]Webb and Webb 1897.

^[13]Peter Hart and Associates 1998 poll reports 28 percent of the nonunion workforce were union members at some prior point in their careers.