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ValueOfUnions 4 - 12 Mar 2009 - Main.AndrewCase
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| | Professor Moglen's comments about unions the other day got me thinking that I have a natural aversion to praise for unions. In particular I have a deep-seated aversion to the notion of seniority for seniority's sake rather than performance-based pay. There are numerous benefits to unions, perhaps most importantly a stronger negotiating position when discussing pay and benefits for employees. But on the flip side, it also seems to create hierarchies based on seniority that prevent younger/newer members from rising through the ranks based on "merit". I can understand and sympathize with the job security concerns that were the basis of Moglen's comments, but am I missing some other valuable benefits to the seniority system? In high school I spent 3 years working at a supermarket where the members were unionized. I liked the marginally better pay than the minimum wage that other stores paid, but I also remember a lot of jaded, unproductive older employees. Unions are human organizations too and are just as vulnerable to the selfish manipulation of those at the top as other organizations are.
This is not to say that I am opposed to unions, I just found it odd that even though I have shifted far far left of my originally super conservative upbringing I was still caught off guard by the rhapsody for unions. Are there any built-in corrections for older members who take advantage of their seniority? Don't most of the complaints about teachers' unions revolve around this issue? | | | This post is getting pretty long winded, but I studied Industrial and Labor Relations in undergrad and I find these topics are really interesting.
-- JamilaMcCoy - 11 Mar 2009 | |
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> | When I worked for the City of New York, the title under which I work was unionized by a petition by DC-37 to the Public Employee Relations Board. As a result of unionization, we lost a week of vacation time, we were put into an inferior eye-and-dental plan, and we had a more limited health plan. We did have access to extremely vigorous legal advocacy if we were terminated, but most of the people in the line were not intending to work there long term anyways – thirteen years later, only one of the people who started with me is still on the job, and none of the people who started with me left involuntarily. I have a fairly low opinion of DC-37 in general, mainly because of subsequent actions by the head of the union, and by the current practice among many municipal unions of "killing the unborn" (trading pay raises for current members for lower starting salaries for new hires, who after all are not yet in the union and therefore don't vote on the leadership).
Later, in graduate school, I went on strike, refusing to grade student papers or hold TA sessions, when the state university where I worked denied us the right to unionize. Through the strike, we won the right to vote for a union, and we voted to join the UAW (which had sponsored the action); the UAW promptly settled all the issues we had with the university system, obtaining none of the concessions that the TAs had been asking for (and relieving themselves of paying promised strike pay, while collecting union dues on a future-going basis).
This being said, both my sister (a NY City public high school teacher) and my wife (a professor at CUNY) are in unions, and both speak very highly of their experience.
My thoughts, limited by my limited experience, would be that unions can benefit their members when their members share common needs, particularly when the members have specialized skills that are hard to replace (it is axiomatic that the most successful unions in the US represent professional athletes and film actors). But when unions themselves become large diversified organizations, representing many types of workers who all do different things, they can behave like other large impersonal entities, and fail to serve their members.
This may be a good topic for merging and refactoring -- I have spoken to some students who say we are using the Wiki like a messageboard rather than a wiki, and I agree we should feel less ownership over our posts and encourage work on them by our peers. |
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