Monday, September 02, 2013

The Libertarian and the Union Organizer Can Be Friends (Maybe)


Today is labor day. Throughout most of the developed world, organized labor is celebrated on May 1st,  May Day. But when the federal holiday was first created in 1894, President Grover Cleveland was concerned about annual union celebration so near the anniversary of the Haymarket bombing (as well as by the Communist associations of International Workers Day). And so, the first Monday in September.

These days, of course, Labor Day is less a chance to reflect on the labor movement than it is a commemoration of the end of summer, a chance to barbecue and (weather permitting) make one last trek out to the beach. This is perhaps not so surprising when one considers the current state of American labor unions. It is no surprise that the U.S. labor movement has not been thriving in recent decades. In fact, union membership has been declining as a percentage of the American workforce for more than half a century.


Similar declines have been seen throughout most of the developed world (although the decline has been steeper than average in the United States), and the causes of the decline are complicated. The situation is so bleak, that strong pro-labor voices like Richard Yeselson have proposed a strategy of Fortress Unionism, whereby labor gives up major attempts to organize new industries in favor of trying to hold on to what it still has.

I confess to being personally ambivalent about this trend. On the one hand, as a good right-winger I am skeptical of many of the claimed economic benefits of unions, and politically unions in the contemporary U.S. seem to mainly function as an impediment to needed reforms in education and other areas. On the other hand, as Catholic I am mindful of my Church's longstanding support for the right to organize.

My own thoughts on this subject are influenced by this paper by  Kevin Carson, which suggests that labor unions might be better off under a regime of pure laissez-faire than they are in the current system. Carson's main idea is that the formalized and routinized structure of modern labor law has tended over time to favor employers, while prohibiting many of the labor tactics that historically have proven most effective:
The AFL-CIO's Lane Kirkland, at one point, half-heartedly suggested that things would be easier if Congress repealed all labor laws, and let labor and management go at it "mano a mano."
It's time to take up Kirkland's half-hearted suggestion, not just as a throwaway line, but as a challenge to the bosses:
We'll gladly forgo federal certification of unions, and legal protections against punitive firing of union organizers, if you'll forgo the court injunctions and cooling-off periods and arbitration. We'll leave you free to fire organizers at will, to bring back the yellow dog contract, if you leave us free to engage in sympathy and boycott strikes all the way up and down the production chain, to boycott retailers, and to strike against the hauling of scab cargo, etc., effectively turning every strike into a general strike. We give up Wagner (such as it is), and you give up Taft-Hartley and the Railway Labor Relations Act.
As with a lot of libertarian ideas, this proposal probably doesn't have a prayer of actually being enacted. Nor is it clear that unions would in fact come out on top in a no holds barred fight. Instead of revivifying a moribund movement, it might simply hasten its death. But it's not as if unions have a lot of better options right now. And to the extent that such a move would pressure unions to reinvent themselves as a structure for increasing worker productivity and security, it is certainly a movement I could get behind. 

30 comments:

  1. Josiah mentions the Church's longstanding support for the right to organize. Here's more on that (quotes from a variety of Church documents regarding unions and the right to organize):

    http://www.usccb.org/upload/Primer-labor-Catholic-social-teaching.pdf

    For instance, in 1986 the US Catholic Bishops declared "No one may deny the right to organize without attacking human dignity itself. Therefore, we firmly oppose organized
    efforts, such as those regrettably now seen in this country, to break existing unions and prevent workers from organizing."

    In 2009, the Pope wrote, "Through the combination of social and economic change, trade union organizations experience greater
    difficulty in carrying out their task of representing the interests of workers, partly because Governments, for reasons of economic utility, often limit the freedom or the negotiating capacity of labour unions. The repeated calls issued within the Church's social doctrine, beginning with Rerum Novarum, for the promotion of workers' associations that can defend their rights must therefore be honoured today even more than in the past, as a prompt and far-sighted response to the urgent need for new forms of cooperation at the international level, as well as the local level."

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    1. Anonymous7:02 AM

      "No one may deny the right to organize without attacking human dignity itself"

      As such, our organization must oppose efforts to organize if the purpose of the aforementioned organization is the resistance to further organizing.

      For the love of irony, is this principled opposition or a Monty Python sketch?

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  2. I think you can argue that the decline of unions is really just the unionization movement adjusting to a major economic shift, before it finds its footing and builds up again. It took decades for unions to adjust to mass organization in an industrial setting, so is it really surprising that it's taking them a while to adjust to a new, heavily services-oriented economy? The unions in the services sectors themselves, such as the Service Employees International Union, are actually doing all right and quickly expanding - it's just the industrial and public sector unions that are getting hammered. Since the latter still represent the bulk of unionized employees, the overall union numbers have been going down for now.

    A "no holds barred" thing would be interesting. I think it would tend to push unions towards consolidation and political lobbying at a national level, to the point where they'd almost become a political party-within-a-party, lobbying for general pro-worker policies.

    The only downside is that in the beginning, things would be pretty ruthless and brutal as they try to consolidate and rebuild in an environment where employers could just fire employees outright for unionization, or even try to make employees sign contracts saying they won't join a union while working there (assuming such agreements held up in court - they might violate freedom of association).

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  3. I agree with Brett, mostly, on the possible consequences of a 'no-hold-barred'.

    Especially if the employers get over giddy and really go to town on employees.

    IMHO, the situation would even more closely resembled late 19th C and these were the times when Labour got nearly para-military in its organisation to resist the bosses/owners' attempt at near enslavement.

    A re-run would, if nothing else, makes for good TV.

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  4. This sounds like a good way to increase violence. (Remember the history.) But then I regard all anarchism as tending that way.

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  5. Anonymous5:55 AM

    in the world we live in today, if all such labor laws were indeed somehow removed from the books, then you would simply see the application of anti-terror laws to entirely new activities. the standard of living may improve, but the chance to democratize power has passed us by. we are all members of the Borg, but some of us -- the libertarians -- admire the rats that scurry around, seemingly without masters.

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    1. I'm not sure I follow; are the rats libertarians? I also don't read as much science fiction as the average libertarian, so what is is the Borg and what does it represent?

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  6. Anonymous7:57 AM

    Many so-called Education "Reforms" currently under way are shams. These reforms have almost nothing to do with improving education for students and everything to do with diverting some of the vast sums of money spent on education into the pockets of the Malefactors of Great Wealth.

    Read the emails by Tony Bennett and "education reform" in Indiana to see the greed in action. There is a concerted effort to "privatize" public education in America. It is all about corporate profit. Privatization as a way to cut costs has been a failure because it does not deliver the quality we need.

    We have "poor schools" because we concentrate poor students in those schools and underfund them. There is a long history of "separate and unequal" education in the US.
    Do your homework.

    Laissez-faire is an idéal, an extreme notion. It doesn't exist. All markets have rules. The rules are written by market participants. Wealthy special interests invest vast sums ensuring that the market rules benefit them. Laissez-faire is an argument they use to discourage the masses from engaging them at the bargaining table and brainwash young scholars in business programs. The economic rules are NOT laissez-faire. They are bargained. They must be fought. There is a bloody legacy of corporations fighting unions with dead on both sides, mine wars and confrontations. The rules have been stacked against unions. However, if inequality continues to increase, we will see the rise of unions. Fast Food Strikes anyone?

    -jonny bakho

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  7. My prior is that the decline of unions was largely attributable to globalization and other external pressures like increased competition. How exactly would deregulation make unions more effective in the face of pressures like those? Or is my prior a myth?

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    1. Anonymous10:06 AM

      Comparisons to other wealthy countries would be useful here. Certainly globalization weakened labor's hand, but from a more vulnerable position to begin with compared to unions in say Germany & France?

      Considering the experience of similarly situated countries helps tether these discussions to how things work in the real world, which is obviously not libertarianism's strong suit.

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    2. What Anonymous said. Sure, globalisation did not help but the dreaded 'cultural factors' (and legal ones!) matter.

      For example, iirc, France isn't more unionised than the US but non-union workers will (often) strike alongside unionised ones if a strike is being called/is seen as warranted.

      Personally, I think the exact shape of the outcome depends on an intangible: How fed up are the current workers with the present situation and to which degree they hold themselves responsible for their own misery.

      If people are largely convinced that whatever befalls them is their own fault for not studying enough, not working hard enough, not securing a pluck job and are overall apathetic and demoralised, then total deregulation will not change anything/makes it even easier for employers to abuse their dominance of the job market.

      If, on the other hand, people do view the problems as systematic and do understand that they are getting shafted through no faults of their own, then... There Will Be Blood...

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    3. Noah,

      I have the same prior about globalization and unions. One way to view this proposal is as a way of testing whether our prior is actually correct.

      I also think that freeing up labor law could encourage unions to focus more on doing things that will increase the productivity of members (e.g. job training), or providing other benefits, rather than trying to redivide the pie with management.

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    4. I think a better conservative approach Josiah would be to completely deregulate the labor industry as you say, let the Unions and businesses duke it out, then set a progressive national tax to guarentee a standard of living we as a society find acceptable, probably in the form of some guarenteed basic income.
      There could be a host ofbenefits to derive from a non distorted labor market, and the guarenteed income would compensate for any short term adjustments such a policy change would surely create.

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    5. Nate O.2:21 PM

      I think the major problem unions face in the US is society's conception of employment as being "at will." If, like in Germany, society considers employment to be a kind of property that can only be taken for just cause and only after due process, then unions make a lot more sense.

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  8. Anonymous10:30 AM

    The author of this blog post in naïve in the extreme. Repealing the labor laws would result in violence and death on a large scale. Perhaps this is what he is looking for. Recall the Haymarket Riots, the Colorado Labor War, Homestead Strike, the Battle of the Overpass, etc., etc., etc. No one is looking for a return to those days - except the Libertarians and those looking for a job as a Pinkerton...

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    1. Anonymous11:46 AM

      Your comment is a little incendiary, but it's basically correct. Labor laws didn't appear out of nowhere. They came in response to a militant labor movement and frequent, violent strikes. Libertarians usually think of these laws as some sort of graft, but don't know or care about labor history, and so they don't understand the conditions they were enacted under.

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    2. Anon 11:46: Hold on a second. "...militant labor movement and frequent, violent strikes"? I don't dispute that something like that is true, but labor laws were chiefly enacted to curb the excess of the owners. Strikes were only violent when the owners' thugs showed up. If we're counting bodies, the number done in by labor and their allies pales in comparison to those done in by the bosses.

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    3. Labor movements became militant as a response to violence enacted by management.

      You were just as likely to see a factory supervisor jumping and hospitalizing a worker attempting to organize as you were to see union reps jumping and hospitalizing workers that did not want to join the organization.

      Factory management was just as likely to hire mob enforcers to break a strike line violently, as unions were to hire mob enforcers to violently prevent scabs.

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  9. Anonymous11:59 AM

    "unions in the contemporary U.S. seem to mainly function as an impediment to needed reforms in education and other areas."

    Go back to your white board in economics 101 to use graphs to show how unions violate your economic theories while the financiers destroy this country in their endless pursuit of more wealth and power.

    -Ken

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  10. Not all nations have experienced the trend to such low labor union mmembership as we see in the US. Thus in pretty well-functioning Sweden, 92% of the labor force is unionized. Ironically, the major high income nation with as low a level of union membership as the US is France, where the unions that are there are highly politicized and radical and prone to going on strike, much more so than those in the US, which were politically defanged long ago.

    Afte all, only the US and Canada celebrate Labor Day today, whereas in over 80 nations it is May Day that is the national holiday, the day declared in 1889 at the first meeting of the Second Sociaist International in Paris to be the Day of International Worker Solidarity.

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    1. Nate O.2:24 PM

      Sweden is a Ghent system country, so their high unionization rate isn't comparable to US unionization rates. Unions there have fundamentally different functions.

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  11. The author doesn't call for repealing laws that make homicide and riot illegal, he just calls for strictly labor laws to be repealed.

    This would allow employers to break unions (peacefully) by firing their members, and it would allow unions to shut down employers (peacefully) by parallizing their business with work stoppages. It would not, however, allow violence, and one has to assume that the government would continue to enforce laws against violence against anyone who broke them (employer or union.)

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    1. 'coz that worked so well before...

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    2. It's not as if the Fair Labor Standards Act suddenly criminalized murder generally, or the murder of organizers specifically.

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    3. Pretty silly comment. Seems a bit like the general (G)libertarian idea that the poor should starve quietly. Hint, they won't - threats to people's livelihood (people are animals too) will generally lead to a violent response.

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    4. To put it more clearly, this is like saying "OK, it's total war, go for it. But PLEASE, keep it peaceful."

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  12. "unions in the contemporary U.S. seem to mainly function as an impediment to needed reforms in education and other areas."

    Funny how no one opposes unions on the grounds that without them teachers could be paid less. That's not at all a part of the motivation for union busting anywhere, is it?

    I used to self-identify with the education reform movement; I'm a sucker for any sort of reform. But the movement seems to have some rather large blind spots. One is the hostility to the idea we might get what we pay for. The fact is that teachers are paid much less than other professions that require four year degrees, and likewise their pay has grown more slowly over time. A reasonable person might assume we can't expect teacher quality to remain constant over time under those conditions, whereas reformers only see an inability to fire poorly performing teachers from their overcrowded classrooms.

    The other thing is that school reformers too often speak as though the private school system doesn't exist; that if they know exactly what schools need to do the public school system is the only place their ideas could be tested. But there are good reasons for a public service to be more conservative than a private one. Why not try to build model private schools, and push your ideas on public schools once you've shown they work? Maybe if you have a great idea but can't point to a private school demonstrating that it is a good idea, that's because it isn't. A case in point is standardized testing. I didn't realize until my kid reached kindergarten just how much time kids spend on those tests now. We looked into several private schools in the area and they brag about all the testing they don't do, but you can't pay money to put your kid in a school where they lose several days every single year to this imposed overhead; you can only get that for free. Thanks reformers!

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    1. They do "build model private schools" already. It's just that they call them 'charter schools' and they steal public funds to finance it.

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    2. But what exactly have they modeled? My point is, if you have some reform you think public schools should be required to adopt, show me it has worked in private or charter schools.

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  13. I think this idea is as "clever" as abolishing corporate law. Remove incorporation, so that companies now need to be partnerships and other structures, where liability is shared by all instead of concealed by a corporate shell. That, too, is a libertarian notion which you seldom hear about, because in the modern world libertarianism consists mostly of propaganda which favors the rich.

    Both ideas are for the sudden destruction of major institutions. That's a sure path to turmoil.

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