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short_answer_2_instr.docx
nafta_and_labor_in_north_america_ch_5_week5.pdf
nafta_and_labor_in_north_america_ch6_week5.pdf
labor_managment_relations_week5.pdf
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1. WHAT DO YOU SEE AS THE RELEVANCE OF LABOR UNIONS IN 21ST CENTURY usa?
2. Do you feel that Labor and Management are in a win-win or win-lose relationship in 2014?
Can strategies such as “Principled negotiations” or uries book getting to yes, provide a more
positive work environment in the future? how so? If it won’t work tell me why too.
3. FROM THE INFORMATION IN THE READINGS AND AN ADDITIONAL SOURCE;
HOW DOES GLOBALIZATION IMPACT YOUR ORGANIZATION, BOTH IN A POSITIVE AND
NEGATIVE NATURE?
IF GLOBALIZATION CONTINUES TO OCCURE AS IT CURRENTLY IS, WHAT WILL YOUR
WORK FUTURE LOOK LIKE?
WHAT ROLE, IF ANY, SHOULD ORGANIZED LABOR PLAY IN THIS GLOBALIZATION?
GENERAL NOTES
Support your answer with information from class READINGS and outside sources. Be sure to give
credit throughout your answers as to where you attained this information. CHECK OUT THE
INTERNET TO SEE WHAT YOU FIND ABOUT PRINCIPLED NEGOTIATIONS AND
SOME Major ideas and issues which Could be considered for these questions includes; IMPACT on
motivation, legal and political influences and agendas, employee turnover, public opinion, working
conditions, security of the employer, SECURITY OF THE UNION, communication, and leadership.
Answer these questions individually. identify which question you are answering. Do not try to make
one essay out of all the questions.
5
The Crisis of Union-Management Relations
in the United States and Canada
If workingmen and capitalists are equal co-partners,
composing one vast firm by which the industry of the world
is carried on and controlled, why do they not share equally
in the profits? Why does capital take to itself the whole
loaf, while labor is left to gather up the crumbs? Why does
capital roll in luxury and wealth, while labor is left to eke
out a miserable existence in poverty and want? Are these
the evidences of an identity of interests, of mutual
relations, of equal partnership? No sir. On the contrary
they are evidences of an antagonism.1
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.
—Karl Marx
A little more than a quarter century ago, experts, commentators,
and scholars began writing about the changing environment in the world of
union-management relations. Typical of this commentary was a 1981 Business Week article that noted: “Quietly, almost without notice, a new industrial
relations system with a fundamentally different way of managing people is
taking shape in the U.S.”2 The new system, the article pointed out, was seeking “to end the adversarial relationship that has grown between management
and labor and that now threatens the competitiveness of many industries.”3
In 1986, a group of employment relations scholars wrote in their now
classic book The Transformation of American Industrial Relations: “We see
the current moment as one of those historic periods of transformation in
which existing institutional structures have been challenged and opened up
to experimentation.”4 Observations that a new era of union-management
relations was emerging reflected deep changes taking place in the structure
of global capitalism, and they affected unions, collective bargaining, and
workers’ rights not just in North America but around the world in both developed and developing nations.5
Caulfield, Norman. NAFTA and Labor in North America, edited by Norman Caulfield, University of Illinois Press, 2010.
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union-management rel ations
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113
Today, even more so than in 1981, the building up of competitive pressures
in the global economy is a constant challenge to maintaining the profitability of many industries, and they have placed great stress upon nationally anchored union-management relations systems. This process is linked
directly to a fundamental contradiction inherent in the capitalist system.
More specifically, the nation-state system, in which the rules of commerce
and ownership are written, designed, and regulated, increasingly comes into
conflict with a capital accumulation process that stretches across national
borders in search of markets, cheaper labor, lower costs, more efficiency,
and higher profits. The result is a closer integration of the global economy
characterized by social productive processes that are more international in
scope and yet in most ways still subject to national laws. Many contemporary academics and analysts increasingly connect the changes taking place
in union-management relations with these larger developments.6
In today’s global economy, trade and finance liberalization, new technologies and production methods, and an expanded labor market have strengthened the bargaining leverage of employers and weakened unions. Declines in
union membership and fewer workers covered by collective agreements are
marginalizing the influence of the postwar, union-centered industrial relations model in the world of work. In this new environment, low-wage, human
resource management, Japanese-oriented, and joint team-based employment
relations strategies are challenging the viability of the older industrial relations model.7 Moreover, the waning relevance of that older model is reducing the capacity of unions to organize workers and influence government
policy.
As early as 1976, John T. Dunlop, former U.S. secretary of labor and Harvard professor, identified the beginnings of this historical development and
its implications for the future of labor relations in the United States. He
wrote that greater interdependence between America and its trading partners
would bring pressures on the employment relations and collective bargaining systems in the United States as a result of the effect of foreign wage rates
and labor market policies. Dunlop predicted that these developments would
destroy many American jobs, and he described the challenges produced by
these developments as “transitional pressures,” insisting that they were inevitable and would require adaptation by both unions and management.8
The “transitional pressures” on union-management relations that Dunlop
describes beginning in the 1970s are now well-established trends. Prior to
the 1970s, the outcomes of union-management relations in the context of
bargaining were characterized by workers obtaining lifelong job security,
Caulfield, Norman. NAFTA and Labor in North America, edited by Norman Caulfield, University of Illinois Press, 2010.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/stmartinsu/detail.action?docID=3414124.
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Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.
114 . naf ta and l abor in north americ a
payment of wages that reflected the general cost of living, and generous
employer-provided health and retirement benefits. Union and nonunion
workers alike enjoyed rising living standards, giving them entrance into what
became known as America’s “middle-class.”
This stable union-management relations environment depended greatly
on American dominance of the world’s industrial economy. In the 1970s, that
dominance began to crack under the weight of global competitive pressures.
Although most of these pressures resulted from Japanese- and Europeanbased corporations capturing greater market share around the globe, other
factors, such as the 1973 oil embargo and disruptions to the oil supply in 1979,
also contributed to the decline of American economic dominance, especially
in manufacturing. Also characterizing the 1970s were long periods of inflation, recession, and high unemployment. From 1970 to 1974, the average annual unemployment rate was 5.4 percent, while the average annual change
in the consumer price index (CPI) was 6.6 percent. In the years between
1974 and 1979, unemployment rose to 7.9 percent and the CPI shot up to 8.1
percent.9
This economic malaise combined with increasing competitiveness triggered a crisis for American manufacturing, reflected by an accelerated fall
in the rate of profit, a trend that began developing in the 1960s. In the 1970s,
industrialists reacted to these developments in two ways. First, they actively
lobbied the government for protection against imports. Second, industrialists
launched an all-out assault on labor through speeding up the pace of work
and attempting to roll back the gains made by workers in earlier periods. In
the process of carrying out this strategy, employers also benefited from the
government imposition of wage and price controls.
Serious attention began being paid to these developments in the 1980s
when Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison published two books on the
subject of deindustrialization. While those studies found that job losses in
manufacturing were due to plant closings and their relocation to cheap labor
havens outside the United States, they also revealed that deindustrialization
was having a significant impact on jobs that remained in the United States.10
Those jobs had been downgraded significantly through the increasing prevalence of part-time employment, wage cuts, and work speedup.11
The trends that began to take shape in the American economy and in the
world of work identified by Bluestone and Harrison provoked resistance
among broad sectors of the American working class. With the exception of
1973 and 1976, the number of workers involved in major strikes never fell below 1 million between the years 1967 and 1979. In 1970 and 1971, the number
Caulfield, Norman. NAFTA and Labor in North America, edited by Norman Caulfield, University of Illinois Press, 2010.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/stmartinsu/detail.action?docID=3414124.
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Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.
union-management rel ations
·
115
of workers involved in strikes was 2.4 million and 2.5 million, respectively.
In 1979, strikes numbered 255 and involved a total of approximately 1 million
workers.12
Perhaps most important, many of these work stoppages were wildcat
strikes, conducted in many instances in defiance of union leaders and without their authorization. In early 1978, officials from many large unions reacted to these rank-and-file challenges by seeking to build stronger relations
with management. In doing so, Douglas Fraser, then president of the United
Auto Workers (UAW), along with AFL-CIO head George Meany, served
on a nongovernmental organization called the Labor-Management Group.
Consisting of an equal number of union officials and representatives of corporate management, the Labor-Management Group met regularly to discuss
ways to tackle inflation, unemployment, rising health costs, and other matters, including labor legislation designed to remove obstacles that prevented
workers from organizing unions.
In July 1978, when the group refused to back a labor law reform bill in Congress designed to make it easier for workers to join unions, Fraser and other
union heads resigned.13 The legislation defeated in Congress was an urgent attempt by the unions to reverse declining membership, which during the 1970s
began to accelerate at an alarming rate. In 1978, for example, 26.6 percent of
nonagricultural workers belonged to unions as compared to 34.7 percent in
1954. Between 1974 and 1978, unions in manufacturing lost more than 1 million members (from 9,144,000 to 8,119,000), more than 11 percent.14
Besides attempting to reverse declining membership through legislative
measures, unions also followed the lead of many industrialists in lobbying
Congress to enact laws that would protect American manufacturing from foreign imports. Owing their very existence to the success of national industries
and economies, the unions combined their lobbying efforts by conducting
a massive public relations campaign to urge consumers in the United States
to “Buy American.” Underlying the “Buy American” campaign were union
efforts to enhance U.S. industry’s global competitiveness through the building of “partnerships” with U.S.-based transnational corporations.
The hope was that through these partnerships labor productivity would
rise and businesses would once again earn healthy profits that they would in
turn share with unionized workers. As a report issued in 1983 by the AFLCIO noted: “Profits can only be created in a well-managed enterprise, where
both capital and labor contribute to the result.”15 In 1985, the AFL-CIO issued another report that reaffirmed the belief that the only way to reverse
organized labor’s declining fortunes was to help strengthen the competitive
Caulfield, Norman. NAFTA and Labor in North America, edited by Norman Caulfield, University of Illinois Press, 2010.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/stmartinsu/detail.action?docID=3414124.
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116 . naf ta and l abor in north americ a
position of U.S. industry in the world economy through union-management
cooperation and developing partnerships with employers.16
Reflecting the new union outlook of cooperation and partnership was a
notable reduction in the number of work stoppages. In the 1980s, the annual
average of work stoppages involving 1,000 or more workers (large strikes) fell
to 83 from an annual average of 207 in the 1970s.17 According to the Federal
Mediation and Conciliation Service, the most strikes in a year during the
decade occurred in 1985, when 1,016 strikes were started that included large
and small work stoppages. This compared to 3,005 small and large work
stoppages in 1975. The downward trend continued in the 1990s as the number of strikes involving 1,000 workers or more declined to a yearly average
of just thirty-five. In 1995, unions and workers conducted 385 strikes, large
and small. The number represented a drop of 20 percent from the previous
year, and it was the lowest number of strikes recorded in the United States
in fifty years.18
The decline in strike activity paralleled the increasing practice of employers
using replacement workers during work stoppages. The use of replacements
took off after 1981 when President Ronald Reagan fired air-traffic controllers
for violating federal law that prohibited federal employees from striking. The
firing of the strikers made replacement workers permanent. Before 1980,
employers hired permanent replacements in less than 2 percent of strikes. In
the 1980s, employers used permanent replacements in 14 percent of strikes.
Moreover, permanent replacement was often a feature of many large, highly
publicized strikes, such as those that occurred at Hormel, Phelps-Dodge,
International Paper, and Greyhound, all of which ended in defeat for the
unions.19
This wave of defeats severely weakened the unions both in the workplace
and politically. In 1994, despite employing a highly charged public relations
campaign, the unions failed to stop NAFTA. Moreover, their efforts to get
Congress to pass legislation banning the use of striker replacements collapsed.
These two defeats, combined with continuing membership decline, accelerated the trend of fewer strikes.20 In 2002, the number of workers idled, the
number of days of idleness, and the percentage of estimated working time
lost because of strikes and lockouts reached historic lows. Only nineteen
strikes began during that year, idling 46,000 workers and resulting in 660,000
workdays of idleness, representing less than one out of every 10,000 available workdays.21 February 2003 marked the first month since the Bureau of
Labor Statistics started keeping track in 1947 that not a single strike of more
than 1,000 workers was begun anywhere in the United States.22
Caulfield, Norman. NAFTA and Labor in North America, edited by Norman Caulfield, University of Illinois Press, 2010.
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/stmartinsu/detail.action?docID=3414124.
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union-management rel ations
·
117
The unions’ abandonment of the strike and their pursuit of cooperation
and partnership with employers along with conducting the highly visible
“Buy American” campaign failed to stop the protracted decline in membership. From 1971 to 1989, union membership in the public sector dropped by
10 percent, while the private sector witnessed a decline of 42 percent.23 In
2000, less than one out of every ten workers in the private sector belonged
to unions, or less than 9 percent of the total workforce. This compared to a
high of 35.7 percent of the workforce organized in 1953. In 2006, private-sector
unionization dropped to 7.4 percent, down from 10.3 percent in 1995.24
The 2006 figure was the lowest private-sector unionization rate since 1900,
when U.S. unions represented just 6.5 percent of the workforce. In 1905,
unionization in the private sector had risen to 11.1 percent, well above the
2006 figure.25 The protracted decline in the last quarter century is even more
evident when considering that, in 1983, about one in six private-sector workers was in a union. By 2006, the share had fallen to about one in fourteen.26
More significantly, in 2006, for the first time in U.S. history, union membership rates were lower in manufacturing (11.7 percent) than in the rest of
the economy (12.0 percent). In 2006, the number of unionized workers in
manufacturing was 9 percent lower than in 2005 and down from 38.9 percent
in 1973.27
Union defeats in decertification elections also have contributed to the
decline. From 1997 to 2006, unions in the United States lost a total of 2,704
decertification elections of the 4,045 conducted by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). In those elections, unions never received as much as
36 percent of the vote in any one year. During that period, trade unions in
the United States lost 123,661 members through decertification elections.28
Adding to the woes of organized labor and contributing to its membership
decline in recent years has been the rapid growth of employer antiunion
strategies that has featured the proliferation of consulting agencies and firms
solely dedicated to union avoidance for employers.29
Astonishingly, union membership decline occurred even while the U.S.
government enacted protectionist legislation. In the 1970s and 1980s, while
the U.S. auto industry faced major challenges from foreign competition, the
Big Three U.S. automakers—Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors—convinced
the federal government to impose a cap on the number of cars Japan could
ship to the United States. In the 1980s, the government imposed quotas
limiting imports to 20 percent of the U.S. market. The steel industry also
received protection through voluntary restraint agreements on imports. In
2000, American steel companies and the United Steelworkers (USW) and
Caulfield, Norman. NAFTA and Labor in North America, edited by Norman Caulfield, University of Illinois Press, 2010.
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118 . naf ta and l abor in north americ a
its president, George Becker, worked together to convince the Bill Clinton
administration to curb imports by imposing a twelve-point plan to protect
the domestic industry from the “dumping” of Japanese steel.30
Despite …
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