A recent report in the Wall Street Journal suggests that the National Labor Relations Board might be about to strike down a rule forbidding temporary workers from joining the union at a unionized company. As someone who has worked for years in temporary jobs, thanks, but not thanks. The unions are no friends of temporary workers — most unions would prefer to shut down the temporary job market entirely seeing relatively cheap temp labor as a big threat to expensive (and often inefficient) union labor.
But it’s more than just the economics that make me hope the NLRB doesn’t go this route. I learned at a very young age to despise unions.
The typical interpretation of unions is that they are in conflict with the corporation, but this is inaccurate. Unions are actually in conflict with other workers, specifically those outside of the union as well as disfavored workers within the union. My grandfather, who was a loyal union supporter, got a taste of this first hand. In the early 1970s my grandfather had one of his legs amputated. All he wanted to do was keep working until he could get his retirement benefits, which he did.
One day while I was waiting for my grandfather to come home, instead I heard my grandmother get a phone call which caused her to start crying and we were whisked off to a hospital. One of my grandfather’s co-workers told another co-worker who apparently spent more time in a local bar than on the job site that my grandfather had reported him to the boss. This turned out to be false, but the shiftless person believed it, and cowardly ambushed my grandfather at the work site, pushing him down and then hitting him several times.
The company, obviously, wanted to fire the guy, but not the union — they actually leaped to this guy’s defense and, in fact, he kept his job thanks to their intervention. My grandfather never pressed charges not wanting to cause even more problems considering he was so close to retirement.
I never understood that episode until I was out of college and working as a systems manager for a small unionized laundry. The laundry had create a mini-hierarchy among the workers with a team leader assigned to about 6 to 8 employees. The team leader made about $1/hour more than the regular employees. In each team there was also a designated backup person who would act as the team leader in his or her absence and made the $1 or so more during that period, but for a variety of reasons there weren’t a lot of people lining up to act as the backup.
So the management thought of an incentive plan. They’d designate one person an assistant team leader and pay that person $.60 more per hour during the regular shift and then they’d get the full $1 per hour more when they actually acted as the sole team leader.
The union, however, in no uncertain terms rejected that move. Why? Because the union was effectively run by two women who had more than enough influence with a majority of the workers to get their way. They were upset that once this system was in place the management was clearly going to simply make the current team leader backups into assistant team leaders. The two women who controlled the union personally despised one of the women who would have been promoted and scuttled the entire plan almost entirely on their own personal animosity toward her (the whole thing was largely racial — most of the workers, including the two women, were black, while the woman they despised was Hispanic).
If you follow a big strike in the news, almost always unions reserve the most hatred and bile (not to mention physical assaults) not toward the owners they are fighting but rather to workers who dare go their own way (the Screen Actors Guild is actually going to put Tiger Woods on trial in their kangaroo court for filming a Nike ad in Canada in violation of an ongoing strike by that union). Unions demand, and legally have, the right to the sort of control over workers that corporations can only dream of. Thanks, NLRB, but no thanks.