For the last few weeks, I’ve been formulating a thought on the greatest fraud known to blue collar workers; the union. Go down to a construction site or into a carpenter’s shop and ask them flat out how they feel about the union. Most of them will tell you it’s the most important thing in the world and how they couldn’t survive without the union. Then ask them for specifics, and you’ll get a list of vague non-descript things that sound like someone reaching for an answer where there aren’t any. Then, when you talk to the older workers, you’ll hear things like “They give workers power to negotiate against the bosses,” and so on.
In the end, no one will ever be able to tell you specifics. Oh sure, some will come up with the increased pay they believe that Unions get them, but what most of them don’t realize is that increased pay is a product of the market for the job you’re in, not the fact that a union is negotiating for you.
Growing up, my father was a carpenter and a member of the NYC District Council of Carpenters. It’s a really large union that was supposed to protect the people of what could at best be described as a sporadic business. My dad built trade show displays. He did it for well over 20 years and worked his ass off doing so. Work was never easy to come by, and a lot of it was seasonal. Most summers were spent with light work or no work as the companies he worked for were going through rolling layoffs. On an average year, my father would earn half his salary because of the lack of consistent work. This is a problem that every person who had a manual labor type job went through (and still does). There just isn’t always work. My sister-in-law’s father was a steel worker, also a union member, and went through much the same thing, and like my family, his was forced to become a two-income family just to support themselves.
Now if you ask my father what the greatest success of being in the union was, he would tell you the health care. To an extent he was right. In fact, it’s hard to argue with health care no matter who you are. No matter how much we were out of work, we never had to worry about going to a doctor, but when you take that out of the equation, you’d be hard-pressed to find one other way we benefitted from my father being in the union.
As I said earlier, the work was very seasonal, and usually the shops he worked in were only busy during trade show months. Remember, we aren’t talking about a small garage with a few saws. We’re talking about a multi-million dollar corporation, one of the biggest in the country, that made trade show displays for companies like Sony, Panasonic, Agfa, Apple, and others. While the workers were in feast or famine mode, and spent half the year trying to stretch their salary to cover the other half they weren’t working in, what was the union doing?
In 1995, hearings were held in which officials found that among other things: Devine and the other officers mismanaged the District Council’s cash reserve so that its net worth dropped from $6.45 million in 1991 to $224,060 in 1996; Devine spent $389,000 on private jets in a period of 30 months; Devine supplied the staff with luxury cars and paid twice what legitimate automobile dealers would charge; Devine’s $25,000 car allowance did not include gas, oil, maintenance or insurance; the union paid Devine’s girlfriend $60,000 as a “consultant;” Devine’s chauffeur was paid $60,000 a year out of trust fund money; and Devine used trust fund money to employ Genovese Family associates. The hearing committee concluded that the trusteeship had been properly imposed and extended its duration.
In 1996, National Carpenter officials raided the Council’s offices dismissing Devine and three of his Vice-Presidents for their ties to organized crime. In 1998, Devine was convicted of stealing union funds and shaking down contractors.
Millions upon millions of dollars of hard-earned money that members were forced to pay through their dues every single week went into organized crime and ego stroking for Frederick Devine, the union head. Instead of protecting workers, he was paying cronies, siphoning the trust, and destroying the financial stability of the union. And it’s not like members knew what was going on, although in hindsight a few of them admitted they realized what was going on, but were terrified to open their mouths because of the influence the Genovese crime family had on the union.
Not mentioned in the above is the new office that Devine built for himself and the “union,” and I use union in quotation marks because the only people who had an office in that suite of marble, hard wood, and glass, was Devine and his closest cronies. The Halls themselves were disasters; most of them single room facilities in outlying parts of the five boroughs. Devine argued that his lavish office was a good thing because it was built with union labor, as if that was supposed to be a consolation to the thousands of carpenters who were on unemployment for months while people like Fred Devine were still collecting a salary and not giving a collective crap about them.
It started to occur to me that the only purpose of union dues, union rules, and creating union shops was one thing: the perpetuation of the union. While the benefits were nice, the fact of the matter was that most of them could be achieved in ways that didn’t involve handing over large chunks of “dues” to let someone else handle them for you. In the end, when the guys were out of work, no one found work for them. Oh sure, you could go to the hall and put your name on a list, but that didn’t work. After all, my father, for example, worked for one of the largest display houses in the country. By the time the cycle had gotten to him to the point where he was laid off, there were already hundreds of people on that list ahead of him. Added to that was the fact that the union was more than willing to send you pretty much anywhere for work meaning you could be going hundreds of miles a week, a trip that effectively negated your salary anyway!
Think about the way a union works. They get a contract for workers, make sure that contract is enforced, and organize all employees to strike when those demands aren’t met or kept, or when the time comes for new negotiations. That’s supposed to strike fear into the hearts of business owners and ply them for dealing with workers. Instead, what it does, is create a game; one of posturing and politics, often devoid of any real negotiating. Union leaders pride themselves on being able to rally the troops and get them onto the street into picket lines to protest the injustice of not having the $1.00 an hour pay increase they’re looking for.
Take SEIU Local 1199, the National Health Care Workers’ Union. Every few years, my mom is told that the union may have to go on strike if they don’t get what they want in the coming contract negotiations. Many times, they have staged “walkouts” and so on. Many times, the union has even asked administrative staff to walk out in a show of solidarity for nurses who were looking for certain contract demands, yet when it comes to administrative staff, the union demonstrably doesn’t care about their employees and doesn’t ask similar sacrifices of nurses.
My mother spent years working for various people in the hospital she works in. She’s never changed departments or hospitals and has almost enough time to retire. Recently, she began planning her retirement and started filling out paperwork. The union, an organization that’s supposed to be on her side and willing to help out, told her yesterday that she wouldn’t be able to retire as planned, and instead was going to be working until September instead because she was out of work for 2 months and didn’t make the required number of days. Of course the reason she didn’t, and the union knows this because they paid the bills, is that my father was in the hospital for two months after his double bypass surgery. Instead of allowing a woman who’s paid into the system since day one, barely missed any work, and dedicated herself to the union and her job for over 20 years, they told her that because of 60 lousy days, she couldn’t retire with her full medical benefits.
Is that how a union that’s supposed to care about its employees handles them? Forcing them to work an extra 60 days because, after 20+ years, their husband had heart surgery? Of course the union will be collecting dues from my mother in that time, as well. There’s no appealing, and no arguing; it’s either like it or lump it. On top of the union’s abysmal handling of my mother’s retirement, the hospital she’s working at looks to be in the preparation stages for hundreds of layoffs to come in June. Originally, my mother was retiring in June, but now she has to worry every single day that she’ll be let go right before her retirement and not get the full benefits she earned over 20 years of employment.
Where is the union on this? Have they tried in any way to advocate for my mom and help to make sure she makes her September retirement? No, and in fact, they won’t, because they don’t exercise any amount of influence in these kind of situations despite the fact that this is exactly the kind of protection most people think they’re getting from a union when they join one.
The truth is, unions exist for one reason and one reason only: the perpetuation of the union. Dues and such are collected for the perpetuation of the union. People go to meetings to elect new officers for perpetuation of the union. Unions spend billions on lobbying the government for perpetuation of the union. In the end, when you’re out there on strike, walking the picket line wearing your union colors and protesting that $1.00, remember that while you aren’t getting paid anything and complaining about the fat cats that run your company / office / job, another group of similarly wealthy fat cats are smiling as you pound the pavement for them and amplify their already considerable power.
They don’t suffer. They give nothing. They serve no one. They provide no help. They’re the union, and they’re there for them and them only. The sooner you realize that, the better off you’ll be.
(See also Frank’s post on unions; it’s a real eye-opener as well; photo from John Edwards 08 on flickr)