As Union Workers Face Contract Concessions...

I have watched union contract bargaining driven by employer demands for contract concessions develop over the last 30 years. We have moved from trying to avoid and trade off in order to blunt the impact of concessions to trying to resist them at the local level, then to scattered fight-backs and struggles to change union leaderships so that fights might be waged more successfully, then to larger strikes and to organizing programs and political action. Now we go into contract negotiations hoping it won't be that bad. Union membership has never been high in the US—we may have hit 30 percent of workers 50 years ago, but today it is between 9 and 12 percent. When we talk about internal union issues, union benefits and contract concessions we are most likely talking to ourselves.

The patterns of how employers win concessions from workers are becoming textbook cases and repetitive: drop hints, change the language they communicate in, increase production, change department heads and human resources people, try contracting out or temps, let the panic run its course, reopen the union contract, ask for as much as they can at the bargaining table and take as much as they can get, enlist some union leaders for cover and then either go out of business or run with higher production and fewer workers. Some version of this gets played out in blue-collar and white-collar workplaces. It’s now usually better for most workers to go by the contract without reopening because they will walk away with more money and more benefits when the company eventually shuts down or downsizes to a minimum.

We may be reaching a standstill in contract struggles. The bosses have pared down and are trying to run work with an absolute minimum of workers during an economic crisis. On the other hand, they instinctively know that workers will resist and they know that the political climate might be shifting in our favor. Union membership is dropping only because of the economic crisis, but weakened unions have fewer resources and less will to resist. Union members who remain working after layoffs are likely to have high seniority, be closer to retirement and may feel that we don’t have much to lose by pushing back. It is a moment full of contradiction.

So-called “labor relations experts” now tell us that something like 25 per cent of the employers they represent should be in contract talks right now, but aren't. Employers are asking for extensions of contracts in many cases—and some union leaderships are agreeing to this.

This won’t last forever, of course. In the past the employers would be trying to develop some kind of joint processes or forums for cooperation in order to share the crisis and use workers’ knowledge to rebuild and be more competitive. Perhaps those days are over. Union contracts give the bosses a hold on the reality of some costs and any kind of disruption now threatens the stability they need. This provides a rationale for them throwing overboard the worst of the union-busters they have been hiring for the last 30 years or more, but will they do this? Unions should use this time to reorganize and build a fight which is both economic and political, but will we do this? Union leaderships have instead been chasing contracts which provide minimum benefits and build union density quickly for several years now. We are hearing talk about joint ownership of retirement plans and union co-ownership of companies again. We need a fight-back based on principles, not hitching our wagon to crisis-driven economies. The reality for us is that workers don’t fight back en masse until the worst of a recession or a depression has passed, but that should not be an excuse for inaction now. What path are we going to take?