The staff of The New Yorker—the people behind the scenes: editors, fact checkers, social media strategists, designers—are unionizing. They’ve even got a logo: Eustace Tilly with his fist raised. If you’re a loyal reader of the magazine, as I am, you should support the union in any way you can. Every week, they bring us our happiness; we should give them some back. They’re asking for letters of solidarity; email them at newyorkerunion@gmail.com.
If you look at their demands, they read like a tableaux of grievances from today’s economy: no job security, vast wage disparities, no overtime pay, a lot of subcontracting, and so on.
The creative class used to see itself and its concerns as outside the economy. Not anymore.
A few years back, I read Ved Mehta’s memoirs of his years at The New Yorker under editor William Shawn. Shawn helped Mehta find his first apartment: he actually scouted out a bunch of places with a real estate broker and wrote Mehta letters or called him about what he had seen. Shawn got Mehta set up with a meal service. The money was flowing. Again, not anymore.
The sea change isn’t just economic; it’s also cultural.
When we first started organizing graduate employees at Yale in the early 1990s, we got a lot of hostility. And nowhere more so than from the creative class. People in the elite media really disliked us. Many of them had left grad school or gone to fancy colleges, and we may have reminded them of the people they disliked when they were undergrads. (Truth be told: sometimes we reminded me of the people I disliked when I was an undergrad.) In any event, they saw us as pampered whiners, radical wannabees, Sandalistas in seminars. It was untrue and unfair. It didn’t matter. Liberals have their identity politics, too.
As some of you know, my union experience didn’t end happily. I lost three out of four of my dissertation advisers. And two of them wound up writing me blacklisting letters. After that, IÂ wrote a mini-memoir-ish essay about the whole experience. I had great ambitions to be a personal/political essayist; this was my first stab at the genre. Part of my dissertation had been on McCarthyism and the blacklist, so I wove that into my essay: the experience of writing a dissertation that I wound up living a version of in real life.
I shopped it around to The New Yorker. I even called a top editor there after they turned it down. He answered the phone. That’s how things rolled back then. It was an awkward conversation.
I sent the essay to another top magazine. An editor there read and rejected it. I can’t remember if we spoke on the phone or corresponded by mail, but I remember his objection clearly. He didn’t like my comparison between my being blacklisted and McCarthyism. McCarthyism, he said, was about people going to jail; my essay was about people losing jobs and careers (which had happened to one of my fellow unionists, a student of the conservative classicist Donald Kagan).
The editor, of course, was wrong about that. Relatively few people went to jail under McCarthyism. Thousands upon thousands, however, lost their jobs and careers. That’s what McCarthyism was: political repression via employment. It didn’t matter. He knew what he knew.
Fifteen years later, there was a union drive at the magazine where this editor worked. He led it. He was fired.
My piece wasn’t great; it should have been rejected. I was an amateur, and it needed work. But I can’t help feeling that some part of the disconnect back then—the easy ignorance and confident incuriosity that so often pass in the media for common sense—had to do with where the creative class was in the 1990s: liberal on everything but unions.
Again, not anymore.
{ 46 comments }
anonymousse 06.06.18 at 6:47 pm
“A few years back, I read Ved Mehta’s memoirs of his years at The New Yorker under editor William Shawn. Shawn helped Mehta find his first apartment: he actually scouted out a bunch of places with a real estate broker and wrote Mehta letters or called him about what he had seen. Shawn got Mehta set up with a meal service. The money was flowing. Again, not anymore.”
So are union members demanding that senior editors find them apartments and buy them dinner? How is this anecdote relevant?
“The money was flowing. Again, not anymore.”
There’s less money in the business. So how are unions justified today? It sounds like the difference is simply one of a healthy business vs a dying business. Unionism is a solution to the wrong problem.
Write to the center, get more money. Write to the Left fringe, get less money, and fight over it.
anon
Gareth Wilson 06.06.18 at 8:15 pm
Great to see three thousand, seven hundred and ninety people coöperating like this.
politicalfootball 06.06.18 at 8:25 pm
anonymousse@1:
There’s less money in the business. So how are unions justified today?
The greater the constraints on resources, the more relevant unionism is. When the boss has leisure time and the inclination to hunt down an apartment for you, you don’t have as much of a need for a union and are less likely to support one.
People arrive at unionism for different reasons. I support unions because I believe in free markets, and the labor market is severely constrained, in good times and in bad, by the monopsony power of employers.
Mario 06.06.18 at 11:21 pm
IMO, there are few things more important than unions. It is the only real technology (i’m using that word intentionally) that can lift masses up from poverty and constrain the modern capitalist monstruosity. A self professed leftist that doesn’t like unions is at the very best an effing moron.
And congrats Corey for your braveness and your fighting character. And thanks for writing about unions, again. The subject is terribly undervalued in modern leftist discourse.
Alan White 06.06.18 at 11:25 pm
From the public sector in Wisconsin. . .
In 2010 I literally held a card in my hand voting for a union among UW faculty (which clearly would have formed given wide support) when Act 10 was passed, effectively abolishing them. Since then I and my colleagues saw somewhere around a net 10-15% reduction in take-home salary (and significant loss of net earnings over lifetime especially for younger faculty), just one biennial raise of (1+1) 2% until this year, elimination of statutory tenure already resulting in forced tenured-faculty layoffs, etc. etc. When working collectives are deprived of effective push-back, guess who benefits?
Faustusnotes 06.07.18 at 12:02 am
Careful anonymousse, you’re straying from your talking points! The standard story is that unions take over the business at its peak and grind it into ruin with their selfish demands for a living wage and safe working conditions. A parasite doesn’t take over a dying host!
You best be careful straying from the orthodoxy or you might get kicked out of whatever country club you have infested.
J-D 06.07.18 at 1:13 am
politicalfootball
This comment fascinates me because I don’t believe in free markets (I mean, I don’t believe in them; I don’t believe there is or can be any such thing, because it’s a contradiction in terms), and yet the last clause captures most of my own reason for being a unionist (although in terms that wouldn’t have occurred to me unprompted).
PS Should it be ‘monopsony’ or ‘oligopsony’? but this is just a detail.
Anarcissie 06.07.18 at 2:31 am
There has been a lot of union organizing in movies, theater, popular and classical music, newspapers, spectator sports, and so on, all of which seem fairly ‘creative’ to me, if that term means much of anything. Perhaps the history of these activities, which began on the margins of respectability and contrasts sharply with the authoritarian history of formal education, has something to do with their ability to organize democratically. Being fired for trying to organize a union is, of course, pretty standard-issue stuff regardless of one’s class.
Brett 06.07.18 at 6:04 am
We’ll see. There’s nothing really new about news and journalist unions (the two biggest beneficiaries of it, the WGA-East and NewsGuild, both date back to before 1960), and the wave of unionizations in non-conservative media has not led to a wave of creative class unionization in general.
J-D 06.07.18 at 9:59 am
anonymousse
There is an imbalance of power between employers and employees. The purpose of unions is to attempt to redress that imbalance and its effects. You’ve given no reason why that should be considered ‘the wrong problem’, nor any idea of what you consider to be, instead, ‘the right problem’.
politicalfootball 06.07.18 at 1:46 pm
J-D:
Conservatives have taken over the discourse around “free markets,” so it might be an error on my part to use the phrase at all. In a sensible conversation, “free markets” and “regulated markets” wouldn’t be considered contradictory. Regulation is a necessary pre-condition for free markets of any scale at all, but “free” has become a synonym for “unregulated” in the public discourse.
So as a free marketeer, I’m all for collective bargaining. A union is, by definition, a market mechanism. The question is: How should we determine the value of labor? And it seems to me that the answer in a fair market is that Labor should have the power to withhold services in the same way that employers have the option to withhold jobs.
As for monopsony and oligopsony, either word works, but I was speaking from my own experience. For most of my career in my profession, to find a new job I’d need to move to a new city — a fact that has given my employers a lot of bargaining power unrelated to the value of my work.
There actually are rules against certain kinds of oligopsony by employers — as there must be in any genuinely free market for labor — but those rules aren’t well-enforced.
bob mcmanus 06.07.18 at 3:06 pm
Sorry, I am too materialist and deterministic to believe that the New Lewis and Reuther are out there but just not trying hard enough. In our current circumstances the fact that unions are in decline is evidence that they are no longer possible, gone with bowling leagues, tailfins, and three-channel tv. I hope I’m wrong.
Precarity, atomization, fractionation are our future, with simultaneous constant communication, accelerating into the future. The Left needs to figure out how to work with this reality, not nostalgia. There have been and are plenty of people working on this for decades.
It is of course inline with the radical anti-vanguardism that I don’t know what the future holds, have no suggestions, advice, optimism or pessimism. The writers I like talk a lot of d-words: decentralize, disperse, dis-aggregate, disorganize.
Paul 06.07.18 at 5:28 pm
Gareth Wilson, why are you not getting the applause you deserve for this:
Great to see three thousand, seven hundred and ninety people coöperating like this.
Brett 06.07.18 at 8:26 pm
Post got eaten by moderation.
I’m more pessimistic. The current wave of new media unionizations started a few years ago, but it hasn’t led to any broader creative class unionization wave outside of the news media business. And news unions aren’t new – the WGA-East and NewsGuild date back to before 1960.
Adam 06.08.18 at 4:42 am
> Great to see three thousand, seven hundred and ninety people coöperating like this.
Truly a beautiful joke.
Michael Denner 06.08.18 at 7:33 am
TillEy not Tilly.
JamesG 06.08.18 at 1:26 pm
For a few years after its founding I was a daily reader of an online news site called “DNAinfo.”
Then two things happened.
(1) Its staff of writers decided to form a union.
and
(2) The owner of the site shut it down.
The New Yorker’s full retail price per issue is now nine dollars.
Yes I know it’s really eight-ninety-nine and yes, I know the sub prices are much lower.
As a retired financial executive/accountant I hope the owner of the magazine loves it enough to absorb the additional cost that the union will add. (It’s kinda hard to imagine a ten or twelve dollar magazine surviving.)
But as the nameless DNAInfo organizers demonstrated, some people simply cannot understand that in some situations the way to ensure you lose the war is simply to win the (wrong) battle.
Trader Joe 06.08.18 at 1:49 pm
anonymousse
… So how are unions justified today? … Unionism is a solution to the wrong problem. …
@10 J-D “There is an imbalance of power between employers and employees”
I agree with J-D’s sentiment and this is the most common way to express the value of unions but I think a better one is that Unionism is a solution when the value creation of the enterprise rests primarily with the workers rather than the management or capital employed.
An easy example is athletes – there is no NFL without NFL players, just empty stadiums. While its true there are thousands of players who could do the jobs, viewers don’t pay to see second tier players, they pay for top tier players. Unionization makes sense here to insure that an appropriate portion of the rents are paid to those who create the value.
I’d say the same is routinely true for professions like educators, hospital workers, airline mechanics and other jobs that have sufficiently unique skill sets that you can’t line up anywhere near enough scabs to replace them and even if you could get close the quality would inherently suffer. The value is in the skills of the workers – not the capital.
By contrast when people talk about unionizing fast food workers or grocery store workers – I tend to think that focuses more on the “power” imbalance in the employee-employer equation since there is little irreplaceable value creation among the majority of those who would seek to unionize. It can still be a sensible to form a union to provide for fair dealing – but there is far greater risk (in my opinion) that such workers pay-over too many of the ‘gains’ of unionization to the union itself or the gains aren’t shared widely enough that all benefit equally.
As I’ve posted on other occasions I come from a background of unionism – my mother was a local leader and just about all of my immediate family carried a card at one time or another. Unions aren’t universally positive – often its swapping one master for another – but in situations where they work best its one of the most potent solutions to both workforce stability and sharing the economic rents of an enterprise.
politicalfootball 06.08.18 at 8:29 pm
DNAinfo is a great example of how free markets are misunderstood by observers and opposed by a lot of capitalists. The union didn’t cost Ricketts a nickel; he shut down the publication purely out of opposition to bargaining in a free market.
It is a normal function of free markets that under some sets of circumstances, suppliers aren’t willing to provide a good or service. People didn’t want to work for Ricketts under the terms he proposed, so they didn’t. That’s how markets work.
bob mcmanus 06.08.18 at 8:39 pm
Sure, people like unions now, about thirty years since the last catastrophic strike. People need to try to remember the 60s and 70s, thousands of strikes, NYC sanitation workers, etc. Back then, even when unions had massive support, the Feds usually stopped in and forced arbitration. Watch the national sentiment if FEDEx or UPS, goes on a months long strike. You backing a work stoppage that stops the importation of pharmaceuticals from China? I don’t think even Democrats can tolerate an economy damaging strike anymore. In local places small gains can be made. As a national political force unions are over.
But…can’t find the damn article that talked about why after so many plant strikes, the occupation of the Dearborn plant broke GM. It was the engine plant, a key node in the supply chain. The article went on to discuss recent breakdowns in global supply chains. They are very very vulnerable, a factor that inhibits unionization. And the Chinese plant will make additives for dog food and life saving medicine. The article also discussed an evolution in tactics, instead of attacking central sites, resistance movements simply shoot power transformers miles away.
A union will simply not be allowed to disrupt key supply chains for very long. They would get stomped and leaders jailed. With all of Trump’s new judges, this is not going to get better. Gov’t is never going to be the friend of the worker again.
The parallel is 1900-1915 or so. It is now the time of the assassins and terrorists, time for sabotage. Blow up the supply chains, make the citizen realize where herstuff comes from, what the economy now is. Blame the radicals, make the union look reasonable and moderate by comparison.
“What, you want to disrupt the importation of penicillin and insulin?” Yes. Then we can measure liberal support for unions, when it means more than a month without a magazine. In the class war, civilians die.
Recommend all books by Steve Fraser.
bob mcmanus 06.08.18 at 9:39 pm
Sorry if I crossed a line above. I am not advocating any immediate concrete illegal activity, Feebles.
1) Okay, maybe I am not seeing it, maybe we are going to have a million little company unions that cooperate national political power.
2) But Capital will never make a concession unless threatened with destruction. And the destruction of Capital, and to a large degree any significant portion of capital, means the destruction of society.
The destruction of society are the stakes and the weapon workers have to challenge capital. The threat has to be there.
What did a steel strike mean in 1960? What would a year-long steel strike mean?
Okay, think about the Internet being offline for three months. All of it. No, never happen, Capital wouldn’t allow?
Capital doesn’t decide. Only workers and scabs can keep the internet up or shut it down. So think again about shutting the Internet down for three months and then you are ready for unions.
Ikonoclast 06.08.18 at 10:29 pm
The “Creative Class”? Is this term meant ironically? I hope so. If “people in the elite media” are discovering they need a union, then they are (finally) discovering that they too have been tools of the capitalists. They are discovering that history has reached the juncture where they too are expendable.
To quote Noam Chomsky:
“What are the elite media, the agenda-setting ones? The New York Times and CBS, for example. Well, first of all, they are major, very profitable, corporations. Furthermore, most of them are either linked to, or outright owned by, much bigger corporations, like General Electric, Westinghouse, and so on. They are way up at the top of the power structure of the private economy which is a very tyrannical structure. Corporations are basically tyrannies, hierarchic, controled from above. If you don’t like what they are doing you get out. The major media are just part of that system.”
J-D 06.08.18 at 11:52 pm
Trader Joe
I can’t figure out how your explanation is supposed to be a better one.
My main theoretical problem with your approach is that it involves grievous misunderstanding of the concept of value.
My main practical problem is that you seem to be suggesting that the argument for unionism is clearer in cases such as athletes, educators, hospital workers, airline mechanics than it is in cases such as fast food workers and grocery store workers; in other words you seem to be suggesting that the case for unionisation is more problematic in the cases where the imbalance of power between employers and employees is greatest.
What I conclude, however, is that the greater the imbalance of power between employers and employees, the stronger the case for unionisation, at the same time that it faces greater obstacles and therefore greater risks of failure.
Also I conclude by favouring greater solidarity between unions, whereas it’s easy to read into your comment a justification for some unions (and their members) to disdain others, sowing the seeds of a division that is in general harmful to unionism.
Chip Daniels 06.09.18 at 2:29 am
@17
As a retired financial executive/ accountant, you don’t find it weird that we treat cost escalation of labor like a horrific injustice, whereas cost escalation of rent, fuel, electricity, insurance and all the other cost items are shrugged off as just the way business works?
Fake Dave 06.09.18 at 8:44 am
@17 JamesG
Your post has two of the most common fallacies in discourse about unions and suggest that you’ve taken some of the right-wing/centrist critiques a little bit too seriously.
The first fallacy is blaming the union organizers for a decision that was made by employers. Layoffs and shop closures are standard tactics for suppressing uppity workers and work well in sectors where union penetration is limited or non-existent. I’m sorry you lost your favorite news site (but have you considered looking up what your favorite writers are up to these days?), but it’s not the workers’ fault it shuttered, it’s the fault of the owners for giving up and taking their ball home. It’s funny how we’re always told that the owners and managers deserve to be in charge because they’re the ones who know how to keep a business running, but, when they fail completely at their one and only job, somehow it’s the workers’ fault.
The second fallacy is much broader and it reflects decades of warped thinking about labor — namely, that unionizing is bad for business. It’s true that some unions (like some management teams) are bad at knowing what’s good for their businesses and that can cause problems, but the last thing unions want to do is put their own members out of work. Unions can and have arranged their own pay and benefits cuts and often make tremendous sacrifices to save their jobs — sacrifices the bosses would usually find unthinkable. The union’s relationship with management relationship is often framed as a workplace uprising, but it can also be cooperative and mutually beneficial.
Assuming that the New Yorker unionizing will immediately result in a massive and unsustainable pay raise is a huge leap and not really consistent with how collective bargaining generally works in practice. Even in a union shop, the power balance still tilts in favor of the employers because they have a million tricks they can employ to delay, obstruct, and discourage the workers from pushing too hard, while the workers have to take immense risks to fight back. This requires a degree of discipline and commitment from the workforce that can be hard to maintain, so savvy employers tend to give the union just enough of a concession to make them feel like they’re making progress without doing much to really affect the bottom line. Organizing is just as much about giving employees a sense of control and security in their jobs and working conditions as it is about actually changing things. Having workers who know that there’s a contract in place and the union has their back and they won’t wake up tomorrow to find themselves fired without cause can be a blessing for a business and their are plenty of countries and industries where employers welcome it.
Ed 06.09.18 at 3:59 pm
Unions are for athletes and truck drivers, not writers.
EB 06.09.18 at 4:09 pm
The New Yorker, progressive though its values may be, is a very snooty publication. Maybe it does some good in reinforcing those values among the wealthy woke, but it leaves me cold, despite its very accomplished writing.
bob mcmanus 06.09.18 at 6:35 pm
Here we go, this gets closer
Three Lessons From Walmart Fight for 15
1) Social Media
2) Reputational damage (direct action, sabotage, threaten and disrupt production)
3) Horizontalism
But in a really big strike, a economy-threatening strike, a strike where Prez Gillibrand calls the national guard to start bashing heads and leadership is looking at jail…
…isn’t a “union” really in the way?
Jacob Steel 06.10.18 at 10:32 pm
I think a lot of the people taking umbrage with #17’s cases study of DNAinfo are missing the point. Consider a situation where there are three options:
1) The business stays open, wages are the higher of two possible options.
2) The business stays open, wages are lower of two possible options.
3) The business closes
The workers have the power to rule out “lower wages”, by unionising, but they can’t rule out “business closes” – the employer always has the power to impose that unilaterally.
The workers will almost always rank the options “higher wages > lower wages > business closes”*.
In a situation where the employer ranks the options “lower wages > higher wages > business closes” then forming a union to rule out the “lower wages” option is an excellent tactic. But if the employer’s preference ranking runs “lower wages > business closes > higher wages” then ruling out the “lower wages” option is a bad move for the workers, and it sounds like that’s what happened ad DNAinfo.
The point is not that the union’s actions were in any way unethical, it’s that they were counterproductive.
I think the best response is the second point Fake Dave makes in post #25 – that a canny union will be aware of this risk, and won’t force its employers’ hand too far. But it sounds like the one at DNAinfo probably wasn’t.
*In some cases the workers might rank the options “higher wages > lower wages = business closes”, but that’s pretty rare, because in those situations the workers are likely to have just left.
J-D 06.11.18 at 12:31 am
bob mcmanus
Recently I participated in a one-day strike called by my union. I don’t think our industrial action threatened our employer with destruction. Nevertheless, the union negotiators tell me that the employer made significant concession after the strike. I don’t think that’s a unique pattern, or even a highly unusual one.
Manta 06.11.18 at 1:53 pm
“In any event, they saw us as pampered whiners, radical wannabees, Sandalistas in seminars. It was untrue and unfair. It didn’t matter. Liberals have their identity politics, too.”
Who wrote the following?
a) Joseph Stalin
b) Karl Marx
c) Chairman Mao
d) Augusto C. Sandino
“Among the basic rights of the human person is to be numbered the right of freely founding unions for working people. They should be able truly to represent them and to contribute to the organizing of economic life in the right way. Included is the right of freely taking part in the activity of these unions without risk of reprisal. Through this orderly participation joined to progressive economic and social formation, all will grow day by day in the awareness of their won function and responsibility, and thus they will be brought to feel that they are comrades in the whole task of economic development and in the attainment of the universal common good according to their capacities and aptitudes.”
Ed 06.11.18 at 3:54 pm
“My main practical problem is that you seem to be suggesting that the argument for unionism is clearer in cases such as athletes, educators, hospital workers, airline mechanics than it is in cases such as fast food workers and grocery store workers; in other words you seem to be suggesting that the case for unionisation is more problematic in the cases where the imbalance of power between employers and employees is greatest.”
No, it just means that unionization is a bad tactic to achieve the goal of higher wages and better working conditions for fast food workers. Its not an argument that fast food workers shouldn’t have higher and better working conditions.
You just need a better tactic than unionization, or be come up with some way to counter the obvious employer tactic of just firing everyone who tries to organize and hire scabs from among the large pool of low skilled people.
politicalfootball 06.11.18 at 4:14 pm
Jacob@29:
I think the best response is the second point Fake Dave makes in post #25 – that a canny union will be aware of this risk, and won’t force its employers’ hand too far. But it sounds like the one at DNAinfo probably wasn’t.
Literally the only thing the DNAinfo folks did was assert their right to unionize. Some people believe in unionization as a matter of principle. (I am one of those people.) The entire history of unionization is full of episodes where people stood up for this principle at some personal cost. (I am one of those people, too.)
So even if unionization was non-remunerative for these folks (and there’s no particularly strong reason to believe that), it’s hard to plausibly characterize their actions as over-reach.
It’s interesting how you remove the owner’s agency from this situation. He created a workplace environment where people wanted to unionize — and you really have to expend some effort to do that nowadays. Then, when employees responded accordingly, he fired all the employees.
It certainly seems reasonable, based on what we know, that the employees accurately believed they didn’t have much of anything to lose.
Trader Joe 06.11.18 at 7:42 pm
@23 J-D
You said “in other words you seem to be suggesting that the case for unionisation is more problematic in the cases where the imbalance of power between employers and employees is greatest.”
I think a more careful reading of my @10 would find that I didn’t say that at all, but rather I said:
“It can still be a sensible to form a union to provide for fair dealing – but there is far greater risk (in my opinion) that such workers pay-over too many of the ‘gains’ of unionization to the union itself or the gains aren’t shared widely enough that all benefit equally.”
The two most common arguments against unions (both made in various of the above posts) is that either A) the union shop will eventually destroy the business its associated with to the ultimate detriment of both the capital and its workers and b) that the union dues and related infrastructure serves the union itself over its members. There are examples in support of both of these – but I’m more concerned with the latter.
In low margin industries like grocery stores and fast foods there is clearly an imbalance of power – but likewise many workers are not going to be equally invested in the outcomes of union action.
I can give a first hand example of what I mean: back in the 80s I worked as a checkout bagger at a grocery where the cashiers and certain of the stock clerks were part of a union. They struck to get wage concessions (not unreasonable) and after a few weeks of strike they eventually got most of their concession and with strike funds most were ‘o.k.’ financially + they got their raise. Guys like me however and the guys who worked the meat counter, produce, loading dock and warehouse however were also out of work. We got nothing other than no paycheck for 3 weeks. We were never invited to join the union and accordingly couldn’t and didn’t. Some weeks after the strike, because of depleted strike funds union dues went up (I don’t recall the amount) but most of the workers commented that in the end they weren’t ahead much from where they started.
Did the union “work” – yes, absolutely. Was it good for labor in the broader sense of the word, meaning all non-management employees of the organization. NO it did not. So that’s where I come from when I say it depends on the organization and the degree to which all or most of the value creating employees can be put within the union umbrella. When this isn’t the case it may be a solution for some, but for those on the outside its really just a matter of being screwed by co-workers instead of by management – its not best for Labor.
Europe on balance does better at this than US companies so perhaps that’s the perspective you are bringing.
faustusnotes 06.12.18 at 1:09 am
Ed says…
Hmm, if only there were something a union could do to stop the employer from hiring scabs … hmm… (I don’t expect Ed is going to come up with any suggestions for a “better tactic” because I don’t think he’s offering this argument in the assumption that there is a better tactic).
Trader Joe, how did it come about that your cashiers and stock clerks were part of a union but you weren’t? I don’t know what a “checkout bagger” is but I’m guessing you worked right alongside the cashier (what quaint words you Americans use!) but you weren’t in a union? And your back-office staff werent’t in the same union or a collaborating union? This seems to me like completely shit union organizing.
Chip Daniels 06.12.18 at 2:46 am
@33:
When I hear the sorts of just-so stories about unions or minimum wages or taxes, where the business owner shuts down or relocates due to that one single variable, they always tell a rather different story than what the author intended, namely that the existing situation was so fragile, so precarious, that the tiniest change in one single variable caused disaster.
In this case, was it really the case that the ongoing business concern was so close to unprofitability that the mere existence of a union made it untenable?
If that is so, then maybe the invisible hand of the marketplace was actually sending him signals that should have been heeded in the first place.
Trader Joe 06.12.18 at 11:25 am
@35 Faustnotes
“Trader Joe, how did it come about that your cashiers and stock clerks were part of a union but you weren’t? I don’t know what a “checkout bagger†is but I’m guessing you worked right alongside the cashier (what quaint words you Americans use!) but you weren’t in a union? And your back-office staff werent’t in the same union or a collaborating union? This seems to me like completely shit union organizing.”
Oh it was complete shit, no question of that.
I won’t remember all of the specific names, but the cashiers and stock clerks were able to be part of a IBW local because they handled money and inventory which made them eligible. The grocer was a regional chain that had lost an action in a neighboring state. In that state (Ohio) the stores were more broadly organized. I can’t say everyone was in, but it was greater.
In our state (PA) there were jurisdictional issues and people like butchers or dock workers couldn’t be part of IBW because there were different unions that handled those job classes and they hadn’t certified with that grocer so couldn’t organize. Guys like me weren’t viewed as ‘full time’ even though most of us worked at least 30 hours and accordingly were classed out as well. All of this sausage-making is exactly what I mean by unions not really working for all, but only for some. In clean situations where one organization can organize a whole shop (which lately is primarily factories, not services) then I fully agree with the power and benefits.
In other cases it can become very disjointed. Some of the US airlines have major contracts with at least 3 major unions all with separate strike powers and still they have less than half their total workers (which would include management classes) as covered employees. All too often this is the case (at least in the US) which is why you often find that its not just management, but also other workers who are opposed.
To finish the story, I later became eligible for the union the cashiers were in and joined. As it happened we never struck, though we did get benefit increases and some wage escalation.
As an FYI a bagger is a now nearly obsolete position, a few high end stores still have them but most don’t. Such people would put groceries into paper bags after the cashier rang them up (no scanners yet) and then carry them out to the customer’s car or for those who called in orders we’d deliver the order to a customers home. The job was primarily social – you were meant to chat up the customer and compliment them and ask them questions and such like, basically make the customer feel valued. I expect a few of the old-timers around here will remember when that’s what customer service was all about – not having a snappy website and a good mobile interface.
politicalfootball 06.12.18 at 4:42 pm
Chip @36 —
In this case, was it really the case that the ongoing business concern was so close to unprofitability that the mere existence of a union made it untenable?
Blog discussions of markets are often over-simple, and my discussion of DNAInfo doesn’t really deal with key aspects of that case, which aren’t market-related at all.
DNAInfo wasn’t profitable, and it had poor prospects of ever becoming profitable. But Joe Ricketts surely knew this when he bought Gothamist just eight months previous. It was a vanity project for a super-rich guy.
So Ricketts wasn’t responding to economic incentives when he created/bought those publications, and he wasn’t doing so when he shut them down. One supposes that the shutdown was the result of his ideological opposition to fair bargaining.
NPR had a good story on the situation.
Ricketts himself is admirably clear about how “free enterprise” is necessarily autocratic. An environment where workers have bargaining power creates an “us vs. them” mentality. Workers need to do as they are told, because unlike capitalists, they don’t have anything important at stake:
Free enterprise, per Ricketts, is about freedom for capital to do as it pleases.
Bargaining for more money or better working conditions is adversarial, and there is no room for adversarial relationships in the autocratic world of free enterprise. It’s no surprise that Ricketts was a big Trump supporter.
Magpie 06.12.18 at 6:36 pm
@Trader Joe #34
I think your experience with that union mixes two different issues which should be kept separate:
(1) the fact that the union covered only “cashiers and certain of the stock clerks”;
(2) the union dues going up to cover the depletion of the strike funds.
You are absolutely right about (1). Everybody was affected, but not everybody won.
But the cashiers and stock clerks are wrong to complain about union dues going up. Think of it this way: the strike fund was their asset, much like a savings account, which they used up during the strike. If the union dues increase to replenish the strike fund, it’s like they are saving again: it remains their asset.
Regarding (2), then, I’d say the problem is not the union, but the decision to go on strike.
J-D 06.13.18 at 1:17 am
Trader Joe
I think advocates of unionism would typically take the position that every employee should be able to join a union.
I can imagine exceptions: for example, I can imagine a scenario where white employees are able to join a union but black employees are not, at least in practice. I have an idea that may actually have been the case in at least parts of the US during at least some periods in its history, but whether I’m right about that or not, the scenario is one where the exclusion of black employees from unionisation is part of a broader social context of racial discrimination and segregation. So what I perceive in a scenario like that is something which should be understood as a problem of racial discrimination and segregation rather than a problem of unionism, although obviously unionism is affected.
I am not familiar in detail with the legal environment of unionism in the US, but the problem you describe from your own experience seems to be specifically connected with that legal environment, which (if I have understood correctly) had the effect of making it harder, or impractical, or effectively impossible for some employees to join a union (than it was for others). In my view, unions should work to make it easier for all employees to join a union, but, as I observed, I think that typically they do. The problem you describe seems to me not like a problem arising out of unionism but rather like a problem arising out of anti-union features of the system within which US unions are obliged to operate.
That comment intrigues me. If you have guessed that I am a Foreignanian, you are correct, but I wonder what led you to that conclusion? and then, what led you to the incorrect conclusion that I am a European? Foreignania is a much larger place than just Europe.
Faustusnotes 06.13.18 at 1:40 am
Why can’t they just have one union for the whole shop? Why do Americans organise all your social systems so weirdly!? Cheques (that you misspell!), Tipping, multiple unions in one building, electronic voting booths, the electoral college, Jim crow … Can’t you people just sort this shit out!?
eg 06.13.18 at 2:51 am
@41 LOL — American exceptionalism …
floopmeister 06.13.18 at 4:22 am
Can’t you people just sort this shit out!?
Healthcare?
Mass shootings?
Pronouncing aluminIum?
:)
J-D 06.13.18 at 9:30 am
Faustusnotes
I don’t know where you are, but multiple unions in the same workplace is not an exclusively American phenomenon. It happens other places too; in my own workplace, for example.
Jordan 06.13.18 at 6:40 pm
I’m all for unions, but someone needs to provide the NY writers with a run-down of the current competitive environment in print and digital media. Over the past 10 years, Google and Facebook have absolutely annihilated the old framework for media businesses. This is why unionization doesn’t make sense; not because uniona haven’t made sense in the past or because they don’t still make senae in certain industries. The New Yorker has no business model to support these workers in the future. The fact that the New Yorker has not fired many of them already says nothing about the long-term growth prospects of the outlet. I see two viable routes:
(1) End the duopoly Google and Facebook have on advertisting.
or
(2) Rather than unionizing, band together, use your networks and savings (what little you have) to audit some business strategy and entreprenurial courses from NYU/Columbia/Harvard. Then, set-out to build a highly specialized/focused/niche subscription magazine or site.
The first requires resources, planning, and organization far beyond what is available to that group of writers.
The second is more than doable. See <a href="https://www.theinformation.com" title="The Information".
J-D 06.14.18 at 1:04 am
Jordan
It is, obviously, true that The New Yorker is doomed in the long run, because everything is doomed in the long run (yes, even Google and Facebook, no matter how hard that may be to imagine; we are all going to die, the human species is going to become extinct, and the planet is going to become uninhabitable); but how long that run is makes a lot of difference. There would be little point in unionising at the stage where the business is sure to close for good within a fortnight; there would still be a point in unionising at the stage where the business is sure to close for good within, say, ten years.
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