This is the draft chapter on unions that’s being put together for the book. It’s not perfect (and literally I’ve just finished working on it for much of the day), but it is timely. Please forgive me for sketchy citations, I’m working on that too – and the only words that are not mine (the one snipped of Milton Friedman’s speech with the two Adam Smith quotes) are cited. Since the book is about what human beings are and do, and the results of that, the focus is perhaps a bit odd – but still relevant. Any comments or criticism would be appreciated.

We’ve seen how people interact, scuffle, discuss, and work, especially when doing things that have an impact on providing food for either the spirit or the family; it’s just what people do, since the world changes around us and everybody’s got different ideas about what to do about it (and the desirability of what’s being done at the moment). So what are people going to try to do when we go to work for a paycheck, whether at small businesses or giant corporation? We’re going to form tribes, and these tribes are going generally seek ways for the people within them to thrive. When this happens with formalities, votes, dues, and written-down-contracts, this is what we call a labor union, and the process of forming is called organizing. It’s not a bad thing, it’s a human thing, and it’s quite a bit older than capitalism. I’m quite sure the people who were around for the origins of what we today call unions would recognize them immediately. While labor movements have been in existence for some time all over the world, my experience and research has been primarily on such entities within the United States, and I will be keeping my focus there.

In order to understand where unions came from, we’re going to have to go back through a good bit of history, back to shortly before the beginning of the Black Plague, near the turn of the first millennium. While, since the Romans had similar social entities (calling them collegia, or sometimes corporations), there is no real evidence of continuity between them and the Medieval craft guilds except in the irony of their use of the term corporation to describe some of them, much to the confusion of modern readers. In 11th century Europe, the use of such technology as existed then was seen as almost mystic in its power to transform, possibly due more to the relatively static nature of life at the time than anything else. At the time, most social changes involved large numbers of armed men, and were therefore suspect. The techniques of any given craft something that was a family’s most jealously guarded possession.

I can’t emphasize this enough, so I’ll restate it: these individuals in the various trades were a new kind of economic entity, not gaining their power from owning land or titles, or forced to farm land owned by someone else – they where somewhere in between these extremes. The hands and minds of those in the trades were easily the most valuable things they owned, more so than the tools of the craft they knew, and it was something that could not be taken from them easily or reliably by c oercion or trickery. This gave them an economic security formerly unknown to anyone outside the nobility (such as economic security was) or those who could manage to buy their way into either the nobility or the Church. Having money, however, is a very different thing than having security, as just about anyone who has invested heavily in junk bonds can tell you. In order to translate this new influence into security, they started organizing into groups defined by common interests (usually by the trade practiced, in the case of the guilds), the way all masses of individuals tend to do given any free time whatsoever, and absent an overpowering reason not to (such as the presence of a union-busting employer).

Something important: As in Rome, the craft and trade guilds (especially in France) were sometimes called corporations. This is misleading to a modern speaker of English, since their resemblance to what we now use that word to describe is minimal at best. It is necessary to remind the reader that the same words in different languages (especially when used in very different time periods) are not necessarily the same thing – and in this case, definitely are not. A modern corporation is organized around maximizing the monetary return to its shareholders; a trade guild (like a union today) is organized around securing and sustaining the well-being of its members. The main difference between the trade guilds and modern unions is the dramatic difference in the power and status of its individual members, which is where the temptation to look at the trade guilds as the forbearers of the modern corporation rises from. This is actually not so much a difference in the organizations, as a change in the environment in which organized labor had to function, which we’ll discuss in a bit.

In maintaining their economic niche, the guilds focused on two immediate factors governing their interaction with the larger community: assuring the skills of the member craftsmen (and by extension the quality of their product and the passing on the craft skills on to new generations), and the protection of the guild’s exclusive right to make whatever that guild specialized in making. (http://www.iisg.nl/hpw/papers/guilds-prak.pdf, page 5, retrieved 8/29/07) While reflecting on the history of the guilds, we might be tempted to consider them as coercive and punitive organizations which maintained their control of information through strong-arm tactics against anyone who threatened their monopoly. In fact, that was rarely if ever the case; even while they maintained exclusive legal control of their trades, they would work with the community and outside practitioners of that craft to ensure that quality and transparency (or mediation, if things went awry) were present in the particular realm of goods and services they represented. (Ibid, p 6) While they did have strong social, political, and economic impact, this was because their primary purpose – the quality and stability of the membership – could not be had without working with the larger society. Their system grew and strengthened, they began to thrive; then came the Black Death – which secured their future for some time to come.

The Black Death wasn’t one event – it was wave after wave of disease and suffering lasting three or four hundred years, and killing between one and two out of every three people on the European continent. Imagine, if you can: half of everyone you know (everyone period, actually), at some point in their lives, drops dead of disease, starvation, suicide, or murder – above and beyond the rate of death that you expect in a civilization full of angry people. You can’t imagine it, because it would be the end of everything you knew and held dear. To be fair, they couldn’t imagine it either, and literally believed the world was coming to an end Many were getting what they could while the getting was good, and the question of whose expense this was at wasn’t even a consideration. To be poor, young, or female was to be at tremendous risk from disease, and to be non-Christian or just someone disliked or “different” was to be at even greater risk for being burnt alive as a scapegoat.

This time represented opportunity and responsibility for those who had a skill, the talent to use it, and the patience and willingness to pass it on. In order to preserve the society, anything that promoted stability and continuity was a pearl beyond price, and usually had unintended positive consequences. In the case of the guilds, during and especially after the Black Plague, there was a middle class for the first time in just about ever, and this was almost solely because there was a shortage of labor (an arguable plurality of non-wealthy people having died) and a huge need for it, especially skilled labor – which the guilds provided and renewed. People who actually got through life by knowing how to things other people didn’t actually found themselves in possession of the chance to speak their minds and not be strung up for it, protected to some degree by the knowledge and skills they had managed to preserve for their families (and by unthinking extension) for human civilization.

In reaction to the guilds came the economic philosophies behind capitalism, a very short way of describing a very powerful reaction to the rise middle class. At the time, like most new ideologies and social theories, it was a reaction to a perceived wrong: in this case, it was an upper class reaction to the knowledge and privilege held by the guilds, more particularly held by those who had knowledge but not great capital or noble birth. What exacerbated this upheaval and created the most serious (and ultimately near-fatal) threat to the trade guilds was industrialization. With many of the skilled trades now performed by machines, and the place of the worker now being to operate the machines, or merely to properly place it so the machines could operate upon it, organize tradespeople lost much of their prestige and economic strength. At the same time, the need for such organizations in order to redress the decline in working conditions and compensation brought about by this shift in labor practices became urgent.

The history of the late 19th and early 20th centuries is one in which (except in professions such as the practice of medicine and law, which industrialization did little to directly change) the now-nearly-defunct trade guilds were replaced by unions. The two most successful changes that the unions attempted to address were the ending of child labor in the United States, and the reduction of the working day to 10. The eight-hour workday, which was granted in England in 1847, was not established in the United States until 1916. even though Illinois passed the first eight-hour workday act in the U.S., compliance and enforcement were both non-existent. Equal pay for equal work, the third change that early U.S. Labor hoped to achieve, is still something the country has not managed to gain – though not for lack of effort on Labor’s part. Still, we also owe public education, many of the workplace anti-discrimination laws, the very idea of occupational safety as a governmental concern, Social Security, and employer-provided health insurance (which while imperfect, is far better than insurance only for the wealthy) at least partially to their efforts. It is safe to say that gains on the part of the American worker (which would be most of us) have been because of, rather than in spite of organized Labor.

Probably because of its necessary structure, the union is a very different organization from the corporation. Tip O’Niell once said that “all politics is local,” and this is literally true in the structure of the modern labor union, since the foundation of any union’s strength lies in the support given to it by its locals. Organized by shop, geographic area, or what-have-you, local unions are a hodgepodge of different structures, sometimes partially imposed from above, sometimes informed by the experience of other unions, but usually as a reflection of what the membership as a whole (especially at the time of its formation) will accept and agree to. Forming a union is a difficult and intense effort (one might call it a labor of love), and such locals are never formed on a whim; instead they are usually created in reaction to situations that the individual members both find intolerable, and do not have the power to address. In fact, unless government and/or business is in collusion with a corrupt union leader, it is this very structure that keeps a union honest, since the membership is focused on its well-being.

Among proponents of laissez-faire capitalism and opponents of Labor, Adam Smith is held up as an ultimate critic of unions and government coercion, but his words actually refered to realities quite different from our own, and informed by the experience of 18th century Great Britain. The Industrial Revolution, with its devaluation of individual labor and greater empowerment of capital, had not yet fully made its presence felt, so the worker and the manager were on a much more even footing. The following two quotes are placed together in a speech by Dr. Milton Friedman, in which I’d like to use to illustrate this point:

The talk I gave at the National Association of Business Economists was entitled the “Adam Smith Address.” And I started by referring to two famous statements from Adam Smith that all of you have heard, but that are highly relevant. “People of the same trade,” Adam Smith wrote, “seldom meet together even for merriment and diversion but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.” Another statement of his which was highly relevant to all the talk about the social responsibility of business: quote, “I have never known much good done by those who profess to trade for the public good.” (”The Suicidal Impulse of the Business Community,” Luncheon Address of Dr. Milton Friedman, November 21, 1998, http://www.cato.org/events/friedman.html, Retrieved 11/10/07)

The first quote – usually used as a rhetorical weapon against trade laborers, but sometimes against merchants – is a reflection of a simple truth: when people with common interests meet, they will tend seek to advance those common interests, sometimes at the expense of those outside the circle of those meeting. Bluntly, this is the simplest, most human, and most powerful argument for a government accountable to the people of the nation to regularly and rigorously exercise regulation and oversight in order to ensure that commerce is not abused (and that the government should regularly be questioned to make sure it’s not being suborned by one group/economic class or another). The second, that people who profess to act for the public good often do not, is answered by capitalism with the proposition that people acting in their own self-interests will create a greater net good for society as a whole than if restricted by laws created with noble intentions. It’s difficult to address this second answer only because there is little logic within it, and many bad assumptions – foremost among which is that people are consistently greedy. Still, there is a kernel of truth to the idea that self-interest is a powerful motivator for positive change. Unintentionally, it actually makes a powerful argument for the idea that workers, gathering together in their own self-interest, will create more benefit for society than if they resist that impulse and merely draw a paycheck. Since the tendency for human beings to group together in self-defense is one most humans share (and has proven immensely effective as a survival strategy), it seems foolish and counterproductive to resist it.

Still, most of the practice of American corporate labor relations (focusing here on large corporations – small businesses are a different and equally complicated story) is built around suppressing this tendency and channeling it as completely as possible into the structure of the business. The problem with this effort, and ultimately with the results it achieves, lies in who is making the policy which affects these workers; the group that will make the decisions regarding policies and arbitration will almost entirely be formed from people in upper and (maybe) middle management, who have little or nothing in common with the people they are managing. Even if the corporation is “enlightened,” the benefits, punishments, and compensation this system generates will not speak to the needs and experience of those it affects, and only minimally achieves the intended results (unless the ultimate result desired is affirmation of the power of management, which is not an unreasonable conclusion to draw). While denying a group of workers recognition as a union (or refusing to negotiate with a union) may be possible under the law, it is supremely demeaning to the people within it (since we should be able to act on our decision regarding what group identifies with us and vice-versa), fundamentally unconstitutional (since free association is enshrined as a right), and makes any loyalty beyond that engendered by the paycheck remarkably difficult to achieve – and the lower the status of a particular worker is in society, the more true these things are.

In all seriousness, the labor union and its predecessors have proved time and time again to be a net good to a society. This is even true when regarding it by the fundamentally conservative economic principle that people do the most good when acting in their own interest. It is definitely in the interest of individual workers to increase their power relative to that of their employer’s, so negotiations over conditions and compensation can be conducted between equals (and are even possible). Even more so, the union can be considered one of the most “conservative” and family-oriented organizations possible, since the main goals sought by organized labor are securing stability, prosperity, and fairness for its individual members – and by extension, their families. With this in mind: when a union is forming, or its membership is on strike for better conditions, remember that unless the leadership of the union has completely become disconnected from its members (which they will usually do their best to make sure the world hears about), this is a group of people seeking fairness and security in the workplace. For this simple fact alone, they deserve far more support than they get.

*jotting down notes here*

More pondering to come. Probably will return to working on earlier chapter drafts before I improve this shoddy piece.

Posted on Sunday, November 11th, 2007, at 3:06 [Corporate Excess, Economic Justice, the book].
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