Interestingly, my 21 y.o. son is quite interested in the Labor Movement....both in it's current stage (decline?) and it's history.

My Dad (RIP 1986) was involved in some early activity here in Philly...back in the later 1930's. I wish he was still around to tell some stories to his grandson

What do you know about current stuff going on and/or history? Are unions very prevalent in your part of the country? Are they a good or bad influence?

 

Unions are a fairly strong force where I live, but then again my home town is the only city in the United States which ever had a General Strike.

I'm in a union, and we went on strike for 40 days about five years ago. It was a very interesting experience, one that I'm glad I went through but that I hope to never have to go through again. Our company had just gone through a merger, and there was a very serious morale problem. I think it is fair to say that the strike was mainly a struggle of the workers to get some respect from mangement. The economic issues were definitely secondary. It was one of the biggest ever white-color strikes in US history (I'm an engineer).

I'd say that unions are very much like democracy in general -- they can be a good or a bad thing, depending on how much the workers themselves are in control of the union. However, like a democratic government, unions are vulnerable to apathy and neglect.

I don't think that unions are necessarily bad for business, nor do I think they are necessarily good for workers. Just as a good management team can increase profits AND provide well for their employees, a good union can do the same thing.

I think that unions, when well run, can be great allies of the shareholders of a public company. Both the unions and the shareholders have a strong interest in the long-term health and prosperity of a company. Unfortunately, this is not always true of senior management, especially in these days of hired-gun, over-compensated CEOs who can make their billions in just a few years and walk away from a company which has been ruined.

 

Philly is a very strong union town, Mike....as are most of the older "Rust Belt" cities in the east. I didn't realize that there was much of a union presence in the Northwest...

Your comment about CEO compensation is also sad but true in most cases. It's really a pleasant surprise when you discover one of the few large companies where the CEO has limited his salary to a multiple of the average worker's salary. I read about one recently but can't recall the company name...

 

Jerry,

If your son ever visits New York City he should stop into the headquarters of the old Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union (ACW). Although now merged with the Textile Workers of America and afterward with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, the ACW still maintains offices (to the best of my knowledge) on Union Square and E. 15th Street in Manhattan. They maintain an extensive library of the union movement, and especially the union movement in the needle trades.

The old ACW union hall is on E. 15th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues (if it is still there, I haven't been to it in about 10 years). There he can see the walls lined with the banners of the old menswear locals. My father was a member of Local Big 4, Cutters. I took their apprenticeship in the 60s. ACW was the only union that I ever heard of where a cutter could go into business for himself, own a business and maintain his membership in the union. My father was an owner and union member. That was the nature of the menswear industry. ( That's also why I was able to take my apprenticeship at such a young age.)

When I started working (part time while in junior high school) Local Big 4 had 3,500 working members. The cutters local was the "top hat and tie" local of the ACW, being a cutter was prestigious. When I was working on my MBA in 1994 and went back to use the ACW library, local Big 4 had only 7 members left, and only 3 were working. By 1994, the local could no longer support itself and was disbanded and put under the control of the joint board.

In the time that I worked in the garment industry, 1961 (I started at the age of 11) until 1991, there was only one strike. It was the most interesting strike I'd ever seen. It seems the New York locals didn't want to strike, but the "hotheads" from Philly did. None the less, people were out on the picket lines who had worked for the companies for 20 and 30 years. Each morning the owners and strikers would stop and chat with each other until opening time when the owners would open their shops and the strikers would picket. Remember, the New York menswear industry was an industry of small businesses.

By the way, Union Square in New York, which is now a park, was once the hotbed of ACW and ILGWU activity. Hence it's name. My father told me that when he was a young teen in the early 1930s and employed as a delivery boy in the menswear industry, he used to push his handtruck through Union Square. He'd stop from time to time to listen to the union organizers and socialists who were always making speeches there.

While in college, my wife worked in the library of one of the settlements in the Lower East Side. From what she tells me, there is also extensive union material there too.

Like your son, I became very interested in the history of unions while in college. I may be able to answer some of his questions or at least point him in a direction.
I'd be glad to share whatever I know with your son, and help to point him to what and who I know.

 

Jerry,

Are you thinking of Costco?

 

Unions have never been very strong here. When I was a child union organizers came here to try to develop a stronghold, but it never really happened. Most of the companies here are non-union and despite several votes, remain so.

Jerry, your son may enjoy reading the book Bucket of Blood by R. S. Sukle. This is a review by John Walsh:

"In the western Pennsylvanian coalfields in the years following the First World War, immigrants from central and eastern Europe are allotted to separate quarters to ensure lack of communication. Starvation wages are offered to the miners and their families are obliged to live in the company town, where all expenditure returns to the company. Unions are banned and health and safety a very low priority. In these circumstances, striking is an action of both immense bravery and desperation. In Buckets of Blood, The Ragman

 

Look for the Union Label
A song by Paula Green, music by Malcolm Dodds

 

In theory and on paper this sounds correct. In fact this is the "Stakeholder" concept that business schools have been teaching for the last 15 years. The concept puts the corporation or business at the center and all of the participants/benefactors surround this center. Because they are all stakeholders in the business according to the theory, they all benefit from the wellbeing of the business and therefore they all work together to do what is in the interest of the business.

In reality, this almost never happens. Unions and management tend to be shortsighted with their vision focused only on immediate or near immediate benefits. Moreover, each group almost always puts it's own interests first, ahead of all others and ahead of the business. Who wins depends on the balance of power. When the pendulum swings to the side of labor, the unions become all powerful, oftentimes unreasonable and corrupt. When the pendulum swings to the side of management, the unions and the union workers pay the price of managements excesses.

Right now the pendulum is on the side of management, in the 50s and 60s it was clearly favoring the unions. It will probably be a long time before organized labor rebounds as we now do business internationally, and the is a huge supply of non union, non organized labor available in the developing countries of the world. Had the unions had any foresight they probably should have seen this coming. Instead, they were shortsighted and focused only on the here and now.

 

This area is also strong with unions. Sad to say but what we have seen here is way to much corruption . "Who is paying who for what" is common place! My dad (RIP) believed strongly in them as he was a member of the Teamsters in the beginning stages and watched the power struggles within them.
In this area at that time they were good for the working man.

 

I'd recommend the movie "Maitwan." I haven't done much research, but from what I did find out it's pretty accurate, historically.

The coal fields of West Virginia and Kentucky were a brutal place to work: long hours, low pay, the pay was often in "script" which could only be spent at the company-owned store (and since the miner couldn't spend it anywhere else, you know what the prices were like). They lived in company housing (couldn't spend the "script" in the open market), and the scene from this movie where the company representatives come to throw the widow of a miner killed in a mine accident out of the house if she doesn't have a son who can go into the mines is probably pretty historically accurate.

The whole industrial base of this nation, railroads, steel, and electricity, was built on the backs of these miners.