Workers in Colorado and across the country are coping with lower pay, reduced hours and greater job insecurity this Labor Day.
And that's making workers resentful of how they're being treated rather than feeling fortunate to be working at all, according to a survey of workplace sentiments.
"Conventional wisdom is that people are happy to have a job right now," said Kathy Gans, a senior vice president with Ajilon Professional Staffing in Denver, a division of Adecco USA, which conducted the survey.
The survey — Adecco USA Workplace Insights — of 1,117 workers in late August found simmering resentment rather than contentment.
Two-thirds of the workers surveyed said they were unhappy with their pay, and three-quarters were unhappy about future career prospects. "There is unrest," Gans said. "People feel wronged by their employers."
Pay freezes and outright job cuts, furloughs and having to shoulder the workload of dismissed colleagues contribute to the malaise, Adecco found.
Workers are made as hell and thus conventional wisdom would indicate that this climate would be favorable to labor unions looking to organize workers. Looks like the conventional wisdom is probably wrong again. As Nate Silver at 538.com posted yesterday - with increased unemployment has come decreased support for labor unions,
Gallup recently found sympathy toward labor unions is at an all-time low, at 48 percent. but then again, unemployment is close to its post-WWII highs. Gallup did not happen to ask this question in late 1982 or early 1983, when unemployment exceeded 10 percent. They did ask in August 1981, when unemployment was up to 7.4 percent and rising rapidly, and at that point support for labor was at 55 percent, which was the lowest figure it had achieved before this year's survey.
The regression line finds that, for every point's worth of increase in the unemployment rate, approval of labor unions goes down by 2.6 points. Alternatively, we can add a time trend to the regression model, to account for the fact that participation in labor unions has been declining over time. This softens the relationship slightly, but still implies a decrease in approval of 2.1 points for unions for every point increase in unemployment. Both relationships are highly statistically significant.
So workers are faced with a highly unstable outlook and, at least in Colorado, are becoming more and more disgruntled with their employers. At the same time employees are becoming less sympathetic to labor unions, the traditional vehicle for disgruntled workers to effect change on their situation. What gives? Paul Secunda at the Workplace law professors blog offers a few thoughts,
1. The Blame Game: "It is because of unions and their unreasonable demands for higher wages and benefits that American companies are losing jobs to global competition."
2. We Need More Unions: "The decrease is union support has actually caused higher unemployment rates, not vice versa. If there were more supports for union, we would have a large middle class, greater consumer spending, and more jobs for everyone."
3. Need More Safety Nets: "Unions have shot themselves in the foot. Rather than working for saftey net legislation like their European peers, unemployment means that those unemployed blame the unions for not helping them negotiate this difficult economic climate."
4. Resentment of Unions: "When unemployment is high, the non-unionized working class resent unions for giving their members greater job security while they're left out in the cold."
I think these are all reasonable explanations. I would also add that the percentage of Americans working in traditionally organized fields (ie. manufacturing) has decreased while other less organized fields (technology for example) have grown. That changing landscape has no doubt had an effect. Support for labor is often times a tradition passed down through a family. I support labor because my father is very active in his union and I understand that the advantages I enjoyed in life (Jesuit education, college and eventually law school) can be traced directly to the good wages that came from my father's union job. As fewer and fewer people are union members the effect is exponential - their kids don't have sympathy for labor and on down the generations.
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Private sector labor unions are as weak as they have been since before the Great Depression (and before most pro-labor laws). Some big factors:
1. Lots of the gains have come through general legislation, rather than union contracts, reducing the need to have union contracts to secure those benefits. Unionization originally had as much to do with work conditions and dignity as with pay and job security. Now, manufacturing is almost as safe as office work, and litigation has discouraged large employers from openly disrespecting employees, so the need for unions to address non-monetary issues is less intense.
2. Unions basically exist to get employees a better share of the gap between what employers are willing to offer, and what employees are willing to accept. During high unemployment periods, worker power falls because would be employees are less demanding, and unions can deliver less. They are in the position of the Vichy French, mediating bad news, which is never popular. Changing labor laws (e.g. permanent replacement of striking workers, wider renegotiation of contracts in Chapter 11 bankruptcies) has likewise reduced what unions can deliver.
3. Many people who were shut of the management class by social circumstances have become part of the management class in modern times, depriving unions of many of their best future leaders. Leading unions is a type of management and they fail without strong leaders (contrawise, middle class public sector unions have gained ground as they haven't lost as much talent to management).
4. The stigma of lateral job transfers has faded and the mutual expectation of a lifetime career has almost vanished; and unions remain strongest in places where lifetime employment remains plausible. The prospect of good employees leaving their jobs for a new one has become more of a check on bad employer behavior in industries where lifetime employment is dead. The better non-union employers behave, the weaker unions will be.
5. Unions are weaker when credible threats of outsourcing, offshoring and layoffs are available to management. In the most strongly unionized fields (public sector jobs, grocery stores) this threat isn't nearly as credible. Even if you do get layoff protections in a contract, they are only as good as the often distressed employer making the promise. Issues like paycuts v. layoffs are divisive within unions.
6. Union negotiated gains for employees aren't available from employers when employers (particularly industrial and construction and hospitality industry employers) have now power to avoid cuts related to the general economy that they did nothing to create. Workers can be unhappy without blaming their employers for that fact. Sometimes job security and pay can suck despite an employer's best efforts. Car factory workers can't personally increase car company sales and have no reason to think that their employers aren't trying their best to sell cars.
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