Trading One Special Interest for Another
In the New York Times today three adjacent articles caught my attention.
The House passed legislation to help Unions organize by allowing them to replace secret ballots with non secret ballots. It is asserted that businesses can intimidate union organizers and influence the secret ballot union vote. What is proposed is that Union organizers can approach each employee and ask them to sign a card endorsing the Union, thus bypassing a secret vote. It seems to me that this is merely exchanging the risk of intimidation from one group for another. I don’t like it. We should be moving more towards secret ballots in which the opinion of the individual is private and personal and increasingly free of coercion.
I am not a fan of Unions. I think they are a protection racket that takes tribute in exchange for protecting mediocre or even bad behavior. As a business owner I do what I can to earn the loyalty of the better employees who demonstrate competence and reliability. I do what I can to weed out who do not have or have lost those qualities. It undermines efficiency and excellence to obstruct this process. I believe that one of the main inefficiencies in our education system is the cost of protecting mediocre teachers and administrators.
The solution I see is for Health Insurance and pensions to be delinked from employment and become personally owned and managed. And for affordable education to be readily available for those who need or want to change careers.
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McCain and Obama apparently have an agreement that if they are their parties nominees they will forfeit individual campaign contributions and both use the national campaign finance program. I applaud them putting their money where their mouths are. And I will contribute to their campaigns and to the campaigns of any leading candidate who make a similar commitment. I think that special interest money is the leading obstacle to a fair, balanced, pragmatic legislature.
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The NYTimes/CBS poll, referred to recently by Joe Gandelman, revealed interesting trends in thinking among Democrats, Republicans and Independents about Health Care. What stood out to me was the relatively similar opinions between Dems and Independents as opposed to the relatively difference in opinions between Republicans and Independents. Independents are relatively more in alignment with Democrats than Republicans. I interpret this to mean that someone who considers themselves an Independent rather than a Democrats may generally agree with the aims of the Democrats but may also be in sympathy with the methods and means of the Republicans to optimize free markets and make government more efficient. If the Democrats can keep to the Center and promote genuine reform and transparency they may be able to grow their majority. However if they steer to far to the left in support of Unions and the far left they may watch control of Congress swing back across the aisle.
I am not loyal to a particular party but rather to individual candidates who are most likely to resist special interests and steer a centrist course.
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9 Responses to “Trading One Special Interest for Another”
Ah, unions. What a complicated story. Everything bad about them is true and everything good about them is equally true.
When unions were at the height of their power, they definitely overreached and caused a negative impact on business and stifled innovation and meritocracy.
Now that business interests have the upper hand, they’re doing their best to ignore the concerns of the labor force.
It’s been a mistake for governement and business to ignore question of income disparity, low wage earner problems et al, even if their stated reasons for doing so are valid. Pressure creates counter pressure. In exactly the same way as in foreign policy, if you don’t acknowledge the legitimacy of the oppostion’s concerns, you create an atmosphere of confrontation rather than cooperation.
I call for mediation, maybe an umpire.
And the instant the unions go away it might take two minutes for a significant number of employers to start giving their employees the shaft because they’d know they have them over a barrel.
Your post completely ignores the realities of many workplaces where people are fired because they are “too old” or for a plethora of personal reasons or serve as scapegoats for incompetent management. Unions as a special interest in today’s America are nothing compared to businesses.
Over 25 years I have come to know scores of business owners through several national organizations. They ALL treasure any employee of any age, religion, sex who are competent, reliable and trustworthy. They all struggle with mediocre staff who make the organization sluggish by not pulling their weight. Most management resources are wasted on the small percentage of employees who do not earn their compensation.
Most pragmatic business owners want employees who make them money.
Unions do a hell of a lot more than protect incompetent workers. They make sure workers have a decent wage and get decent benefits. Sure, there are some unions that protect people who should be fired. There are also a ton of managers and executives who keep their jobs because they make nice with certain members of the Board of Trustees or because they know how to shift responsibility around.
On card checks, there was a study done recently on intimidation. It looked at management intimidation in secret ballot elections and labor intimidation in card check elections. The result?
46% of workers in secret ballot elections claimed that management intimidated them. Only 14% of workers in card check elections claimed that labor intimidated them.
Unions aren’t perfect, but they are desperately needed in the service sector in order to give workers a chance at better pay and benefits. It’s great to make employees happy without the need for a union. But most employers only care about employee happiness to a point, and beyond that they play hardball. When they do, workers need somebody in their corner to give them leverage.
Paul Silver said:
Over 25 years I have come to know scores of business owners through several national organizations.
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Maybe that’s part of the problem. Business ownrers talk to other business owners and gripe about how hard it is to get good servants.
Workers talk to other workers and gripe about bosses who take advantage of them.
But does Peter ever talk to Paul? The worker is at a clear disadbantage, because he knows that he is at the mercy of the boss, even should any talking take place. That’s one advantage of unions; someone can talk on the worker’s behalf without putting him personally at risk.
Your problems with employees who don’t pull their weight are really a function of the terms of your employment contracts and the quality of the available work force, not unions in the generic sense.
Unions arose in the first place because of abuses by business. Unless the nature of man has changed while my back was turned, each group will do whatever it can to get the most and give the least possible. There has to be a MUTUALLY acceptable agreement.
domajot has a point. Paul thinks of the managers as decent hard working people who would never do anything but manage their businesses justly and treat their employees decently.
I’ve met the managers who break their word to employees, try to go back on agreements and let their own egos get in the way of good management. Once I was fired because of a manager’s ego when he couldn’t take the fact that even though he was the owner’s son he wasn’t my manager and I wouldn’t do something that was just utterly insane without checking it with my manager. Can you imagine being asked to clean out the walk-in refrigerator at a busy restaurant (I was the purchasing manager’s assistant.) at 11:00 AM? When that cleaning involved emptying the fridge so that the prep chefs couldn’t find their ingredients? He never forgave me for that and when his dad was in a bad mood one day succeeded in getting me fired. Never cite the unerring rationality of business owners to me. Ever.
I worked for some really nice doctors once, doing insurance referrals and authorizations. They always told me how much they valued me- but never enough to give me a raise. I waited 3 years, and they were shocked when I decided to move on, since they thought my pay was more than fair. There was no union to complain to –and I was employed at will. I would have been happy to have union representation to negotiate something a little more fair.
There was an important suggestion in the post that is not addressed in the comments-the one regarding separating health insurance and pensions from employment.
In theory, I support this notion, but I’m not clear how, then these programs would be administered. The idea of portable insurance, not tied to a particular employer has also been bandied about and sounds pormissing.
Probably, there needs to be a mandatory element; otherwise we would end up with a goodly number of uninsured and pensionless people, just like now. If not the employers, then who would administer these programs?
Pensions, it seems to me, are a bigger worry than insurance. Left to their own devices, the unsavvy could end up with zero in their pension accounts. So, who would be the nanny?
A lot of details need to be worked out.
I belonged to a union for 32 1/2 yrs, now retired with active card. Our union has a clause in it which says the company can hire who they feel is the most qualified. We also had the right to find our own jobs. This was a plus for the union members and the companies.
Our pension/welfare trustees have equal # of members from the union side and company side. It works out very nice for all concerned. The slackers, lazy bums, good for nothing type of workers did not last long, as word of mouth between companies and fellow members (you were judged on your work)starved them out.
It wasn’t 100% great, but better than most unions. We got paid a very liveable wage, and decent benefits, job safety, etc. What more could a working man ask for?