The power of unionized labor

Amidst the holiday celebrations of last week came some surprising news: The longshoremen of California, the folks who handle the mighty flow of cargo that passes into the U.S. through the Pacific ports, declared a tentative victory in their dispute with employers. You probably remember the hysteria during their abortive strike of October, abruptly halted by a presidential order which seemed to take the steam out of their struggle. Last week, however, union leaders proudly announced a settlement mandating pay increases, protecting the jobs of existing workers and improving benefits. These days, union victories are thin on the ground; but the success of the longshoremen is the second big win for labor this year, following the deal reached by UPS management and workers in July.

In general, the picture for organized labor in America has been extremely bleak in the past three decades: Union membership has been declining for 30 years, and the economic crisis of the 1970s, coupled with Ronald Reagan's anti-labor policies in the 1980s, nearly destroyed the union movement. Big corporations, particularly in the manufacturing sector, have long sought to minimize their operating costs by pushing jobs overseas. While President Reagan encouraged this process in the 1980s, an even more crushing blow to labor's hopes came in 1993, when Bill Clinton led the effort to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement. NAFTA demonstrated that even the Democrats, the traditional allies of the labor movement, had bought into the Republicans' mantra on free trade and 'labor flexibility.' Hundreds of thousands of U.S. manufacturing jobs were lost, and the days of labor unions seemed numbered.

So how did the UPS workers and the longshoremen manage to score their victories? A pessimistic reading of the situation would focus on the difference between the (relatively few) successful workers and the many employees in the manufacturing sector who've lost their jobs in recent decades. In simple terms, the successful unions were doing pretty well in the first place, and could leverage their indispensability as they negotiated with management. The jobs done by the UPS workers and the longshoremen could hardly be 'outsourced' to Mexico or China, and a labor disruption — resulting in closed ports or undelivered packages — would have a ripple effect far beyond any single sector of the economy. From this perspective, the apparent vitality of these successful unions merely confirms that the union movement has fractured: A small, 'indispensable' fragment of the workforce can get a fair deal from employers; meanwhile, a much larger rump of workers becomes less and less secure in the wake of still more 'free-trade' agreements and the transfer of jobs to countries with cheap labor and poor working conditions.

On the bright side: Perhaps there's an inspiring lesson from the recent union victories that has broader relevance. Traditionally, a vast number of non-manufacturing jobs — particularly those in the 'service economy' — have been non-unionized. Go into Wal-Mart, a restaurant chain or a movie theater, and the chances are that most of the employees are paid low wages and have no union representation. Conventional logic has held that manufacturing jobs are more secure, since they require more training and see less worker turnover, and so unions have been concentrated much more in those areas. The success of the longshoremen and UPS workers, however, suggests that it's your connection to your community that makes you indispensable. While corporations can shunt manufacturing jobs to Latin America or Asia, it's a fair bet that Dining Services isn't about to outsource your lunch or the worker who prepared it. Millions of low-wage workers, then, can play the same card as those union members who've just scored big victories.

Two things need to happen to make this optimistic vision a reality: First, workers in the service economy have to recognize the power of their proximity, and to organize collectively to improve their current situation. If you've read Barbara Ehrenreich's book "Nickel and Dimed in America," you'll know just how tough it is to make ends meet on a job at Wal-Mart or in a chain restaurant, and you'll also have seen how these employers make titanic efforts to deter their workers from unionizing. Second, middle-class and affluent Americans, who come into contact with this low-wage economy every day, have to recognize their dependence on the people who do these service jobs. The UPS workers and the longshoremen may have been indispensable, but they also did a great job of sticking together so they could emphasize this fact to the public at large. It's going to be a lot harder to create the climate in which this can also happen for the food service workers on Nassau Street or the retail assistants in the Route 1 malls, but all of us have a part to play in making this happen. Nicholas Guyatt, a graduate student in the history department, is from Bristol, England. He can be reached at nsguyatt@princeton.edu.