OK. Don't understand this:
Headline in the NYT reads 'Board redefines rules for union exemption' The story is of a decision of the National Labor Relations Board that defined who was a supervisor , a decision which was important as supervisors were exempt from union membership.

Does this mean that union membership in certain industries or certain places of work is compulsory ? If so, in what circumstances is it compulsory for a worker to belong to a union, and does that have to be the same union as that of his or her colleagues, a one union workplace ? If not, what does it mean?

Union membership used to be a contentious matter in British industries but Mrs Thatcher's government put an end to that and the labour government of Mr Blair, though the unions have still got a strong influence in his party, has not thought it wise to change. There were industries where it was de facto compulsory to belong to the local union. with the result that a union had sometimes got more control of the workforce than the management had but, even where it was not, a levy was taken on every employee's wages as a sum payable to a union.

It's far too complicated for me to understand all the rules here Fred, but I can explain part that I am familiar with.

In Chicago the unions get builders to sign contracts with them. The contract simply states that they will use union labor on the job. (Not all contractors have to deal with this but certainly any sizable job) If you don't sign then they will picket the job. They have the right to do this and the builder has some right to bypass the strike and continue work with non-union workers. Problem becomes that you will never get a union worker to do work on that site. So basically you have to sign on if your project requires steel, concrete or any other necessary and union controlled item including any deliveries from the truck drivers union or garbage collectors.

The rules within the trade unions are really clear - they can't work with nonunion people, their trade is very specifically spelled out and doesn't overlap any other trade except in rare instances, and they get uniform pay and uniform benefits. Supervisors of the work on the owner side do not need to be union... architects, managers, engineers. But supervisors for the trades need to be union unless they own the company. The owner of any company is not allowed to work in the trade.

(The owner situation becomes quite ridiculous in some circumstances where an ex-electrician now owner is losing his butt and wants to come in and work to save himself from bankruptcy... not allowed.)

Each employee must pay to the union dues. Each employer has to pay wage, health and welfare, and pension as well as workman's comp. Employers within trades also "need" to be "signatory" to the union which I don't know a lot about but I believe it's dues that have to be paid anually. I think they look at that as a fee to pay for auditing of books each year to assure the union that you are paying in the proper funds.

There are many many full time lawyers here that only deal with unions. It's way over my head but this is the small patch that I am familiar with.

In a nutshell:

closed shop-workers must join the union representing them

open shop-union membership not compulsory, but often they must pay dues

Some states have right to work statutes which prohibit compulsory union membership.

Does this mean that union membership in certain industries or certain places of work is compulsory ?

Yes.

If so, in what circumstances is it compulsory for a worker to belong to a union,

The union and the management have agreed that only union member can be employed. This is called a closed shop.


and does that have to be the same union as that of his or her colleagues, a one union workplace ? If not, what does it mean?

No, but it usually does. Sometimes, the union is specific to one place of employment, and there i one union for all hourly employees. In other situations, however, different unions are representation different classifications of hourly employees in the same location. In this situation, the type of job defines what unions are involved.


Ex. My father was a wood patternmaker who worked at a steel mill. He belonged to the patternmakers' union, as did all patternmakers in that factory. However, most of the other hourly employees belonged to a more general union, the steelworkers union. There may have been other unions in that factory that represented other specific job skills; I only know about the one he was in and the one I was in at another steel mill.

In the construction trades, there are many unions represented at one location, often (usually) all working at the same time. Carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and general laborers can all be working on the same building at the same time, with each belonging to a different union.

The same holds true when a movie is being made. Actors, directors, cameramen, sound technicians, electricians, and a couple of other unions are all on the set, working at about the same time, each belonging to a union whose members have that particular skill.

And you call yourselves capitalists? How did this state of affairs come about ? Who was so weak as to allow closed shops (as described)? No trade union should have the power to dictate to (blackmail?) the companies or industries. It took good old socialist Britain a long while to be dragged out of this situation. It took a right-winger, Mrs Thatcher, to do it but Mr Blair a 'socialist' and himself, I think, sponsored by a union, admires her for doing it .He's not sought to change any of the law.

Mrs Thatcher endured a national strike of coalminers, whose union had brought down an earlier Conservative government by striking. 'Her' strike lasted a whole year but the coalminers gave up in the end and inefficient or expensive collieries were closed.

The print unions used to blackmail newspaper proprietors by threatening sudden strikes to such an extent that there were absurd payments being made, even down to numbers of workers claiming two pay packets (and using such secondary names as M Mouse and D Duck, such was their impudent power ). It took Rupert Murdoch to end that. He secretly signed a deal with electricians whilst building state of the art computerised printworks. The print unions assumed they would be as powerful and crooked as before. He moved the paper almost overnight and only then told the print unions to get lost because he'd done a deal to the effect that any union labour would be members of the electrical unions or the like and not of the print unions, so the electrical unions would operate the new machines . He too endured a strike at the Times which lasted a year.

As for demarcation ( the rule that only workers in one union do certain jobs ) I can remember, many years ago, living in an apartment block where I called the block's maintenance to redecorate. The job was a big one, involving stripping lots of wallpaper. By one window was the hook for a curtain tie-back, still with a little wallpaper round it. So I said to the painter 'We don't need the hook so you may remove it' He said 'No, I can't do that. That's a carpenter's job.' So he left it in the wall while he summoned a carpenter from the department ! Incredible!No wonder Mrs Thatcher won the election . Her laws allowed no such nonsense.

So the account I read in the posts above sounds to me like something out of distant history .

quote:

How did this state of affairs come about ?

In Chicago it was very basically a war. Quite a number of uprisings and responses. Fort Sheridan north of Chicago was established to quell union uprisings. (okay it wasn't established for this purpose but it was the first domestic purpose other than jailing Indians.)

The unions won and they won big time. Chicago is probably only second to New York in union dominance.

Fred, in the UK, if there are union and non-union workers doing the same job, do they get the same pay and benefits? Who negotiated those benefits? In Open Shops the US, the union has negotiated both the pay and the benefits for both union and non-union employees.

Regarding your "That's a carpenter's job" -

In the US, it is common for one union to allow a member of another union to do little things like that. It is not a rule, but it is common. That is not to say that what you describe doesn't happen, nor is it to say that one way is done more than another. Much depends on the unions involved, the specific job to be performed, and the situation on the job site itself. Most jobs that I have seen will allow a carpenter to move a shovel, even though shovel work is the duty of a laborer.

If you want to be completely amazed - check out the operators union and some of the great gigs they've secured for themselves. For instance, any highrise in Chicago has to have an elevator operator for all cars used for construction access until such time as the work is substantially complete and only a certain number of workers are on the job on a daily basis. Many times this keeps operators employed at high-rises for the duration of the buildings life. (John Hancock tower as an example)

Operators make about $75 per hour. They get double time if they work through lunch. They always have to work through lunch or none of the workers can go to lunch. And they get time and a half to start and finish a half hour after everyone (because workers have to get up in the building and get down). They end up netting more than almost any other trade when they get this job.

In all fairness, operators often have the most dangerous jobs. The elevator operator position is designed to accommodate people that can no longer work in the trade due to age or injury. So there is no objecting to this unnecessary position because it's almost always older guys doing the job and many of their coworkers have been injured or killed over the years operating cranes, backhoes and other heavy equipment.

The rates of pay and benefits may be negotiated by any union(s) or by non-union representatives , as it happens. Whatever benefits accrue they are the same for all workers.

We do not allow any strike without there being a conciliation meeting under a body called ACAS, the conciliation service, first. It tries to get a fair agreement and resolution by its arbitration; we do not allow any strike or go-slow without there being a secret ballot on it first and that only after a cooling- off period; we do not allow any intimidation; we do not allow picketing of a workplace, unless the pickets are directly involved in the strike; we do not allow more than a few pickets; no union can call its workers out 'in sympathy', that is no union can strike because some other union has a dispute, whether in that workplace or some other; we do not allow a dispute specific to one place of employment to be used as the reason for a strike in any other, so, for example, if the workers in one Ford factory have a dispute the union cannot call out all its members in other Ford factories..and so on and so on.

The penalties for offences may be for criminal activity but are usually simply penalties on the union(s) involved. These are substantial fines.In practice strikes in Britain are rare. There is but a small fraction of days lost through industrial disputes compared to the pre-legislation days.The strikes we do get are very brief and seem to be in only a few areas of industry where one union is particularly awkward. A visitor might find that one of the London transport unions is on strike (one union which is awkward is in London's underground railway system but it does not have anything like all the workforce), but the problem from the unions point of view is that these have little effect beyond some minor nuisance value. That's because the 'awkward' union finds that the rest of the workforce, unionised or not, doesn't stop but covers for the strikers. In any case the union is powerless, in effect, to stop strike breakers who happen to belong to it.If they disagree they can join another union or none if their union withdraws membership. The union will call for its members to stop for one day, or a selection of odd days over a period; in the interim there is expected to be, and is, further negotiation and it is unusual for the strikes to go for more than two or three days in total.

No public meetings to decide on possible strike action are permitted. So we do not get, as we used to, the spectacle of a meeting in the open air in some soccer stadium where any decisions are made on 'a show of hands' and a) only the activists attend and/or b) any dissenters are intimidated into not being seen to be speaking against, or not voting against, the strike.

We used to find instances like those of your elevator men. These are instances of what we term 'restrictive practices' and may be illegal. We had some prize examples. One was the footplate-men. These were the men who shovelled the coal into the boiler of the steam locomotives. We last had steam trains in the early 1950s but the union insisted on two men,one a footplate man, being employed on any locomotive be it diesel, diesel electric or electric ! The print workers on national newspapers were also largely unnecessary, in that modern newspapers and printworks did not use hot lead type, but the unions saw to it that national newspapers kept the old technology (under threat, though most papers couldn't or wouldn't invest), hence the workforce.Many of them were superfluous even then, the unions having set matters so that two or three men were doing the job of one.

Modern union leaders are a different brand from the old ones. They were steeped in the mythology of the old left and a goodly number were communists, tending to see industrial relations as some class struggle between the bosses and the proletariat (or so they would talk; not all were quite so genuine). They weren't great believers in democracy (unless 'democracy' is orchestrated mass meetings in the open air); it was quite possible for the leadership not only to be unelected by any recognisable form of secret ballot but even to secure itself a job for life.

The modern leaders are not only elected on secret ballot but are like MBAs or personnel managers,familiar with business and more diplomat than firebrand.

Big labor in North America is pretty much moribund; it simply does not have the clout it used to. Membership is at a low. Over the years, its relation, especially the Teamsters, with the Mafia, has come out. The UAW has had to make huge concessions, as Japanese and other foreign cars have cornered the market. Airline unions, from pilots to mechanics, have had to surrender huge amounts, as the big carriers go into bankruptcy. It could be argued that unions were too successful; in a global economy, they priced their workers out of the market.

Here, JR, only 17% of the workforce in the private sector is in any union. In the public sector the figure is 58%. Overall the figure is 28%. Decades ago the figures were much higher. There has been a persistent and constant decline in union membership.

The unions destroyed themselves. Their practices were such that they were seen to be self-serving institutions constantly at odds with both the general public and the elected government. The big unions had enormous power which they constantly abused without being answerable to anyone, yet they were not representative of the workforce, in that few of their own members would have supported strike action but they were too cowed by the powerful and vociferous activists and, furthermore, many did not wish to be, or were not, in a union but were being compelled to do whatever the union directed.

Mrs Thatcher and her party swept to power on 'the Winter of Discontent' when unions fought the Labour government and we had, inter alia, graveyard workers and garbage collectors unified in strikes to blackmail and dictate to the government.This was union power at its worst, for the grievances were usually contrived and often not the grievances of any more than one of the unions involved. The sight of streets full of stinking, rat-infested garbage and bereaved people unable to bury their dead was blamed on the Labour government.

The unions effectively controlled the Labour Party. That is why it took Mrs Thatcher, a woman who was both utterly fearless and in tune with the 'silent majority', to fight them and force them to adopt proper practices: no Labour Prime Minister could have done such a thing. Once it was done it enabled future Labour Party leaders to say to the Party that it had to weaken the influence of unions in the Party if it were ever to regain the support of the electorate

I have long followed British politics, and there is no doubt that the Iron Lady made major changes during her mandate. Tony Blair benefitted directly from her. Could he have risen in the Labour Party 30 years ago? I doubt it.

quote:

Originally posted by juanruiz:
I have long followed British politics, and there is no doubt that the Iron Lady made major changes during her mandate. Tony Blair benefitted directly from her. Could he have risen in the Labour Party 30 years ago? I doubt it.

Could he? Never.The new leader John Smith had similar ideas but died suddenly of a heart attack. It is doubtful whether he would have been either as strong or as charismatic as Blair. Mr Blair has something of the Thatcher about him. Once elected nobody in his party dared to dissent openly. He was their talisman and he attracted many of the voters who Mrs Thatcher had won before. It was not for nothing that he immediately styled the Labour government 'New Labour' and sneeringly called anything which had gone before 'Old Labour'. Though he did much, his one regret , he says, is that each time he went for reform he did not go far enough !

Now he is gone the party is trying hard not to be seen as reverting to old ways. Like Mrs Thatcher before him he was the Party and adopted a style of cabinet government which was non-cabinet. L'Etat, c'est moi ! As with Mrs Thatcher, nobody dared oppose him whilst he was a winner and he cheerfully ignored anything and everything which he personally disliked, whatever the manifesto, the cabinet, his conference or other figures in the Party said. Mr Cameron, the Conservatives' new leader said that if he won the next election he would be a Prime Minister, not a President (He also pointedly said that his government's relations with America would be 'steadfast', not 'slavish' and thereby hit Mr Blair at his other greatest weakness in the minds of the public).

There is no doubt in my mind that Blair was New Labour. He had a savoire-faire lacking in those Labour PMs who preceded him. That he got mired in American ventures may not have been his fault.