White-collar workers are turning to labor unions

[Starry Messenger]

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-union-white-collar-20130516,0,6262845,full.story

<snip>

One of the most clicked-on links on the professional employees section of the AFL-CIO's website is "I'm a professional. What can a union do for me?" said Paul Almeida, president of the national union's Department for Professional Employees.

"When you come out of a recession, people feel more secure, and say, 'I've taken all the hits and done what I'm supposed to. I deserve my share of what's going on,'" he said.

The legal profession seems especially ripe for organizing because of the abysmal job market.

In Washington, D.C., for example, a group of administrative law judges is trying to form a union under the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers. In Canada, legal aid lawyers in Ontario also are trying to organize, in part, because their employer asks employees to share computers to do their work.

At one time, professional workers were encouraged to give input to management to improve the way companies are run. Now they are treated like cogs on the wheel, regardless of the amount of experience or the number of degrees they have under their belt, said Paul Shearon, secretary-treasurer of the federation. "Their level of influence has really diminished, and it's had a dramatic impact on their workplace environments," he said.

<snip>

The poll at the LA Times link is running 70-30, with the majority voting yes on "Do white-collar workers need unions?".

[freshwest]

1. More unions are generally better. ALJs - that's an odd thought. Go for it.

[Kingofalldems]

2. All workers should unionize.

[ruffburr]

3. ALL WORKERS NEED TO UNIONIZE!!!!!!

For the good of the country , White collar , Blue collar, Green collar, period
Thats all folks!

[Starry Messenger]

4. +1

[Skidmore]

5. The very same legal profession that has a subgroup which makes its living from advising corporate

bosses on how to screw workers over????

The only thing I have to say in regard to white collar workers organizing is that they'd better not use the power of their unions to dump on the blue collar or service workers.

[Omaha Steve]

6. K&R!

[Dawson Leery]

7. White collar unions needed to union 30 years ago.

[Starry Messenger]

8. Were white collar workers under the same social pressures in 1982?

I was very young then, but it seems like that was when being a yuppie white collar person made if seem like the world was in your hand.

[HiPointDem]

16. In 1982 we were in the throes of the first reagan recession & labor was under fire. Much like today.

In February 1981 Reagan presented the Economic Tax Recovery Act to Congress, calling for massive personal and corporate tax cuts, reductions in government spending, and a balanced budget...Reagan "propose[d] budget cuts in virtually every department of government..." he cut back social programs, including school-lunch programs and payments for people with disabilities... (also housing & many others, including, contrary to what the OP claims, social security...)

The United States was experiencing its worst recession since the Depression, with conditions frighteningly reminiscent of those 50 years earlier. By November 1982, unemployment reached, nine million, the highest rate since the Depression; 17,000 businesses failed, the second highest number since 1933; farmers lost their land; and many sick, elderly, and poor became homeless.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/reagan-recession/

Homelessness emerged as a widespread & common phenomenon under Reagan. The reagan recession killed my hometown's economy and it has never recovered.

PATCO was 1981. It was a white-collar union & it should have been a ticket to the clue train.

Reagan's war on labor began in the summer of 1981, when he fired 13,000 striking air traffic controllers and destroyed their union. As Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson noted, that was "an unambiguous signal that employers need feel little or no obligation to their workers, and employers got that message loud and clear -- illegally firing workers who sought to unionize, replacing permanent employees who could collect benefits with temps who could not, shipping factories and jobs abroad."

Most important was Reagan's appointment of three management representatives to the five-member National Labor Relations Board which oversees union representation elections and labor-management bargaining...The NLRB settled only about half as many complaints of employers' illegal actions as had the board during the previous administration...and those that were settled upheld employers in three-fourths of the cases. Even under Republican Richard Nixon, employers won only about one-third of the time.

Most of the complaints were against employers who responded to organizing drives by illegally firing union supporters. The employers were well aware that under Reagan the NLRB was taking an average of three years to rule on complaints, and that in any case it generally did no more than order the discharged unionists reinstated with back pay. That's much cheaper than operating under a union contract. Reagan's Labor Department was as one-sided as the NLRB. It became an anti-labor department...

Union-busting was only one aspect of Reagan's anti-labor policy. He attempted to lower the minimum wage for younger workers, ease the child labor and anti-sweatshop laws, tax fringe benefits, and cut back job training programs for the unemployed. He tried to replace thousands of federal employees with temporary workers...all but dismantled programs that required affirmative action and other steps against discrimination by federal contractors, and seriously undermined worker safety. It closed one-third of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's field offices, trimmed its staff by more than one-fourth and decreased the number of penalties assessed against employers by almost three-fourths.

http://www.dickmeister.com/id89.html

The leadership of the big unions, with few exceptions, followed a concessionary path as their membership was decimated. Randi Weingarten is in the same mold, and when you've seen it before you recognize it.

We're living through a replay of the 80s in slow-mo, only this time with way less 'fat.' It's the bones they're picking at now.

[HiPointDem]

9. maybe they should have got a clue 40 years ago. too little, too late.

[Starry Messenger]

10. Were white collar unions popular 40 years ago elsewhere?

[HiPointDem]

11. public unions are largely white-collar. i'm speaking of private white-collar workers who thought

unions were for blue-collar types who didn't have the 'talents' white collar workers did.

[Starry Messenger]

12. Do you believe the people organizing now were in the workforce 40 years ago?

The push now to organize seems to me a generational split. I don't believe in the concept too little too late though. Labor needs to expand.

[HiPointDem]

13. Labor may "need to" expand, but it's contracting. No, they likely weren't in the labor force

40 years ago, but they may have been in the labor force during the dot com boom when I heard plenty of young go-getters saying the same stuff about unions. They were too special and smart to need unions. And talking about their 'intellectual property" by which they meant their particular skill set. Everybody was going to be a millionaire.

More power to these people, but the ground is turning to sand as we speak.

In 2012, the union membership rate--the percent of wage and salary workers who were
members of a union--was 11.3 percent, down from 11.8 percent in 2011, the U.S. Bureau
of Labor Statistics reported today.

The number of wage and salary workers belonging to unions, at 14.4 million, also declined over the year. In 1983, the first year for which comparable union data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent, and there were 17.7 million union workers.

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm

What is the bargaining lever for unions today? What are the choke points?

Few & far between. I doubt there are many in any union's leadership who even have a grasp of the whole production-distribution-consumption chain in their own industry anymore. Things are too spread out, & constantly shifting around -- by design, to remove such choke points that might be used by labor.

[Starry Messenger]

14. I have friends who were saying those things too, 15 years ago.

They've since changed their tune, many of them. I don't think it would be good to turn them away as allies.

Labor can't expand if people are discouraged from changing their mind on the subject.

[HiPointDem]

15. not turning them away (as if i had any power to do so). i'm just stating my opinion. at this

moment in time, not enough people are doing anything to turn the tide. things may change, or they may just devolve further.

tonight i feel like shit & say it looks like they'll devolve to me, because i was just threatened by my fucking crackhead neighbor.

tomorrow i may feel different.