The Union Label

I spent a couple hours on Friday lurking in the hallway of the United Auto Workers Local 600 office in Dearborn. While my wife was taking a test for a job with the Census Bureau, I looked at the many historic photos which lined the halls. There were the usual photos of presidents, governors, and mayors, shaking hands and greeting union members. The more powerful pictures, however, were those depicting the difficult and violent struggle which brought the UAW to power.

I knew some of the history, at least in a casual way. Seeing the photos of people dead in the streets of Detroit, union leaders with black eyes and bruised lips. Confrontations between Ford "security", and the union protesters. Tens of thousands marching in a funeral procession for five slain men, who died fighting for their right to organize. Henry Ford vowed that workers would unionize over his dead body.

It made me realize how much my generation and those that follow have taken for granted. We expect a standard work week, fair wages, benefits, and a safe work place. Many of us have forgotten that those were not provided by employers out of the goodness of their hearts. Blood was shed for those rights. People fought for those rights. Their sacrifice and struggle, provided the greatest growth of the middle class this country, and probably the world has known.

As I was growing up in the late 60's through most of the 70's, it was a given that our generation would be better off than our parents. A big part of the "American Dream" was rooted in that belief. The growth of the middle class fueled that economic expansion. The middle class grew in large part because of the success of unions in general, and the UAW in particular. Growing up in Detroit, I witnessed this first hand.

Auto workers, were able to buy nice homes, send their children to college, and even have small cottages up north as weekend getaways. The union pay and benefit package impacted workplaces throughout the region. Even in non union employers, higher wages, better benefits, time and a half pay on Sundays, were all offered because in a union market they were expected.

Every time I hear a talking head on television prattle on about the overpaid auto worker, I want to scream. When we have a healthy middle class, we have a healthy economy. Certainly unions are not perfect. They have created safety nets in some cases for those who were not deserving. I grew up surrounded by auto workers. The overwhelming majority worked at exhausting, demanding jobs. They worked in unbearable heat during the summer. Long hours were common for many. Were they paid well for people without education? Absolutely.

The slide of the auto industry is not due to the fact that we paid the workers too much. The auto industry in America for years simply did not engineer innovative or dynamic product. Instead of researching and innovating, they followed the path of least resistance and kept building big SUV's. Mostly because they were highly profitable in the short term. Higher profit, led to higher stock prices, which led to big bonuses to the CEO.

The other elephant in the room so to speak, is our abysmal health care system. The erroneous astronomical hourly rates that one often hears the auto workers make includes the company investment in health care benefits. Of course, it is difficult for American companies to compete with foreign competition, when every other advanced nation provides health care for it's citizens.
Until we remove the burden of heath care from employers, and develop a government program, we will always be at a competitive disadvantage.

The shrinking buying power of the middle class, I believe is in great part responsible for the economic mess we are in today. That shrinkage began with the weakening of the union movement. Through much of the Bush administration, poll after poll showed Americans were not satisfied, or confident in the state of the economy. I remember economists being puzzled, because all their indicators and measures showed growth. That growth we now know was a mirage. A mirage created by low interest rates, and increasing real estate values which created an illusion of wealth. This was no more real than a waterfall in the Sahara. We were refinancing our homes, taking "equity" out, and going on vacations, buying plasma televisions, and new cars using profit that had not in reality been earned.

We were playing with the houses money, but the house was broke. Some of us could see the problem looming, even if we did not have a p.h.d in economics. Incomes were stagnant or dropping, except for the top one percent. I kept thinking about the "value" of my home and thinking how out of line that was. Especially as everyone insisted that the value could only go up. My house, is essentially a "starter" home and I thought no way could this be worth $250k in a few years. It makes me wonder how the p.h.d crowd failed to see this.

Republican senators say we must lower the pay of the American worker, to compete with the world. How about this for an idea. Let's try to make the rest of the world pay a decent wage to it's workers. Put a health care system into place that removes the burden from our industry. Most of all make sure that wealth grows in all segments of the economy. Trickle down has been utterly discredited. It is time we realize that prosperity spreads from the bottom up. The union isthe greatest tool that the American worker possesses to achievie a decent living. We should never discredit that or take it for granted.