Whither Labor?

Labor Day feels like the inverse of Memorial Day – both holidays mark the change in season more than commemorate anything specific. It’s not like folks stay at home on Labor Day contemplating the legacies of Samuel Gompers or George Meany. People around here head to the lake for one last long weekend because summer is ending and if Labor Day means anything, it means we all get a day off to rest from our labors.

Organized labor as a force is fading fast in our culture. Pay attention to the media and ask how many positive references you hear to labor unions. Unions get the blame for coddled, unproductive workers, high costs and low profits.

On top of that, the new Beloit College Mindset list just came out, the list created annually to capture the worldview of freshman entering college. (The list mostly succeeds in showing the rest of us how old we are.) Number four on this year’s list is: “The only significant labor disputes in their lifetimes have been in major-league sports.”

That’s not how it used to be.

Sometime around 1970 my father told my brother and me that there was going to be a strike at the Fisher Body II plant by our house. He worked a few miles away at Fisher Body I. We hopped the fence that separated our sub-division from Fisher II and, sure enough, at the appointed hour a hoard of people came streaming out of the factory. A few of them hoisted placards and started picketing. A piece of paper blew across the road to where we were and my brother picked it up. We now had a copy of the lyrics of the union’s marching hymn Solidarity Forever. We joyfully sang along with those on the picket line: When the union’s inspiration through the worker’s blood shall run, there can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun, yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one, for the union makes us strong….

But it wasn’t all marching and singing. There was definitely violence in the air. I remember someone came barreling into the plant entrance and tried to drive a car through the picket line. The way was blocked and there was a lot of shouting and cussing and rocking and pounding of the car. A stalemate ensued until some plant security officers came out and rescued whoever was trying to get in.

If my memory is correct, the strike at Fisher II was never settled. Not that it mattered in the long run – Fisher Body is long gone, and if the Federal Government hadn’t intervened a few years ago there’s a good possibility that General Motors itself might have gone under. The struggles of Flint, Michigan, where the drama of the strike at Fisher II played out, have been well documented by Michael Moore.

I’ve sometimes ridiculed Michael Moore because he actually grew up in the suburbs while I grew up in the city. Truth be told, though, his father was a blue collar, hourly employee at AC Spark Plug on Flint’s east side. My father was a white collar, salaried GM employee and we lived on the southwest side of town. My father spent his career in “labor relations,” which meant he was locked in a slow dance with the United Auto Workers for about 30 years. The UAW was anathema to him. In my father’s retirement he’s seen benefit after benefit stripped away as GM has struggled financially. Things like pension payments, life insurance policies and health care provisions have all been cut or reduced. In addition, the GM stock he accumulated over the years is now worthless. Ironically, the blue collar UAW retirees have had more of their benefits preserved because of the strength of collective bargaining. Somebody should have started a union for the white collar retirees!

I think about the assumptions labor and management made about the world a generation ago. They assumed they should be in conflict with each other. They assumed unreliable, ugly, gas-guzzling automobiles would always be in demand. They assumed it was okay to spend your life doing mind-numbing work that required few skills and little education. They assumed people worked only for money and didn’t need things like inspiration, hope or beauty in their work lives. They assumed General Motors, the largest corporation in the world in those days, was invulnerable. Neither side thought much about what mutual goals they had. Instead, they fought and fought to beat each other and get a bigger piece of the pie than they had before.

The future, for any company or corporate entity, and for any labor organization, is in cooperation instead of conflict, in inclusiveness instead of exclusiveness. Who can afford the kind of acrimony and combativeness I witnessed as a youth at Fisher II? Go back to the Beloit College list. Only in professional sports, where millionaires bicker with billionaires, can people afford strikes and lock outs. In the real world, happy are the employers who have learned the lessons of the labor movement and come to value the unique contributions every employee brings, who share ownership, who build cultures where everyone is an insider. The future belongs to them.