I've drawn inspiration from Richard Kahlenberg and Moshe Marvit in the past, but their latest work, along with Mark Zuckerman, feels like a mind meld.
Their report for The Century Foundation, "Virtual Labor Organizing: Could Technology Help Reduce Income Inequality," contains this little nugget:
The problem today is that joining a union at work is decidedly last century—clunky, contentious and confusing—and companies such as Walmart and McDonalds want to keep it that way.
Of course they do. And they've done a really good job for a really long time. Big companies have kept it difficult to join a union by convincing working Americans that union membership is all headache and no benefit.
But Kahlenberg and company see it differently.
As I referenced back in September, Kahlenberg believes the right to organize is a civil right. In this report, he doubles down, making the bold claim that, "the ability of employees to join a labor union is the largest unclaimed legal right to additional personal wealth in America today." He backs his claim by calculating the estimated union hourly wage premium—the amount by which an individual's hourly wage rises when he or she becomes part of a collective bargaining unit— across a number of industries. He includes manufacturing, the building trades, health care, teaching, public safety and the sciences to show that—regardless of your industry or the color of your collar, you leave money on the table when you choose not to join the union. In fact, the BLS has calculated median income for a two-income nonunion household to be $400/week less than for a union household. "Over the course of a lifetime," Kahlenberg says, "that adds up to more than half a million dollars in foregone wealth."
Personally, I think it's madness. Americans have a civil right that could put thousands of dollars in their pockets, and more than 80 percent of them are opting to just take a pass!
But then again, clunky, contentious and confusing are tough obstacles to overcome. And remember, employers want to keep it that way. They campaign, coerce and cajole. They intimidate, villainize and demonize. Employers have long targeted employees who advocate for union membership, and the tactics work. Workers have been convinced they're better off handing over their rights—and their checkbooks—than risking their jobs to go through the process of joining a union.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. The anti-labor forces are united in one thing—their desire to bust unions. And keeping the process cumbersome helps them achieve their goal.
Kahlenberg says a revitalized union movement could be a powerful force in reducing income inequality. But to do that, we need to bring organizing into the 21st century.
His timing couldn't be any better.
As Right to Work continues to rear its head in legislature after legislature across the country, the next front has already been opened in the war on workers. In places like Oklahoma, lawmakers (and ALEC) are trying to prohibit union dues from being paid via payroll deduction. And Illinois governor Bruce Rauner has been on an almost maniacal campaign against labor.
At the same time, the Supreme Court has granted cert in Freidrichs vs. California Teachers Association, which threatens unions' ability to collect agency fees from non-members who receive the benefits of collective bargaining. By the way, it's no accident that this case made it to next session's docket. The justices telegraphed, through earlier decisions, their desire to look at this issue.
Eliminating payroll deductions creates an extra hoop for union members to jump through each month. Agency fees prevent free riders—workers who accept all the benefits the union offers (collectively bargained wages, grievance representation, etc.) without contributing to the costs associated with those benefits. In other words, unions are facing a situation where they have to absorb the cost of representing more non-members at the same time it becomes harder for members to provide the union with resources.
The new goal isn't just to smear unions; the goal is to choke off labor's oxygen, to bleed unions dry. Because when unions are strong, all Americans do better. And when all Americans do better, it's hard to concentrate wealth and power amongst the few.
If there's a silver lining to all of this, the attacks seem to have awakened a sleeping giant. Unions are focusing on members and membership. Across the country, unions are undertaking massive organizing campaigns again.
Kahlenberg cites a 2007 study that showed 60 percent of workers would join a union if they could—at a time when only 12 percent of the workforce was organized. Why can't they? Because the barriers are too high. The intimidation factor is too persuasive. The clunky, contentious and confusing organizing process is a deterrent in and of itself.
To grow labor in the 21st Century, Kahlenberg suggests a digital organizing application that simplifies the organizing process. He proposes an application that identifies and maps employees for organizing campaigns, allows communication between organizers and workers that's free from employer snooping and moves the campaign quickly and efficiently through the collection and submission of cards to request an election.
I don't usually use this blog to talk about UnionTrack specifically, but—simply put—I feel like I'm in the eye of the perfect storm.
We built UnionTrack to be the technology platform that helps unions in the 21st century devote their resources to the core missions that strengthen the labor movement: organizing, training and advocating for working families. We believed we could create not only a system that unifies union operations into a single system that maintains a single version of the truth about each member, but that we could play a role in helping labor organize and grow. In many ways, we built UnionTrack to be everything Kahlenberg has proposed, and more.
We built it with a focus on the individual member, and we built it to service the entire union ecosystem. From workers engaged in an organizing campaign to pre-apprentice trainees and apprentices, journeypersons to retirees, UnionTrack allows any union—from a small local to an international headquarters—to manage each member's union lifecycle.
With some developing partnerships layered on top of the system we already have in place, I believe we could deploy the "theoretical" application Kahlenberg suggested in a matter of weeks.
On a personal level, it is incredibly satisfying to have the work we put into building UnionTrack validated by a respected expert on the labor movement. And as we continue to see legislators and policymakers line up with the few and the powerful, I am proud to stand on the side of working people across America and beyond.
As always, thanks for reading.
In Solidarity,
Ken
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