Union-management relations

Andrew Sullivan links to this old article by Gregg Easterbrook from 1983:

What is at the heart of these and other conflicts is not an urge for self-destruction but rather the chronic mistrust between corporate management and American labor unions. Louis Brandeis, hardly a corporate apologist, said in 1905, "Don't assume that the interests of employer and employee are necessarily hostile — that what is good for one is necessarily bad for the other. The opposite is more apt to be the case. While they have different interests, they are likely to prosper or suffer together." One might assume that if anything could prove the reasonableness of such advice to both labor and management, it would be the pressures of the recession and the need to work together to keep companies from going out of business. Nevertheless, confrontation, however destructive, continues to be the norm in many industries. William Hobgood, a former assistant secretary of labor, who mediated the coal strike in 1978, says, "Historically, labor has made most of its gains through confrontation, not cooperation, and historically, management has been most satisfied when it has employed pressure techniques. You would think that the recession would cause some positive structural change in that relationship, but so far, if anything, it's made matters worse."

Why this should be so has to do largely with the course of labor relations through the years of prosperity that preceded the American economy's doldrums. Then, mechanisms designed in anticipation of infinite growth, and geared chiefly to provide a constant improvement of wages and benefits, were built into contracts. These mechanisms made little provision for any decline in profits or the retrenchment that would have to follow. Today, they still have a powerful momentum, even though they have become detrimental to the interests of all, ultimately threatening the shutdown of factories and stores that are the source of union jobs and corporate income.

But union intransigence doesn't arise without cause. It's often said that companies get the unions they deserve, and in some industries, this was clearly true:

The goon squads employed by coal-mine owners, the dirty, unventilated textile mills, the subsistence-level wages, and the broken backs and missing limbs suffered by laborers working, exhausted, too close to open-hearth furnaces or vicious stamping presses are not all that far in the past. What coal miner could be ignorant of the explosion of the mine in Monongah, West Virginia, in 1907, which killed 361 men and was caused by a company's indifference to escaping methane, or of the mine explosion in West Frankfort, Illinois, in 1961, which killed 119 men and was also caused by the owner's negligence?

Before workers formed unions, they were forced to accept the wages they were offered, and either to tolerate conditions on the job or quit. Substantial improvements in wages and conditions were not achieved in most industries until the 1940s and 1960s, when unions mustered enough power to bargain on an industry-wide basis — a system known as "pattern bargaining."