UAW Local 6888

Office Professionals of Central Michigan University

Americans Owe Much to Labor Unions

By Glenn Feldman

By every available measure, union members are better-clothed, better-fed, better-paid, and better-housed than non-union workers with comparable jobs.  They enjoy better and fuller access to health-care and prescription drugs.  They have safer and more dignified workplaces and a great deal more recourse when employers violate the most basic standards of justice and equity.

But the real success story is not what labor unions have won for the 12.9 percent of the workforce that they comprise, but what -- through the expenditure of real blood, sweat, and tears -- they have been able to gain for the millions of Americans who do not belong to them. For it is through the daily tribulations of their members, sometimes through the loss of actual lives and limbs, that unions set the bar for what others take for granted in the workplace.

Yet most Americans remain blissfully unaware of the gargantuan debt they owe the labor movement.  They are indifferent to -- or worse yet contemptuous of -- organized labor, often without the most rudimentary knowledge of what it is unions do.  Once a year, on Labor Day, Americans will take the weekend holiday and grill out.  And politicians -- even the conservatives who are most opposed to the basic values that unions stand for -- will spew meaningless platitudes about the dignity of work in America, and then return on Tuesday to their usual program of decimating safety standards and workplace regulations so that companies can increase their bottom line. For pure charade, Labor Day has come to rival January's Martin Luther King Day.

Far too many Americans take this approach to organized labor.  A majority of the MBA students I have taught can enumerate with child-like glee the Christmas list of goodies that awaits them once they go out and take a real job: sick pay, overtime pay, vacation pay, health insurance, disability insurance, good wages, safety standards, pension benefits, prescription drug coverage, and more -- without ever once realizing that it is unions to whom they owe a massive thank you for setting the industrial standard.  Instead, they believe that an all-powerful and beneficent employer is responsible for willingly 'giving' these things to them.  And so the fable is brought full circle -- replete with employer as Santa Claus.

Glenn Feldman is an associate professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.  His latest book is The Disfranchisement Myth:  Poor Whites and Suffrage Restriction in Alabama.