Do We Still Need Unions? More from IUE-CWA President Carl Kennebrew

I cannot think of a single industry that can’t be organized. Many people associate unions with manufacturing workers because when unions were at their peak in the 1950s and 1960s, over a third of the workforce was employed in the manufacturing sector. Similarly, today the National Education Association (NEA) is the biggest union in the country, representing more than three million teachers in public schools and universities, education support workers, administrators, and more. However, just because these labor unions represent a lot of workers in these sectors, by no means does that limit the power of labor unions to these sectors. 

The Economic Policy Institute reported last year that there is a tremendous gap between the share of workers with union representation (11.9 percent) and the share of workers that want a union and a voice on the job (48 percent). Unfortunately, our country’s anti-worker laws make it incredibly difficult to organize a union—but that doesn’t stop us. Workers are unionized in almost every profession you can think of: nurses, journalists, nonprofit professionals, bus drivers, political campaign staffers, graduate assistants, and photographers; retail, grocery, and other service workers; domestic workers, actors, and screenwriters; local, state, and federal government workers; and agricultural workers—the list goes on.

It is important to note that the benefits and protections of labor unions have historically been held by white men, but that is not our present, and it certainly cannot be our future. Today, African American workers are more likely to be union members than any other race, and the gap between male and female union representation has continued to tighten. On average, union workers make more money, enjoy better benefits, work in safer conditions, and have more job security than their nonunion counterparts. Every worker in this country deserves access to the protections and benefits a union membership provides, most specifically in the low-wage industries that are overwhelmingly made up of female workers and workers of color. 

However, you don’t just have to work in a low-paying field to benefit from union membership. César Chavez, a famous labor leader who cofounded the National Farm Workers Association with Dolores Huerta in the 1960s and helped organize hundreds of thousands of agricultural workers over his lifetime, often spoke about dignity as an organizing issue:

No issue can get people excited and interested in doing something about a problem as much as when personal dignity is involved. No injury is greater than not being looked upon as a human being. The deepest kind of hurt is when you find you’re not welcome, when even by the tone of voice that you are addressed in you know you are not considered to be anyone. This is the kind of stuff that gets you going. The working conditions and the wages, the lack of drinking water, the lack of education, the lack of housing, all hurt but not so deeply as personal injury...Wages are not our main issue in the strike. If this was our main issue, it would disappear after you got the union in to get an increase in the pay...We’ve increased the wages considerably in all places we have contracts. And in most of the places we don’t have contracts they have raised the wages to try to keep the union out. But the strike goes on.

Union membership is not just about how much money you make or how low your copayments are, it is about having a voice on the job without fear of retaliation and being more powerful as a collective than you are on your own. No matter where you work, no matter what you do, everyone deserves dignity on the job. An organized workforce is the strongest vehicle for that dignity. 

There are two big buckets workers’ contracts can fall in: “at-will” and “just cause.” “At-will” employment essentially means that an employee can be fired legally for any reason and without warning, as long as the reason is not explicitly illegal (like firing someone because of their race or religion). Contrastingly, “just cause” contracts require management to be consistent in discipline, ensure that rules are clearly defined and communicated, that investigations be conducted fairly, and that discipline be imposed equally; essentially you cannot fire someone for no good reason and the rules have to be fair and clearly communicated.

Virtually every union contract falls into the “just cause” bucket. However, because of corporations and the one percent’s successful campaigns to spread disinformation about unions, many people falsely believe that it is impossible to discipline bad employees in a union shop. This simply isn’t true. It is our job to make sure that management is acting fairly, that they aren’t changing policies and rules on a whim, and that workers who are doing their jobs and are following the rules are protected. No one wants to be fired unfairly and without a valid reason, so much so that many CEOs put “just cause” in their own employment contracts.

In a nonunion setting, the vast majority of employees are not even working under a contract, but rather a set of guidelines that management has the sole discretion to change. What kind of job security is that? 

Unions are fundamentally democratic institutions. On average, union representation elections have a participation rate of roughly 90 percent, obviously far higher than almost any election you see at the local, state, or federal level. Elections are held for all the officer positions with robust free speech rights and in the many different unions, including the IUE-CWA, officers are even subject to recall. For negotiations, bargaining committees are elected and then surveys are sent out to determine the desires of the membership. The final contract is always voted on and any strike votes must be democratic as well.

The decision on whether to act individually or collectively is often a tactical one. Not every workplace disagreement results in the union taking action, but when an issue affects multiple people, when the power of the collective is critical in solving it, and/or when there is a contract violation, union infrastructure and resources are deployed. What is more effective for a safety issue: a scared individual filing a safety complaint or the combined workforce speaking out as a unit through the contractual safety committee? A key tenet of the labor movement is the concept of solidarity. At IUE-CWA, we believe we move farther, faster, when we move together.