A Union by Any Other Name, Part 3

By Richard T. Balsley

See Part 1 and Part 2 if you have not already!

The Use and Application of Labor
Offices and factories allow people to pool their efforts. This has the added bonus of multiplying the output of each individual as they specialize to handle key areas of the process to produce the product or service offered by the company. Having such proximity to one’s fellow workers makes it easier to cope not only with the stresses of the job, but it also helps to alleviate any sense of isolation between members of the same profession. Some of these concerns may have led to the guild halls for the same reason that people gather in offices or hold trade conventions today. As everything has a trade-off, there is a downside to the ability to congregate and perfect one’s skills on a daily basis.

The individual worker has no say in where he can perform his job nor does he have any input into the conditions of the facility. Government ordinances do, certainly, but they are outside the power of a specific person. These conditions are under the control of the person who owns the worksite. Additionally, most workers do not own the equipment necessary to do their jobs regardless of their level of skill. Herein lays the problem for the worker: having a desire to perform meaningful work for meaningful pay without losing access to the means of production where such criteria can be met. If the chief aim of the company is to provide a product for profit, then it behooves the board members to maximize earnings, but where to take the money is another question.

For good or for ill, all workplaces that employ groups of people are sites of labor extraction. There is nothing inherently wrong in this idea. Not only is it convenient and require less logistics, a centralized work location, and also a place where quality and safety controls can be instituted, but it is also a place where efforts can be coordinated. It is this last point where one can see the need for a supervisor. No longer burdened with teaching a new apprentice how to create the entire product, a supervisor or foreman can train a worker to perform a specific series of tasks along the assembly line style of industrialized production. The foreman likewise only needs to know how to do the jobs under his purview. Some of these changes between one job and the other are often minimal so that workers may graduate from one position to another in some industries. The purpose of this is nominally for standardization of quality.

Owning the sites of labor extraction and the means by which to do it is a central point of contention. In a truly communistic culture, the people who do the labor would own the site, giving them complete control over how, when, and the value of their efforts for whatever capital or other assets are exchanged to obtain what the workers produced. Whether it is a cultural or biological imperative for people to stratify themselves, the most likely result is the concentration of power in the hands of fewer people, not more. This is what capitalism does efficiently and effectively and why it is mentioned near the end of the last installment as a natural extension of feudalism. In a democratic republic, the people are legally equal in all respects. Within the site of labor extraction and the laws that govern how such labor may be extracted, this is not the case.

People are paid based not on the work they actually do in a factory or an office, but rather for what the company thinks the position each person occupies is worth. The individual is replaceable. As a result, the wages are deflated just enough to make the job enticing without making it too repellant and costing the company more money than what they would earn by paying the higher wage. Unions have helped keep the pressure on companies to provide benefits while keeping wages stable. Given the cut in profits that such wages and other forms of compensation unions work to secure in exchange for their members’ labor to be extracted, it is easy to see why both have an antagonistic relationship.

The disintegration of union power through right-to-work laws is not a bad thing in light of some of the problems that union control has had over the job market. Anyone attempting to enter a trade had to be a member of a union or be barred from work in a facility where the union oversaw employee relations with the company owners. Unfortunately, those very laws have given corporations more leverage in dictating what workers will receive in compensation for their labor. The rise and prominence of unions has been at times a barrier to the growth of any single business, but when strikes spread across several companies in support of work stoppages in other locales, it becomes harmful to the economy overall. Hence, there exists the need for balance in the legal system to prevent abuse by either organization.

The data for the past forty years or so shows a correlation between the decline of the middle class wage and the decline of the unions. Whether this is because corporations have worked so diligently to break the corporations or is in part a result of the changes in technology and the outsourcing of so many manufacturing jobs is not necessarily so clear. The increasing disparity between wages of blue collar and white collar workers, however, is. Unpacking the reasoning for this is beyond my purview, but what I can comment on is the mentality that defines the two sides of the argument and how that has helped lead to the entrenchment.

Essentially, the divide between unions and corporations comes down to a quasi-ritualistic structure that imposes a moral order on the thinking of the members of each group. The effect is a cultural indoctrination which Joseph Campbell described in The Masks of God, Volume 4: Creative Mythology as part of the ritual which serves “as the enforcement of a moral order: the shaping of the individual to the requirements of his geographically and historically conditioned social group” (p. 5). The result is the belief that the opposed group is the Other bent on eradicating the culture’s existence, and to some extent this may be true with all the legal wrangling that have informed both union and corporate culture. The strategies and tactics used by both groups are not so different, however; how they manifest is.