Bob,
The individual "company culture" will be the main differences between any union and non-union company. The unions have protected members jobs (to a point), depending on the union, the company and the business environment. The basic answer to the question is yes, they have protected the membership, because the companies have a "process" that they have agreed to follow. This is a short answer to an involved question. 🙂
Well the fact is that I work for money.
Job creation is not a function of unions, and now that they have been put in the position of being "responsible" for job creation at the expense of quality it has put unions exactly where corporations want them.
What union leaders have failed to realize is that unemployment becomes a burden on government, and who has the most control over government?-Corporations.
It is not the goal of government, and the corporations that control it, to make us all unemployed, just enough to make us desperate for work at any price. Thats why unions pushed for Unemployment benifits and Welfare. So people would be more resistant to exploitation.
The unions response should be that if they cant stop the company from moving jobs to third party vendors the unions simply organize the workers at the vendors. But to lower wages in order to try and prevent the company from moving them is self defeating for workers. They took the job because of the wage and the expectation that it would get better, not worse and the paid dues to a union to make sure of that.
Now the fact is that thousands of jobs were lost. We have less people working moving more people and freight than before, and they are doing it at reduced compensation. The airlines hit a grand slam-with the help of misgiuded or even corrupt unions. Would there have been more job eliminations? I doubt it. At Aa when the company said either reach this figure through concesions or we will have to lay off X amount of workers the Local representatives said -Lay off. The company then came back and said no, that if they laid off that many workers they could not operate.The companys bluff was called.
So jobs were lost and so were the pay and benifits that brought us into this industry and the unions were unable to do anything to stop it.
The unions gave the airlines drastically reduced labor costs and increased productivity.
The fact is that if we were all in one union we could have made out better.
The union could have taken the position that we were made promises after the abuses of Frank Lorenzo that BK would not be used as a means of voiding our contracts, therefore if any labor contract is voided then as a political protest all the unionized airline workers are going on a political strike.Economic strikes against a company as a means of gaining leverage to settle a dispute are controlled under the terms of the RLA but a political strike is basically a Boycott, which is legal.The political goal would be interpretation of legislative issues-the rules and powers of a BK judge.
The fact is the airlines and the courts ran right over all of us because there was no threat of resistance. If massive economic disruption due to a political reaction to the grossly distorted one sided interpretation of the BK laws was a possibility the Judges would have had to proceed more cautiously than they did.
Look at the figures, air traffic is not declining, nor is it expected to decline over the next few years. This is probably the only example of a growing industry where unionized workers wages are going down instead of up.
No matter what color is on the tails those planes are going to fly. They have to. In addition to the passengers there is freight. With todays "on demand" inventory shutting down the airline industry is not an option. As long as thats the case we have leverage no matter what they post as far as profits or losses. The challenge is to speak as one and let them know that we are not going to give our labor away.
The problem that we face is the structure of the industry. Our fates are tied to our company and whatever union may be in place. The unions, which are run as individual little corporations, see the elimination of another carrier as their opportunity to expand their membership without technically raiding. This is what drives the race to the bottom. The obsticles put in place to punish leadership that puts us in that race are formidable if not insurmountable.These obsticles make it so that having unions in place that are so ineffective may very well be much worse than not having a union at all.
