Lindy,
The biggest problem with unions these days is that they DO spend too much time worrying about how they can make their individual company competitive.
In the acceptance of the logic of competitiveness, unions and their members invariably do help their individual company cut labor costs and in so doing beggar themselves.
But it doesn't stop there. In sacrificing themselves at the altar of competitiveness, they set off a chain of events that generally leads to the beggaring of employees at the competition.
And as the concessions spread through an industry, the unit cost savings achieved by cutting labor costs soon evaporate, defeating the purpose of the original sacrifice.
It is true that many workers are unhappy with their unions, and almost everytime I hear a complaint (at least from a worker) about the union it is because a worker perceives their union as not fighting hard enough, not because the union isn't scrambling to give away the store in the name of competitiveness.
I believe it is true that most union leadership does not fight hard enough and has instead adopted the self-destructive allegiance to corporate competitiveness. This is something that needs to change in the labor movement. Of course, as my "avatar" suggests, my response is not to whine about it, but to organize to strengthen the fighting spirit of my union.
And that is one of the reasons I like the AFA presidents in PIT and PHL so much: They have the fighting spirit and the sense of solidarity that is needed so desperately in today's workplace!
BTW, your historical sense of Gompers is a bit off. He was one of the leaders who led the labor movement astray towards narrow allegiance to company competitiveness and internal union bureaucracy and away from worker solidarity and the democratic spirit from which true union power derives. And Hoffa, well he forgot his early lessons about worker solidarity and rank and file democracy from the Minneapolis Truckers Strike of 1934 and tried the topdown strongman approach. This led to shortcuts that put the leadership of the Teamsters in bed with management (with a brief hiatus when reform candidates took over the union in the 90's).
The labor movement has plenty of problems today, but failure to promote competitiveness is not one of them. An overabundance of militance is not one of the problems today either--to the contrary!
One of the cores goals of the labor movement is to take labor out of the competitiveness racket. What I want from my union today is for us to return to our core values of solidarity, democracy and an understanding that "an injury to one is an injury to all."
In solidarity,
-Airlineorphan
P.S. The fine free market fundamentalists at the Mackinac also claim that the blackout had nothing to do with the Rube-Goldberg deregulation of our energy system and argue a number of other fairly extreme positions. They are entitled to their one-sided views (as am I
), but there are quite a few other studies of the decline of union membership that contradict Mr. Robert P. Hunter's unsubstantiated opinions.