Negotiating the Future: A Labor Perspective on American Business, by Barry Bluestone and Irving Bluestone
Metzgar, Jack
NEGOTIATING THE FUTURE: A LABOR PERSPECTIVE ON AMERICAN BUSINESS, by Barry Bluestone and Irving Bluestone. Basic Books, 1992. 325 pp. $25. More baloney is written and spoken around "employee...
...But whatever you call it, the Bluestones are advocating something that would redefine unionism for the worse...
...Like Barry's previous books with Bennett Harrison, this is economics and labor relations written for a general audience, while offering a wholly original analysis that specialists (both academics and practitioners) will be unable to ignore...
...Without dramatic improvements in productivity (the Bluestones set 6 percent annual increases as a goal), workers' income would stagnate...
...To assess its value and likely impact it's necessary to consider not only its arguments, but the audiences to whom these arguments are addressed...
...And that's the problem...
...They'd develop strategies to "compete," as would Mexicans and Koreans...
...Rather it would be the workers, managers, and owners at GM against the workers, managers, and owners at Ford...
...Unions need to be, as some have been, much more actively involved in changing work systems and management practices that undermine the economic health of both private firms and public institutions...
...And unions need to help management manage better, including helping to improve productivity and product quality...
...On the other hand, if workers were able to increase productivity dramatically, the Enterprise Compact would require not only wage increases but price reductions that would allow the company to grab market share from competitors...
...Wage-led" growth sustained the boom for a quarter of a century...
...Their Enterprise Compact envisions a real union with a binding labor agreement and ' real—in fact, expanded— powers...
...It would no longer be the United Auto Workers against the auto companies as a group, trying to win the best deal they can...
...They have done the labor movement a service by thinking through one of its options clearly...
...Irving, the father, is a former production grinder for the General Motors Corp...
...Their conception of an Enterprise Compact logically derives from their analysis of EI programs and the power of union-management joint action in some notable cases...
...Unions were a fundamental part of the solution then, and they're a fundamental part of the solution now...
...Twenty years of experimentation and more than a decade of careful academic study of these workplace programs make it clear that democratic, participative organizations are able to outperform hierarchical, authoritarian ones...
...But this should not overshadow their overall conception or their other distinctive argument— the importance of unions in the American economy...
...But they are also critical of unions, which they see as inadequate in their response to today's more competitive and more global economic environment...
...who worked his way up through the ranks of the United Auto Workers (UAW), retiring as its vice president in charge of negotiations with GM...
...The Bluestones want a revolution in labormanagement relations, and they argue that the future of the U.S...
...And for that reason unions require a nonnegotiable ethical commitment from their members—worker solidarity...
...Many unionists would call this "company unionism," and would deny that there is anything new in it...
...From a union perspective, the Bluestones' Enterprise Compact is probably the worst idea since the Wobblies got it into their heads that labor contracts were a "bourgeois ruse" to be avoided like the plague...
...The logic of unfettered market competition is antiworker, and that's why unions have been successful in raising wages and standards only when they have been able to limit competition across a craft or an industry...
...Today it's different, and more difficult—the competition is global, and unions are falling apart everywhere...
...Managers are likely to see the book as too pro-union and unionists as too pro-management (which it is...
...This might be good for the U.S...
...economy, for a while at least, if GM and Ford workers in their competitive frenzy were able to chase out Japanese and German imports...
...But it should be clear, as it is not to the Bluestones, that the union approach is to organize internationally, to build unity among workers, and to control competition...
...Victor Reuther, one of the founders of the UAW, more properly calls the kind of thing the Bluestones are advocating "enterprise unionism," and Reuther and others have developed a thorough critique of it...
...In an Enterprise Compact product quality would be a strikable issue, and there would be no layoffs...
...The contract demands made by organized labor and the settlements it ultimately concluded with management provided workers with better wages SPRING • 1993 • 249 Books and benefits and reasonably steady employment— both of which contributed to higher consumption levels and therefore higher GNP and employment...
...Workers have a lot to offer management, if management will only listen...
...Some argue that this would inevitably happen if GM's Saturn experiment were generalized, but this is not the Bluestones' conception...
...But the 250 • DISSENT Books very idea of a union has meant that workers must stick together and refuse to compete with each other over basic standards...
...Though the Bluestones do not say it quite this way, they are very much aware that this is a "new brand of unionism...
...In such an arrangement, union workers would be organized not by craft (the AFL mode) or by industry (the CIO mode), but by company...
...Somewhere in the employee involvement section, however, the Bluestones take a wrong turn and just keep going...
...Unions must, as in the past, keep companies from destroying each other through ruthless competition...
...The Bluestones would reverse all this...
...economy depends on it...
...But "company unionism" as it has been practiced in the United States means that the company completely dominates the worker representation process and that there is no real union in the workplace...
...The details of their Enterprise Compact take up only a small portion of the book...
...There would be no "management rights clause," and the union would have a say in, and veto power over, corporate decisions on product pricing, purchasing of raw material, marketing and advertising, methods of production and the introduction of new technology, investments in new capital and products, and the subcontracting of production...
...The people to whom it will appeal the most are those—like academics and politicians—who have neither management nor union responsibilities...
...Because the Enterprise Compact links wages and benefits directly to productivity and profits...
...But in considering the Bluestones' Enterprise Compact, most unionists will understand that unions have both a much narrower and a much broader set of responsibilities than the Bluestones seem to realize...
...competitiveness and prosperity...
...Barry, his son, is an economist and co-author, with Bennett Harrison, of two books that had wide impact among labor and community activists in the 1980s —The Deindustrialization of America and The Great U-Turn...
...Only solidarity among workers can give unions this power...
...But they cannot become fixated on the enterprise level, nor can they abandon the independence of the traditional union structure...
...This is not easy, as there are real conflicts of interest among workers, as well as a host of imagined ones...
...But Japanese and German workers (and managers and owners) are no fools...
...There's no better guide to the progressive potential of employee involvement than this new book by the Family Bluestone...
...But why would a management agree to such a systematic loss of managerial discretion...
...unions played a pivotal role in maintaining postwar prosperity, not only for their own members but for the nation as a whole...
...Most analyses of what the Bluestones call "the glory days" of U.S...
...More baloney is written and spoken around "employee involvement" (EI) than any other issue in American business...
...economic prosperity, the postwar period from roughly 1945 to 1970, see the strength of unionism during those years as merely a consequence of economic good times...
...Indeed, without the increasing wages and benefits won by unions, it is unlikely that the immediate post-war consumption and investment boom could have sustained the glory days for much more than a decade...
...Without a stable set of relationships that limit competition, even a growing market in an expanding economy will not automatically result in better conditions for workers...
...It is naive to think that this global competition would be based strictly on productivity and quality, and never on reducing wages, working conditions, and living standards...
...A book that comes with jacket-cover endorsements from the Steelworkers president, the president of the National Association of Manufacturers, three secretaries of labor (including the current one), and the president of the United States is bound to have an impact...
...Every gain for the GM workers would mean more pressure on the Ford workers to "compete," and vice versa and so on...
...For "the competition" includes other workers, whose wages and standards would deteriorate and whose jobs would be lost unless they could come up with equally powerful productivity increases...
...From the Mine Workers' early twentieth-century efforts to organize an employers' association with which to bargain, to more recent attempts by unions like the International Ladies Garment Workers to develop industrial policies to make an entire industry more stable and competitive, the traditional union focus on helping to manage its industry is based on both moral and practical grounds...
...This analysis is crucial to their argument about restoring U.S...
...And I suspect this is very much by design...
...They believe that workplace-based employee involvement needs to be extended in what they call an "Enterprise Compact," so that union workers have a say in all aspects of management...
...The Bluestones marshal evidence to show that employee involvement programs have often been successful in doing just this, and that such programs are more successful in union workplaces than in nonunion settings—evidence that has turned upside down the widespread management assumption that employee involvement is antithetical to or a substitute for unionism...
...Here's where they call for a breath-taking redefinition of both management's role and unionism...
...The Enterprise Compact strips the union of any responsibility for industrywide standards and makes solidarity among workers in the same craft or industry (let alone as a class) obsolete...
...The Bluestones themselves show clearly the advantages of both oligopoly and government regulation in achieving our postwar prosperity...
...The whole system is designed to transform workers and management into an entrepreneurial team whose goal is to "beat the competition...
...The strategy is to use public interest and pressure to get both unions and managements to rethink how they've been doing things...
...But it's a mistake to dismiss this movement as "just baloney...
...All of these are desirable new powers from a union perspective...
...Using the GM Saturn plant as a model, the Bluestones argue that the union should be involved in "all strategic enterprise decisions" through a consensus decision-making process similar to that at Saturn...
...The Bluestones have thought long and hard about how to strengthen unions and empower working people in a complex and difficult new environment...
...The Bluestones show that matters were not nearly so simple: [T]he causation between economic growth and the strength of organized labor ran both ways...
...A workplace that taps the insight and knowledge of its workers will be more productive and produce better goods and services...
...Increasing market share would presumably increase profits, and in the best-case scenario workers might become rich...
...Unionism, outside of Japan, has been based on building unity among workers...
...Creative unionism has played an important role, through organized pressure at the workplace and in the political arena, in limiting the degree of competition in organized industries...
...Therefore, the Bluestones argue for changes in labor law that will facilitate organizing and otherwise strengthen unionism in America...
Vol. 40 • April 1993 • No. 2
