"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..."
Jeff in CA's story I’m 48 and now I’m in a Union inspires me to mark the differences between our experiences. Jeff's story begins
As a professional employee (an engineer and later a project manager with a PMP credential) from the time I graduated from college, I never gave a second thought to the possibility of being in a labor union. It just has not been an option at all the places I have worked. Where I now work, project managers do not have personnel supervisory authority. They manage projects in which their co-workers report to their own functional supervisors. This has been typical of my career in project management at other companies as well.
Now, after three years in my present job, I suddenly am a member of a local which is part of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, AFL-CIO.
... this union local had only represented a group of drafts-persons in our department. In December an additional group of engineers, project managers and others in the department were approached in an organizing effort. The company has a neutrality agreement with the union, so the procedure was not a contested affair. It was simply a majority vote of the group. Through a card-check procedure, a majority of the group turned in their cards in favor of joining. A couple weeks ago an outside vote-counter certified the results of the vote, and I instantly became a union member.
High Tech is notoriously anti-union, and having that neutrality agreement probably made the difference between success and certain doom. My own experience was quite different.
I worked at a spin-off of Hewlett Packard, Agilent Technologies, that made a lot of products used in Dept of Defense and Homeland Security. Management started doing design work in China, where sales of our products was illegal, and we began manufacturing products in Malaysia. Those Malaysian products couldn't be legally sold to our Defense Contracts without some logistical sleight-of-hand, but the labor was a lot cheaper than U.S. employees and so management told us to move the products overseas.
I felt that my role in enabling transfer of these high-skilled jobs was destroying the engineering capabilities and security of our country as well as the economic health of my community. It also was harming the company because our best engineers typically started out as assembly line workers that discovered a knack for electronics which we would nurture....our Malaysian assemblers did not have the basic education to pursue engineering degrees.
But, since there isn't much one person can do, I asked management if they would mind me advertising on their newsletter to form an employee association to see what everyone else thought of off-shoring and the fact that our wages were stagnant due to competing with workers around the globe.
That minor step towards employees joining together for mutual benefit went over about as well as the Steelworkers attempt to organize at Hewlett Packard.... http://www.nlrb.gov/...
I'm very similar to Jeff from CA, in the sense that being in a union had never occured to me before. In college, when I could only afford to eat ramen and chili beans, I used to be somewhat annoyed when workers at my local supermarket went on strike because I thought their wages looked pretty good at the time, compared to my part-time job. I was even under the misperception that only hourly workers could organize and that salaried employees couldn't join a union. And in High Tech that was true by default. Salaried or professional employees were rewarded for hard work and loyalty, and there weren't any unions because there wasn't a perceived need for them.
Then Hewlett-Packard's founders, Bill and Dave, made the fatal mistake of growing old and dying. Our managers, who rose through the ranks by following orders, were put in leadership positions, for which they lacked the vision and personal dedication.
Instead, they followed the market, followed the competition, and followed Wall Street to maximize their bonuses and stock options. Its hardly their fault, the Board of Directors rigged the executives' employment contracts to reward short sighted behavior and our CEO's lasted a few years and then cashed out.
Those of us who worked at the company without employee contracts and whose salaries required working until retirement had a longer view of things. We believed in the longevity of the company, not in the fluctuations of a certain financial quarter. We believed in what Bill and Dave called "The HP Way." We worked hard during downturns and took pay cuts because we believed the company existed to do more than be highly profitable. We felt the company had a social responsiblity as well. We believed in the value of the company to the community, and many of us volunteered in local charities and were involved in local politics.
But with new executives and no accountability to the now-dead founders, HP and Agilent abandoned the ethics and values of the HP Way. HP's CEO, Carly Fiorina had a notorious clash with a renegade board member, the son of founder David Packard. Fiorina recalls as only she can:
"It was a made-for-television drama complete with a reluctant, slightly rumpled good guy battling valiantly to save his father’s legacy and protect the little people pitted against a possibly wicked, definitely ego-driven, controlling woman determined to have her own way."
http://www.carlyfiorina.com/
As Jeff in CA tells in his story:
For several years in the 90s I worked at a large well-known Silicon Valley high-tech company. It is non-union, but my experiences there made me wish that it were unionized. For the first time in my life I felt as though I was a commodity, available for the company to use and discard. The workers there are told that it is a great place to work and made to feel that they should be happy just to be there, so that they can be paid less than at other comparable workplaces.
At age 36, when I joined that company, I went from being among the youngest in my work group in my previous industry, to being the oldest person in my work group. Whenever it could, this company would hire two recent college graduates instead of hiring one experienced person, and then it relentlessly demanded a high number of hours of work from them every week (overtime was uncompensated of course). The workers there would definitely benefit from a union, but high-tech companies have been notoriously difficult to organize, in part because the predominantly young workers are not convinced of the benefits of being represented by a union. At Yearly Kos in Chicago last year, I mentioned this to one of the Teamsters union representatives at the evening picnic, and he confirmed that until such workers turn in over 50% of their cards in an organizing drive, there’s not much to be done.
Damn. He could have been working at HP from that description. But for that matter many Silicon Valley companies adopted the HP Way, and also abandoned it when that was what the market dictated. Everything that Jeff says applies to me (except I never went to Yearly Kos). And though I knew how difficult organizing a union would be, I felt I had to give management the benefit of the doubt in complying with the law and had to assume they only objected to the Afl-Cio or other existing labor unions....they wouldn't object to a little internal team-building of employees to improve morale and find some solutions to our declining wages and benefits....they always said how valuable the employee are to the company.
Nope. The stories told by the AFL-CIO are true and apply for any group of employees. Management hated the idea of any group organizing that wasn't under strict control of the executives. And of course, though I took Labor Rights for granted before, they became real important to me then, though in actuality the decline of Labor Rights corelated precisely to our industry's declining wages and benefits. A bit of root cause analysis will tell any engineer the same.
After almost two years of struggle and eventually resigning in disgust with the inefficiency of the NLRB and of management's continued abuse of the law, I won the right to post a notice on the electronic bulletin board. Sure it cost me my career, but who wants to be a guard at Nurenburg anyhow? Sometimes you just have to do what is right even though you know you will pay dearly. And thus I close my diary with apologies to Dicken's A Tale of Two Cities.
"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known."