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.
Until now, ...
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.
I am a bit astonished at now seeing myself as a union member, even though I grew up in an area (Pennsylvania) with a strong union presence in the mining, steel, trucking and manufacturing industries. I had relatives and friends whose parents were union members. A boyhood friend, Randy Fogle, who survived the Quecreek Mine disaster, comes to mind.
Speaking of mines, my late grandfather spent his career as a coal miner until the day he retired. As a young man, he worked in the Pennsylvania coal mines in the 1920s and 1930s, which was a six-day-a-week job. He told me stories of the violence that took place in the coal fields during union organizing efforts back then.
At one time, he was hired by coal company management as a night guard armed with a shotgun to guard company facilities from being besieged by other miners in the night. That sounded terribly dangerous to me, and made me appreciate how hard the labor movement has literally fought to achieve worker protections. My grandfather died at the age of 82, finally succumbing to silicosis from decades of breathing rock dust. My grandmother told me that they knew at the time that breathing the stuff was bad, but what could they do? Her husband had to put food on the table, she said.
I had other impressionable experiences as a boy that I can recall.
I was a stock clerk at a Jamesway department store 31 years ago, the summer before my first year of college. I worked about 37 hours a week (the store could then consider me a part-time employee). While I was there, an organizing drive among the retail clerks began and later became contentious. I remember a store manager ordering a union organizer to leave the area in front of the doors to the store. Store management treated the employees to a nice dinner to plead their view of the situation. I did not go to the dinner, as I had already left for college by that time. The union lost the vote. My father later told me that the union was challenging the vote and that my vote was one of the votes being challenged, even though I had never had the opportunity to vote.
Pennsylvania is a thru-way for a huge number of trucks traveling throughout the Northeast and cross-country. I remember several high profile trucking strikes occurring when I was growing up. The Pennsylvania Turnpike goes through my hometown, and there were often reports of nails that had been strewn on the turnpike, the intended targets being strike-breaking or non-union trucks.
My mom worked as an administrative assistant at a high school in our area, but not the one that I attended. I don’t remember the details, but my mother was involved in an effort to organize the administrative staff at the school, which ultimately failed. She is 70 and retired now, with worries about money to live on and medical expenses. I am sure she would have been better off now if the union effort had succeeded.
When I was a young member of the work force, I was more ambivalent (weren’t we all). But because of my later experiences working under some poor leadership over the years, I have become a strong proponent of unions and the protections that they offer their members, especially when a person’s job can be considered as a commodity.
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.
With regard to the present, one concern that I have is the effect of seniority if job reductions were to occur. I have seen many times that one should never say never about the possibility of future layoffs. Most of the people in our group have put in more years at the company than I have. This includes a few people who are twenty or so years younger that have been here longer, even though I have 27 years of industry experience. The bargaining agreement has a "bumping" system that favors seniority in the event of layoffs. However, I see one mitigating factor in the age demographic at this company. There are quite a few co-workers who will be retiring in the next seven or eight years, so hopefully this won’t be an issue for me.
Well, this truly did turn out to be a personal diary. What do you think? Anything you’d like to share with me?