NAFTA and Labor in North America

5. The Crisis of Union-Management Relations in teh United States and Canada

5 The Crisis of Union-Management relations in the United states and Canada If workingmen and capitalists are equal co-partners, composing one vast firm by which the industry of the world is carried on and controlled, why do they not share equally in the profits? Why does capital take to itself the whole loaf, while labor is left to gather up the crumbs? Why does capital roll in luxury and wealth, while labor is left to eke out a miserable existence in poverty and want? Are these the evidences of an identity of interests, of mutual relations, of equal partnership? No sir. On the contrary they are evidences of an antagonism.1 —Karl Marx A little more than a quarter century ago, experts, commentators, and scholars began writing about the changing environment in the world of union-management relations. Typical of this commentary was a 1981 Business Week article that noted: “Quietly, almost without notice, a new industrial relations system with a fundamentally different way of managing people is taking shape in the U.S.”2 The new system, the article pointed out, was seeking “to end the adversarial relationship that has grown between management and labor and that now threatens the competitiveness of many industries.”3 In 1986, a group of employment relations scholars wrote in their now classic book The Transformation of American Industrial Relations: “We see the current moment as one of those historic periods of transformation in which existing institutional structures have been challenged and opened up to experimentation.”4 Observations that a new era of union-management relations was emerging reflected deep changes taking place in the structure of global capitalism, and they affected unions, collective bargaining, and workers’ rights not just in North America but around the world in both developed and developing nations.5 union-management relations · 113 Today, even more so than in 1981, the building up of competitive pressures in the global economy is a constant challenge to maintaining the profitability of many industries, and they have placed great stress upon nationally anchored union-management relations systems. This process is linked directly to a fundamental contradiction inherent in the capitalist system. More specifically, the nation-state system, in which the rules of commerce and ownership are written, designed, and regulated, increasingly comes into conflict with a capital accumulation process that stretches across national borders in search of markets, cheaper labor, lower costs, more efficiency, and higher profits. The result is a closer integration of the global economy characterized by social productive processes that are more international in scope and yet in most ways still subject to national laws. Many contemporary academics and analysts increasingly connect the changes taking place in union-management relations with these larger developments.6 In today’s global economy, trade and finance liberalization, new technologies and production methods, and an expanded labor market have strengthened the bargaining leverage of employers and weakened unions. Declines in union membership and fewer workers covered by collective agreements are marginalizing the influence of the postwar, union-centered industrial relations model in the world of work. In this new environment, low-wage, human resource management, Japanese-oriented, and joint team-based employment relations strategies are challenging the viability of the older industrial relations model.7 Moreover, the waning relevance of that older model is reducing the capacity of unions to organize workers and influence government policy. As early as 1976, John T. Dunlop, former U.S. secretary of labor and Harvard professor, identified the beginnings of this historical development and its implications for the future of labor relations in the United States. He wrote that greater interdependence between America and its trading partners would bring pressures on the employment relations and collective bargaining systems in the United States as a result of the effect of foreign wage rates and labor market policies. Dunlop predicted that these developments would destroy many American jobs, and he described the challenges produced by these developments as “transitional pressures,” insisting that they were inevitable and would require adaptation by both unions and management.8 The “transitional pressures” on union-management relations that Dunlop describes beginning in the 1970s are now well-established trends. Prior to the 1970s, the outcomes of union-management relations in the context of bargaining were characterized by workers obtaining lifelong job security, 114 . nafta and labor in north america payment of wages that reflected the general cost of living, and...