The best and the worst of American unions

Washington Monthly, July-August, 1987 by Steven Waldman

Albert Shanker, the AFT president, has the flexibility to take bolder positions than the NEA's leadership in part because he is an autocrat, but there are still issues he has held back on. Most significantly, in emphasizing "professionalism' he has continued to insist teachers should take a series of often useless education courses before they are fully certified. Moreover, his hawkish views on foreign policy and his leadership of a racially polarizing New York City teachers strike in 1968 have made some liberals reluctant to join hands with him.

But Shanker is not likely to retreat on most reform issues. In a recent article, he offered hope--and a threat. "If things get only slightly better--or if they get worse--all the powers we can exercise at the bargaining table or in the legislative arena will not be enough to stop an angry public from getting even with the public schools. But even if we could fool the public we cannot fool ourselves. Nor would we want to. In the end it is we who must serve as the protectors of our students and our profession.'

United Auto Workers--One might have expected it from a hippie-turned-entrepreneur or from desperate workers faced with an immediate plant shut-down. But ten years ago it seemed unlikely that the union fighting hardest for a creative, flexible workplace would be the one that had fought most ferociously for stifling work rules and don't-tell-me-about-declining-profits wage increases. But with UAW president Douglas Fraser's appointment to the Chrysler board in 1980, the union adopted a radical principle: unions can take responsibility for economic growth.

For example, Ford's Employee Involvement program, credited with helping the company's dramatic financial turnaround, not only brought workers in on shop-level decisions about production and work conditions, but gave workers the authority to stop assembly lines to cut down defects. The program also eliminated many job classifications. In other industry plants that have more than 100 rigid job classifications, a few absentees can cripple an assembly line and worker tedium is unrelieved.

The contract bargained with the New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc. (NUMMI), the joint General Motors-Toyota venture in Fremont, California, created a similar system of small teams, with each worker trained at many tasks. After years of labor-management relations so bitter that the plant was referred to as "the battleship,' introduction of employee control dropped the absentee rate from 20 percent to 2.5 percent today. Grievances went from thousands to dozens. And NUMMI's product, the Chevrolet Nova, has received good reviews. "Nobody thinks we died and went to heaven, but when we have a problem we talk it over and we solve it,' says Gus Tilly, vice president of the local. "Quality is up. Last month we had one of the best orders yet. People feel like they're listened to.'

These agreements also include incentive pay plans that tie some wages to company profits. The UAW and the auto companies have also set up a $1 billion job bank to retrain and reassign workers who lose their jobs due to new technology, plant consolidation, or other efficiency measures.