Download The Next Big App: Workers` Guide to Good Jobs and Good

The Next Big App: Workers’ Guide to Good Jobs and Good Employers
Thomas Kochan 2/4//13
January was another bad month for unions, and indeed for America’s labor relations
system, and for workers of all kinds. On January 21 the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported union
membership fell significantly last year to the lowest level since 1916. The next day a court of
appeals ruled that the National Labor Relations Board members were appointed illegally by the
President without Senate confirmation and so all their decisions are now open to challenge.
These include a call for an election to determine which union will represent over 40,000
employees of Kaiser Permanente, a decision protecting co-workers’ use of social media to
discuss employer practices, and more than 200 other rulings.
These are but symptoms of a much deeper crisis in American labor relations: The system
of union representation and collective bargaining built into the 1935 National Labor Relations
Act is on its deathbed with no cure or replacement in sight. Repeated efforts to reform labor law
have failed — from 1978 to the aborted effort to enact the Employee Free Choice Act during the
first Obama Administration. A biological or social system that cannot reproduce and replenish
itself with new participants is unsustainable. Labor lost not only this week’s battles but also the
war itself and should throw off the chains of the current law and start afresh by experimenting
with new ways of giving workers the voice they want and the economy and society so
desperately need.
Why such a revolutionary change? The best kept secret from workers and the public is
that today unions cannot organize under the law if management opposes them through either
legal or illegal means. In the face of determined management opposition, unions fail to obtain a
collective bargaining agreement 90 percent of the time, even after a majority of workers sign a
statement saying they want the union to represent them. So today, ironically, it is management
and their consultants and lawyers who decide who will get a voice at work, not workers as
envisioned in labor law.
More generally, unions have not been able to reverse 30 years of wage stagnation and
growing income inequality or to stem the tide of cutbacks in pensions and insurance coverage.
As more workers move from traditional employee status to contract and contingent work, move
across jobs at a higher rate than in the past, or are classified as supervisors or managers, the
percentage of the workforce even amenable to traditional organizing and representation
continues to shrink. More workers are excluded from union reach today than are included.
But, ironically, as unions declined over the past several decades workers’ desire for a
voice at work, both through traditional union routes and in other ways, grew. In 1976 just under
one-third of non-union workers said they would join a union if given the chance; by 2000 nearly
50 percent said they would do so. Moreover, consistently surveys find that 70 percent to 80
percent of all workers want a voice over how they do their job, their training and development
opportunities, and other conditions of employment and expect their employers to value their
input, listen to them, and build a cooperative and friendly workplace. As the leader of a work
team at Kaiser Permanente said recently: “We want to enjoy coming to work, and to like our
coworkers and supervisors. When we are happy and feel good about being at work we help make
our patients feel happy and get better.”
Here are just some of the innovative approaches that might emerge if workers and unions
cast aside the 75 years of legalese that are now strangling the current system by experimenting
with new models and building on the ones that have already proven their value to workers,
employers, and society.
1. Some enterprising young entrepreneur might develop a national online workplace survey
that workers can use to rate employers as places to work and publish the results widely on
an easily pulled up i-phone app, supported by Google-like ads paid for by the best
employers in an industry or local labor market. This would not be limited to any single
occupational group or level but apply to hourly, managerial, and professional employees,
contractors, temp workers hired through agencies, and everybody else. Ranking the
quality of jobs employers in an industry and region offer would provide workers a new
source of power, one better and more accessible than the strike.
2. The best employers and worker organizations would do what Kaiser and its union
coalition and a growing number of teacher organizations and school administrators are
doing — build partnerships that nurture and support engagement of front line employees
in continual efforts to improve the services they provide to patients, students, or whatever
customers they serve, directly or through the products they develop and make. Workers
respond well to these partnerships — despite some traditionalist union leaders who want
to argue all employers are bastards who can’t be trusted. Workers know better — they
can tell good supervisors, managers, and employers from bad ones and know that both
types exist. So unions would give workers a reason to value representation with good and
bad employers by serving their needs with whatever type they encounter over the course
of their careers.
3. New lifetime membership models would be created in which unions help members
navigate the 7-10 job transitions they will likely make over the course of their careers and
provide continual education and training to keep skills marketable and information on
where new job opportunities can be found. Employers might view them not as
adversaries but rather as preferred suppliers of talent at least as good as current temp
agencies, on-line job posting services, and other referral/recruitment channels.
4. New wage norms would spread across the economy — the race to the bottom would be
replaced by a race to the top. Bottom feeders in a labor market, whether giants like Wal-
Mart, or restaurants that skim the tips off the wait-staff, would be exposed to current and
future employees. The media might start covering workplace news as vigilantly as the
media now covers financial market news on a 24-7 basis. Wages might finally wake up
like Rip Van Winkle after their three-decade long nap.
5. Immigrant advocates would gain stronger voices in workplaces that now use threats of
deportation to undermine union organizing drives. Unions would not have to demonstrate
they have a majority of all workers in some bargaining unit but could use the full power
of social media, community organizing, and political pressure to expose employers who
exploit immigrants and other low-wage workers. Violating basic labor standards or
treating workers poorly would become a national disgrace that would force American
employers to establish codes of conduct similar to what multinationals like Nike and now
Apple have had to do in response to exposes of abuse of contractors overseas. The
difference would be these data would be made public and transparent and there would be
millions of workers in these workplaces monitoring employer compliance.
This is the new world of worker voice and representation that I believe is not only
possible but also likely to emerge if we could apply the nation’s entrepreneurial talent to building
a sustainable economy that works for workers, business, and the overall society.
So, workers of America, throw off your chains, ignore the outmoded doctrines of the
National Labor Relations Act, and just do what makes sense to you. And let the best app win!