Jeff:

You need to pack up your anti-union propaganda and move over to Red Oregon. Everything the police and fire unions want is pro-family, pro-fessional, and pro-Democratic. To suggest otherwise is anti-union and fascist.

Traitor.

AHHHHHHH....I see Alice. If one lays out a spirited case that in anyway differs from the standard progressive mantra regarding unions, then one is no longer welcomed in the progressive movement?

Hmmmmm....a movement that despises dissent. Doesn't sound very progressive to me. I hope we don't lose contributors like Jeff. He's always an enjoyable read and inspires one to think. In the end I may or may not agree with him...but it's refreshing none the less.

Alice, You on the other hand...well lets just say I don't really care when your next post will be.

As for the PP&Fire Disability and pension fund....it's definitely on it's way out. Aside from the fact that it's fiscally unsustainable, it's been disgracefully abused.

I agree Paul....I think the PP are deluding themselves if they think they can kill reforms at the ballot box. If anything, a vote on radical reforms is a slam dunk....which is why Randy Leonard will want to stall this thing as long as he can.

Skip, et al:

I was being facetious. Clearly, if you look at the UAW, the Teamsters, or the local janitors unions, their activity over the last 50 years has resulted in fewer union jobs, declining union enrollments, and a hugely successful "non-union" movement that has bankrupted traditional union companies or U.S. based industries.

The fact they make more money or have higher benefits is precisely the problem. If they don't earn those benefits through increased productivity or superior quality, their non-union competitors kick their ass. Why do you think Wal-Mart has twice the profit margin as Costco?

Mark - your knowledge of union vs. non-union pay and benefits is impressive. Yet is also exactly the problem. I'm a salesguy at a local manufacturer with union labor in our shop. I CAN'T COUNT how many jobs we've lost because we're unable to submit a competitive bid. And guess what happens then? Shop workers get laid off. Also, their union is dead set against any of them cross-training, so machine operators can never shift over to assembly, or vice-versa, when the production schedule demands. Guess what happens then? That's right, more layoffs - we can't have machinists sitting around for 2 weeks when the bulk of our work is in assembly, so we have to let them take a couple weeks off. Now that's good business sense. NOT! Very frustrating.

Alice. Omigod, that was hysterical. I laughed out loud when I read your first comment. I assume you're being more sincere in the second bit, but love the fact that I'm not sure.

As to Mark, thanks for chiming in - though I agree with Alice's second comment; you can compare and contrast figures all day long, but it doesn't mean much if you do so outside of the context of whether that's realistic or even producing sustainable victories; on the evidence of trends in unionization, I'd suggest it isn't.

A second point, Mark concludes with a tactic that liberals so often freak-out on conservatives for using: attacking the messenger, in this case The Oregonian, rather than the substance of the argument. If you can dismiss the facts in their copy, fine; you'll also be a hell of a lot more persuasive.

On that subject, I caught one whopper in your comments. It's the second half of this bit:

"While Jeff actually adds a luke-warm rejoiner on unions in general, nary a word or link on the notorious history of the Oregon workers compensation system and and its systematic rejection over the years of valid claims by workers.

By way of response, I'll pull from the Officer.com article I referenced in the original (which also notes that the PPFD&R Fund is a rather unique arrangement), as opposed to the "anti-union" Oregonian:

"The committee found that the average cost per disability claim under Portland's public safety fund was more than three times higher than the average disability claim for all other city employees. It also found that Portland's fund denied only 0.2 percent of its claims between 2000 and 2005, compared with 13.7 percent of claims denied for all other city employees under workers' compensation."

In my world, a 13.7% rate of denial hardly equals "systematic"; 0.2%, on the other hand, well, let's just call it a rubberstamp. That's the kind of factoid you've got to address to make a convincing case for unions. Slagging The Oregonian doesn't cut it.

And, by the way, I've belonged to two unions in my day. I've seen them go to the mat for employees who showed up to work drunk - and not to get them counseling either, but only to protect this same employee by demanding a massive paper trail to allow firing (you'd be shocked to find out where this was; I'd rather not say because, well, the drunk was a nice guy). In another union job, compensation was delineated in rigid salary tables; raises were given to all employees regardless of performance by schedule and, occasionally, via cost-of-living increases. What's the point of working hard - or even well - under such a system? Your pay doesn't change whether you slack off or shine. Moreover, when you spend your day cleaning up other employees messes (as I have) and, yet, you don't see any recognition that you're pulling more weight than an "attaboy," yeah, that tends to make you question the wisdom of that system. That's the near-worship of loyalty over competence; does that really make sense.

Both of those things are not a PR problem, or "lousy marketing." Those are crap systems for organizing labor. The same goes for PPFD&R's cushy fund. From what I've read, I don't know how that system can be justifiably maintained.

I welcome any evidence - links, stories, random observations, etc. - as to why it should. I'd also welcome a post that you described in the first half of the comment I excerpted above. I didn't present as much because a) I don't know where to find it, b) that wasn't the purpose of my post. I see a country where union enrollment is declining and their relevance dwindling. What I don't see is a willingness to on the part of unions to seriously address that decline.

You may not believe it, but I sincerely want the unions to adapt and thrive. I genuinely cannot see another alternative to balance the power employers inherently enjoy. On the political level, they're the only place where the great mass of the hoi polloi actually organize and express their interests; again, that's a balance against employer/corporate interests, who arrive at their own self-interest fairly naturally.

At the same time, I'm not going to shut off my brain and bless every last behavior of any given union - especially when said actions don't make sense. Unions need to get out of their defensive crouch and actually think. Unions don't suck, in and of themselves; they only suck when they become hostile to thinking seriously about the problems confronting them.

Finally, Skip, thanks for having my back...even if I'm not sure it was needed (very mysterious person, this Alice...).

And, yeah, what Larry said. Seriously, that's the problem unions need to address. Again, how can that asinine system by lousy marketing?

For those interested, I (finally) found a copy of the Independent Review Committee's report on the fund. You can find it on this page. It's a pdf file and my machine's too dumb - or I'm too dumb - to link to it.

And for Pat...crap. I wrote the dang post and I didn't even catch the word play...

I offered an alternative in my post: exchanging higher pay and a job-training fund, while focusing unions' political efforts on national healthcare coverage. That's something, ain't it? Rip it apart if you like, but it's based in the idea of helping workers shift their feet in the new economy.

I'm also not seeing anything about enabling a race to the bottom. I'm seeing real frustration at work-place procedures that are reactive and, in my experience, non-sensical. I'm seeing practices that treat workers as drones, as if they're all the same, thinking that punishes stronger employees by effectively equating them to incompetents. The idea that all workers are equal, that's just a myth and it's a corrosive one at that. Workers deserve fair treatment, not rigid equality.

Who knows? Maybe my situation was atypical, but it happened. In any case, Larry's situation sounds more insane than mine. Can you say with a straight face that what he's describing makes sense - either from an employer's or employee's point of view? Cross-training - i.e. more knowledge - ought to make an employee more useful and more employable should he or she lose work.

How to get there from here in each workplace? I admit that's tough. Perhaps send a union representative to performance reviews to make sure people aren't being screwed for frivolous reasons; while we're on the subject, an end to the notion that all unfavorable reviews and firings are created equal and that not all result from employers trying to bone this or that employee. But performance reviews matter - at least they're a mechanism for rewarding hard work and originality.

Germany has powerful trade unions. On average, Germans earned the second highest manufacturing wages in THE WORLD in 2004, at US$34.05/hour. Despite being a high cost producer, Germany exported more manufactured goods than the United States (at US$23/hour average wage), or Britain and France combined (THE average hourly wage in France was $23.89; and $24.71 in the U.K. in 2004).

In 2004, Germany exported $893.3 billion, France exported $419 billion, and the U.K. exported $347 billion. The German economy is growing much more slowly than Britain, France, or China's: clearly, higher wages are not a competitive advantage, nor is the German's exporting strength indicative of a "race to the bottom".

That said, German unions have participated in productivity and quality improvement initiatives that helped German companies distinguish themselves. Many consumers are willing to pay higher prices for higher quality. The only way for a union to justify higher wages than are paid to non-union competitors is to offer productivity and quality gains.

Portland's Police and Fire Departments have no competition, foreign or domestic. If so, they would be much more interested in negotiating a sustainable outcome. At present, the Police and Fire unions should recognize their pension and disability costs are competing with their own departmental operating budgets, and the remaining resources available to fund other city programs and departments.

A "race to the bottom" it is not. If low wages were the path to economic success, Vietnam and Sri Lanka would be at the top of the growth charts (or China would have exported more than $583 billion of goods in 2004). Would you rather buy a car (or bottle of wine, flannel shirt, can of pears, mid-range watch, or tires) made in Germany, Mexico, or China? Would you pay extra for the same product made in Canada or the U.S.A.?

Personally, whatever the cost of funding the Fire and Police retirement and disability liabilities, I would suggest they double the size of the bond issue and use the other half for infrastructure repair and replacement (bridges, roads, sewers, & water). Maintaining our infrastructure is every bit as important as meeting our committments to the fire and police departments.

Um....wow. Read Alice's thing, folks. I hadn't even considered that the squeeze to the overall city budget would constrict the police and fire departments' general fund. Good one.

Mark:

If the "race to the bottom" doesn't involve foreign competition, then don't mention NAFTA, CAFTA, WTO, etc.

Clearly, the City of Portland's Fire and Police Departments have no competition (unless you count Downtown Clean and Safe). Historically, the largest and most powerful unions were in manufacturing or services that had plenty of competitors, always domestic and (frequently) offshore as well. How many 411 operators thought they would be replaced by somebody in Bangalore, India?

I am not suggesting unionization made Germany an exporting behemoth. Rather, the manufacture of high quality goods that people are willing to pay higher prices for allows unions to "earn" (meaning "merit") higher wages.

For the Police and Fire Unions this could mean longer hours, more flexible work/disability/H.R. policies, or (sometimes) simply more backsides and elbows. I don't mean to imply they aren't dedicated or dilligent or brave. That said, it seems unlikely they are incapable of productivity gains.

I don't know any firemen or police officers in Portland: my perception is that much of the firemen's time is not spent fighting fires, or maintaining equipment, or training (i.e. cooking, sleeping, waiting for a call). Similarly, I see very few Portland P.D. officer's walking/biking/patrolling downtown or in my S.W. neighborhood. If the meth addicts outnumber the cops, we need to deploy and/or hire more cops. If that is not possible, we need to make the cops we have much more visible and productive.

Interesting string to be sure! A few comments......

The company I retired from after 35 years has several manufacturing facilities in Germany. German unions do indeed have consistently higher pay reflected in their contracts. There is one FUNDMENTAL difference however. In Germany (unlike France, Italy, and our US facilites) the unions VERY rarely got themselves invovled with defending employees in disciplinary problems with the company. In fact they didn't want that right in the contract. The employees knew that and were well aware that they were pretty much on their own if they didn't perform to expectations or violated a company policy. The company was willing to pay the higher hourly wages because high performance was expected....AND enforced. The union had no rights (nor interest) in trying to block terminations of bad employees.

U.S. unions leaders would drop over in a dead faint if we offered a standard German union contract (with 20% higher pay) and asked them to allow their members to vote on it. The workers would vote overwhelmingly for it.....and the union leaders know it....so they'd never forward it on to the membership for a vote.

The German model is truly unique. Want to give it a try here Mark?

Union-busting has been ongoing and aggressive for the past 25-35 years, and the results are clear: offshoring, declining real wages, routine mass layoffs, and the degradation of whole segments of the US population to Third World status (infant mortality, hunger, homelessness, etc.).

Perversely, the right wing is trying to blame these things on unions themselves. Wage arbitrage, namely offshoring in order to bust unions, is not the result of any "inefficiency" of union labor. The purported "efficiency" of Third World labor is what results from IMF/etc. "structural adjustments" that have literally created the Third World and are the causes of the famines in Africa, paying the workers far, far below minimum wage, and, of course, the liberal use of death squads (near universal) and Guantanamo-esque "free trade zones" in which Third World workers are literally imprisoned (c.f. Abramoff's Saipan shenanigans, China's use of prison labor in its "free trade zones," etc.). If you want to compare union wages against Third Worlders forced to work at gunpoint, you're going to see all the "efficiencies" you want.

Of course, no one ever considers the vast subsidies in the form of military intervention and arms shipments involved in this equation. Of course, corporations and billionaires don't pay for any of that as they don't pay taxes at all. It all comes from "reprogramming" what ostensibly is going to HUD, Medicare, Social Security, etc., all paid for by the average Joe's taxes, plus the 50%-60% of our taxes that overtly goes to the Pentagon for de facto subsidies for "defense contractors," plus the unknown amounts raised from intelligence agencies' drug dealing activities. Black budget info taken from Michael E. Salla's "Black budget report."

A handwavy analysis goes something like this: The GDP is 12 trillion annually. The federal budget is 2.5 trillion. Consumer spending is 2/3 of the GDP, 8 trillion, leaving 4 trillion for "business." Ignoring the black budget, since that's rather easy-to-muddy water, and assuming the military budget is about half of the federal budget, the Pentagon's putting up 31.25 cents on the dollar worth of "matching funds" for death squads, military invasions, and other subsidies to corporations. If you include the black budget (which is approximately equal to the federal budget) you get 93.75 cents on the dollar worth of matching funds. That's a heck of a lot of corporate welfare.

Essentially all of that goes toward military "interventions" intended to "make the world safe for capitalism," which as noble as it would be if it were true, is nothing a thinly-veiled euphemism for defending a few sufficiently-well-connected corporations' bottom lines against "social spending" and "entitlement programs" in Third World sweatshops, mines, and so on. Every US military intervention since WWII can easily be paired with a list of the corporations "defended." And sure enough, after a right-wing dictator is installed and the population is reduced to famine and pummelled by death squads, they're "willing" to work for next to nothing, plus whatever raw materials are there to scoop up can be for the cost of transportation, and none of the proceeds benefits the locals. And who do the death squads target in the Third World? Union organizers, priests and nuns that try to feed the starving, "left-wing lunatics" who think a country's natural resources should benefit the country's people and governments might actually try to improve people's living conditions, and so on. If they try to collectively bargain or feed the starving they're "communists" (Arbenz literally modelled his programs on FDR's New Deal and was called "communist" for it); it makes you wonder how long such things unions, social security, or unemployment insurance will last here.

So, when offshoring is cited as being "more efficient" because "labor is cheaper" in the Third World, one should bear in mind how the conditions for labor to be cheaper in the Third World were arranged, and how the efforts to arrange such constitute vast subsidies to corporations that don't pay any taxes in the first place.

All this is, of course, ignored when discussing offshoring and unions. The right wing cries, "Look, people starving because of the IMF's structural adjustments who are getting slaughtered by the CIA's death squads in Latin America and elsewhere will work for 2 cents an hour and no benefits! Unions are asking for too much pay," and it's swallowed whole. Taft-Hartley's crippled unions for 50 years, and right-to-work-for-less laws kick unions out of whole states at a time. Unions are now largely confined to industries where Taft-Hartley doesn't apply (railway, etc.). Things are headed quite rapidly back to the days when Richard B. Mellon said, "You can't mine coal without machine guns," and the vast majority of the US is sleepwalking right into it. The FBI is even investigating people for union membership.

WLI:

Your allegations simply defy logic. The UAW is still one of the most powerful unions in the country, but GM and Ford are both in danger of going bankrupt.

Toyota and Honda build cars in the U.S.A. (sans UAW), and they are more profitable, have better quality, and better labor relations than the Big Three. You don't think the UAW is part of the problem?

The Teamsters barely have a pulse. Meanwhile, the non-union trucking companies are thriving, while the union trucking companies make lower profits, while many of the behemoths have gone out of business.

UPS was hobbled by a Teamsters strike in 1997, and non-union Fedex picked up the slack with barely a hiccup. The only threatened work stoppage ever experienced at Fedex was when their pilots threatened to strike in 1998 (the strike was averted). When the strike was over and the smoke cleared, FedEx had pulled roughly two percentage points of market share away from UPS, increasing its share of the express transportation market to more than 43%. While UPS faces additional labor unrest among its pilots, FedEx pilots are among the best-compensated and most contented in the industry.

Guess which company is growing faster? Fedex grew at 9.4% over the last five years (vs. 5.8% at UPS), while Fedex's sales grew at nearly 17% over the same period (vs. 6% at UPS). I'm not suggesting there is anything wrong with the Teamsters, and UPS is fond of saying they "run the tightest ship in the shipping business." Arguably, UPS is the best management partner the Teamster have ever had: it certainly is the largest company that is currently represented by the Teamsters. But if the Teamsters strike UPS again in the future, it will (ironically) benefit the non-Teamster represented Fedex much more than it will hurt UPS.

Here's my point: with the exception of a small number of Mexican flagged trucks, the Teamsters have no foreign competition. Their competition is from non-union trucking companies. With the exception of UPS, most of the non-union trucking companies are healthier companies. If the Teamsters pursue an adversarial strategy with UPS, they will hurt themselves and their employer while benefitting the non-union competitor (Fedex). Similarly, if GM or Ford goes bankrupt, do you think that hurts GM or Ford's management more or less than it benefits Honda and Toyota?

I can only assume the rest of WLI's "facts" are as subjective as the below comment:

Ignoring the black budget, since that's rather easy-to-muddy water, and assuming the military budget is about half of the federal budget, the Pentagon's putting up 31.25 cents on the dollar worth of "matching funds" for death squads, military invasions, and other subsidies to corporations.

In fact, even a generous assumption for the black budget and including all HSA spending (much of which is largely administrative, like the U.S. Customs and TSA, having little to do with "military spending"), the total defense budget is less than $600 billion (divided by $2.57 trillion) = 24% of the total budget. That's alot less than half, WLI!

If you measure total U.S. defense spending, as a percentage of GDP, it is currently about 7% of our economy; a far cry from 32%.

Quoting the Department of State, USIA click here for the link This unstable international environment has meant that the United States has had to halt the decline in defense spending that occurred in the 1990s. Beginning with its fiscal year 2000 budget, the Pentagon expects defense spending to increase in real terms for the first time since 1985. By the year 2005, U.S. defense spending will be back to 90 percent of its Cold War level.

To summarize: as a percentage of our GDP, we are spending less on defense than at virtually any time over the past 50 years (excluding the Clinton "fall of Berlin Wall" budgets) Here's a historical chart of defense spending as a percentage of GDP

If you are unwilling to allow that we can "afford" to spend more money on anything as our GDP rises, then a pure (inflation adjusted) chart of DoD expenditures looks looks like this, Clearly, we have not reached the defense spending levels of the Korean or Vietnam Wars, or the Reagan Era.

In summary, would you rather have the largest, or the smallest, defense budget in the world? I prefer the largest.

I dealt almost exclusively with offshoring in my post. My allegations don't "defy logic." They're quite uncontroversial, except to those who care to deny the well-established record.

Unions do hit the bottom lines of corporations. The cost of higher wages and more benefits is nonzero, and that does take a bite out of corporate profits, which is why all this union-busting activity (international and domestic) takes place. Of course corporate profits will "grow faster" when the workers are paid less.

The UAW is one of the few surviving unions in the US outside of non-Taft-Hartley-regulated industries, and it is getting wiped out. Offshoring and accounting shell games (hence the bankruptcies) are rather blatant in the effort to wipe out the UAW. Where there is noncompetitiveness from the US auto industry, it generally falls outside the productivity of labor and into the domains of overall product design such as gas-guzzling SUV's of declining popularity. Who's on which end of the stick is rather obvious from the CEOs' pay going through the roof (not that it wasn't already) while the union workers are getting 60% pay cuts plus layoffs and benefits cuts rammed down their throats on pain of plant closings.

As far as Japanese automakers having "better labor relations" in their onshore production, they don't. Extensive use of temps (from e.g. Manpower) yields a ready-and-waiting pool of underpaid scabs. High unemployment (official stats are garbage; the real statistics are worse than Europe) makes sure there are plenty of such ready and waiting. The full-timers keep quiet for fear of getting fired. One of the first things you're warned about arriving on site is that mentioning unions will get you fired. On-the-job injuries are written off rather quickly and undertreated. If you're in too bad of shape to come in after the medical benefits have been cut off (and they are always cut off very quickly), you're fired. Temps, when injured, are de facto "fired," though de jure remain employees of the temporary agency. The so-called "good labor relations" mean little more than that the workers have been effectively silenced and prevented from even attempting to erect collective bargaining infrastructure.

Describing a non-union competitor such as FedEx getting used as de facto strikebreakers is not particularly compelling, and has precedents in 19th century union-busting tactics. Taft-Hartley outlawed one of the main countertactics, namely secondary boycotts, and sympathy strikes have unclear legal status in the US but the general state of the law is union-hostile, the result of long-running "lawfare" against unions (though the article references international law, it's clear that it applies to domestic contexts).

WLI:

Interesting that you chose not to address the fact that you mistakenly DOUBLED the amount of the Federal Budget spent on defense. Those facts are stubborn things.

How do those underpaid scabs manage to build a better car?

Surely you will acknowledge UAW's employees have some bearing on the lower initial quality surveys and higher warranty costs on cars built by the UAW vs. Hondas and Toyotas built in Ohio and Kentucky? It can all be "management's fault" right? Do you think the decision to build more SUV's had anything to do with the fact the UAW built small cars couldn't compete with the Japanese?

W. Bruce Anderholt, the picture of military spending changes considerably when payments on the national debt incurred due to military spending are included. That effect can be seen at [http://www.warresisters.org/piechart.htm]. From this you get 48% (not quite 50%), but even that picture is an underestimate due to other devices used to conceal military spending, such as foreign aid used for military purposes by the recipients. The same site cites CDI estimates of 51%. The black budget can never be conclusively quantified, so I suppose you can merely regard the paper I cite as one of the high estimates from scholarly sources, but it is very, very high. If you want to ignore the black budget's contribution, the overt spending is still high enough to be a tremendous amount of corporate welfare, and it even excludes the corporate bailouts and "tax breaks." I regard the historical charts you cited as unreliable due to failing to account for these military expenditures.

As far as "the largest defense budget in the world" goes, what are we supposed to be defending ourselves against? Canada? Mexico? China? Where's the threat? If it's terrorism, even the Pentagon is publishing papers saying that global warming is a bigger threat than terrorism.

Speaking of terrorism, since there isn't a genuine threat, "terrorism" is getting trumped up as one. Yet the military is an inappropriate vehicle for dealing with such. The military boondoggles as a "response to terrorism" are thinly-veiled pretexts for the usual military "interventions" on behalf of corporations that went on during the latter half of the 20th century. Insofar as terrorism is a threat, it's negligible. Terrorism kills far fewer people than lung cancer, car crashes, or even ordinary murders. Famine kills at least four or more orders of magnitude more people than terrorism annually. Law enforcement, if it bothered to try dealing with it, could do so easily. Of course, the FBI spends the plurality (40% the only time it was independently checked) of its time, manpower, and money on ridiculous COINTELPRO-style machinations, so there's little hope law enforcement will be brought to bear on the problem of terrorism.

If the question is "Why are we bothering with all this military spending?" there is no ready answer unless the benefit of the doubt is withdrawn.

I guess the only deficit spending we do is for the DoD budget, correct?

If you want to accurately attribute the cost of servicing the national debt, you would apportion it on a pro-rata basis, meaning the DoD budget would only bear responsibility for the proportion of the national debt resulting from it (much less than 24% over the last 50 years). Either way, your statistics are misleading at best; deceitful at worse. Just come right out and say your in favor of underfunding (read "weak") national defense. It worked great for Dukakis.

<h2>I don't know how you manage to blame union busting on the DoD, or what the one has to do with the other. Sounds like you've got it all figured out, though. I won't trouble you with the facts.</h2>