The Promise and the Peril of Members-Only Unions

[eridani]

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/18562/members-only-minority-unions

Unions have taken some hard hits in recent years, with even greater existential threats on the horizon. Labor must consider alternative forms of organization if they want to survive. But unions should watch out for unintended consequences of those new forms of organizing.

In their report for the Century Foundation, Moshe Marvit and Leigh Anne Schriever highlight case studies in “members-only” organizing, where unions cannot reach majority status for legal certification but maintain a workplace organization made up of a minority of workers that presses issue campaigns against the boss. Charles J. Morris, in his 2005 book The Blue Eagle at Work, reminds us that in its first few years, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) used to certify minority unions as the bargaining agent for that union’s members only, and that such a mechanism still exists (although the modern Board has dodged efforts to get a ruling to respond to Morris’ assertion). Some unions in “right to work” states are contemplating “members-only” certifications as a solution to the “free rider” problem, that workers can choose to opt out of joining (and paying dues to) a union, but the union is still legally compelled to represent them. “You want the contract? Join the union,” goes the simplistic (albeit attractive) logic.

But make no mistake: Non-exclusive representation will also inevitably lead to competitive union situations at workplaces. If a union, for whatever reason, only seeks to represent a portion of a bargaining unit, another organization will come along to recruit the workers who are left out by promising better benefits or an alternative approach to seeking improvements on the job.

This may not be a bad thing. The combination of exclusive representation (in which a workplace either does or does not have a union, and if it does, all employees who have the covered job titles are automatically represented), and agency fee (in which all of those represented employees join the union or at least pay a fee to the union for the bargaining, benefits and grievance services that the union provides) is a uniquely American collective bargaining framework—and a relatively new one, at that. Wall-to-wall certifications were sought by the industrial unions of the CIO to stave off AFL craft unions from coming along and claiming a handful of job titles at a workplace. By the end of the Depression, the CIO’s perspective on union certifications (that bigger is better and that a union should represent all workers in as many job titles as possible across the enterprise) prevailed at the NLRB, partly because the CIO was better than the AFL at working the system and partly because employers generally prefer to deal with one union rather than a multitude of unions.