In Place of Unions
I believe that in retrospect, yesterday's vote will be seen as the death knell for unions - not just public sector unions, but unions in general. This is not meant to be disparaging, but simply an acknowledgement of reality - unions have been declining for forty years. It's easy to point to big money influence and hostile legal pressures, but the historical record has shown that there has never been a time in American history where the business community has been anything less than hostile towards unions, largely because such unions eat away at the foundations of investor-oriented capitalism.
I have been a union member, once in my life - a member of the National Writers Union. The money I spent on that exercise, about $250 annually, went towards lawsuits in which newspaper reporters were fighting against the Boston Globe in order to prevent work-for-hire contracts from being enforced. The lawsuit failed, but it was a Pyrrhic victory - the Globe came close to being closed by the New York Times (the owner of the paper) unless the unions agreed to major concessions. The Globe stayed open, the jobs were saved (though many were subsequently lost to the Internet) and the unions were, once again, broken.
My day job has been in IT as a contractor and later a consultant. Most of my jobs since 2005 have been short term - 3-6 months at a gig as a systems architect or consultative engineer. At least in my sector, unions are rare and generally unwelcome, because most unions end up placing job security and benefits at the top of their list. In a world where job security is a joke, where benefits are largely what you put aside (and which ObamaCare actually makes more possible) and where your personal reputation, not your union's reputation, makes the difference, belonging to a union makes no sense. Unfortunately, a growing contingent of the workforce are now essentially in that same category where the cost of belonging to a union generally outweighs the individual benefits to be achieved. This also tends to create a self-reinforcing feedback loop - as the number of people in union-related jobs decline, the power of the unions also decline.
Any alternative that arises to unions thus has to acknowledge the fact that the 1920s factory model out of which 20th century unions arose is no longer valid. Young people, when they enter the force, are far more likely to work for companies of under 250 people, which are in turn subcontracting to other companies of under 250 people. Service jobs are evaporating as more of the mechanisms for selling services (from manning cash registers to providing legal or medical services) shift to the Internet. Manufacturing has been moving overseas for some time ... yet just as some of it is coming back, 3D additive printers are starting to make their debut. What has emerged is an economy where you have highly rewarded specialists who have invested heavily to acquire and maintain their specialization, a secondary tier of mid-level specialists who are generally paid much lower rates, and a large population of people who don't have a valuable enough skillset to maintain employment, overseen by a thin core of owner/managers.
If you're under the age of thirty and you are employed, the chances are high that you are an initial sweat equity owner of your own company. The odds that your company will survive is fairly low, admittedly, but in most cases what is emerging are patronage studios - where either the initial employers or an investor creates a company to do or make "something" - as often as not virtual - primarily for the purpose of gambling in the market. The workers don't unionize because they own part of their companies. These people see unions as largely protecting many mediocre workers at the expense of a few good workers, and while this is a vast over-simplification, there is some truth in this view. Similarly, compulsory membership in a union, while it makes sense from the standpoint of giving the union more leverage, can be seen as extortionate if the benefits from joining the union aren't there. While progressives (and I consider myself one) may argue about people "voting against their own self-interest", in the case of unions the factor of self-interest actually plays fairly broadly.
Public sector unions are even more of a challenge. I work in Washington DC (on ObamaCare, actually) and in general what I see is that at the Federal level, most Federal employees are managerial, analysts or researchers. The vast majority of workers are subcontractors of subcontractors of system integrators, and even many of them fall into the MAR categories. This increasingly holds true at the state level as well. In general, the only real public sector unions left are those like the teachers' unions that are facing decimation as school districts become underfunded or disbanded entirely, and health and safety workers - firefighters, police, garbage collectors and others, and these unions tend not to have the financial clout to fight back. Lacking political support (and I'm sorry, but the Democratic party has not provided all that much support for the unions except around election times), these unions are going to face an uphill battle for survival.
I'm sorry that Walker wasn't recalled, but I can understand why he wasn't. Democrats need to understand that unions have run their course, and that the reforms that may make sense to a new generation - supporting a radical reduction of the self-employment tax (which hits independent contractors especially hard), reducing the ability of companies to front their contracting to contracting agencies that jack up the rates of contractors to double or triple what the contractor is paid, controlling how non-monetary compensations such as options are accounted, mandatory employee representation on boards of directors, providing tax credits for mentorship programs, and reforming the tax code so that it favors small businesses over megalithic ones would be a big start.
Eliminating income taxes in favor of a mix of sales taxes and corporate taxes might seem anathema to progressives, but in reality income taxes tend to be political footballs favoring one income group over another depending upon who is in power, while progressive transaction costs (for everything from purchasing food to conducting market trades) usually tend to hit heaviest those who consume the most. Consumption taxes encourage thrift and discourage wasteful production, providing an incentive to move towards a more sustainable economy. Finally, such tax systems are actually easier to manage - a significant portion of company's overhead either directly or indirectly goes towards determining and dealing with managing tax collection on individuals. By taxing production rather than labor, it becomes easier to account for taxes at the point of purchase. Currently, in theory the US government (and in practice the Federal Reserve) gets a significant boost by holding onto collected taxes and collecting interesting on that.
Put another way, Democrats need to recognize that unions are dying, partially due to political pressures, but more due to the fact that they no longer make sense in a hyperconnected, distributed economy. This doesn't mean jettisoning support for them, but it should at least examine the strategies that it currently employs. The Democratic Party can still be the party of Labor (and should) but Labor does not necessarily mean union anymore.
= new reply since forum marked as read
