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<font size=5 face=Arial><B>State of the unions </b></font><P> <P>Saturday, January 09, 1999<P>By Dennis Roddy, Post-Gazette Staff Writer <storysumm><P><P><P>
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On a week when millionaire basketball players flew first-class to New York and voted to go back to work for the rump-end of the season, Mike Yates was thinking hard about what unions mean, and at first blush, it certainly doesn't seem to be that, now, does it?<P>
Yates is a college professor from Shadyside and he just published his fifth book, "Why Unions Matter." An ardently pro-union Ph.D. who writes in subversively cogent prose, Yates spent the great economic boom of the 1990s trying to figure something out:<P>
Why are so many of the working people who helped create this wealth one step removed from domestic life beneath some highway underpass?<P>
"Politics," Yates said.<P>
Unions more or less abandoned a straight-forward political agenda years ago to become a branch of the Democratic Party. The AFL-CIO tossed out left-leaning unions during the Red Scare of the 1950s. Remaining industrial unions progressively became "service model" unions, providing contract services the way, say, a basketball player hires an agent. The idea of some largeness of purpose, of an agenda bigger than the next paycheck, got lost.<P>
Witness the results: at the end of World War II, one-third of the work force belonged to unions. This year, it's 14 percent. The number would be lower but for public employees.<P>
Yates' book includes a photo of the opening day of contract negotiations between the United Auto Workers and the big auto companies. I defy anyone not familiar with the players to look at that photo and figure out which side is which. It's all white guys in suits. The CEO of General Motors greets the CEO of the UAW.<P>
Yates occasionally gets invitations to address workers and tells this story:<P>
He was called to speak before a group of postal employees. For his topic, he chose the growing inequality of income in the United States - the widening gap between rich and poor, and what should be done.<P>
"Whadda crew," he remembered. "They couldn't have cared less."<P>
Of course not. These guys wanted to know what the union was going to do for them right now. Never mind that the train's about to jump the tracks, so long as we can all die in a first-class berth.<P>
At a speech before a group of United Auto Workers, Yates heard their theories on economics. Their thesis, he said, was that recessions are caused by the media, that the economies of the '70s and '80s derailed because bad press scared away wealth.<P>
"They have no coherent view," Yates said. "This is what a union is supposed to give them."<P>
That's why workers haven't figured out that those plants set in the middle of nowhere are there, in part, because it occurred to somebody that it means workers will come from all over the place, meaning they'll go home at night instead of meeting in town to discuss what might be done about an abusive boss, or a wage scale that makes them choose between buying food or refueling the car.<P>
It's why the manager in one plant put up a big map before a union vote by workers on whether to join a union. It showed the United States, the plant's town, and had a big, red arrow pointing to Mexico.<P>
Without a broader vision, it's never going to occur to union leaders that, just maybe, the answer is to organize the Mexicans.<P>
Dennis Roddy's e-mail is droddy@post-gazette.com<P>
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