[lbo-talk] Boycotting the unorganized?

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Thu Jan 20 21:14:54 PST 2005


John Lacny jlacny at earthlink.net, Thu Jan 20 19:38:28 PST 2005:
>John Thornton:
>
>>Bills store does not exert downward pressure on wages or undermine
>>solidarity with workers because it is staffed by family.
>
>John, you're quite wrong. (Notice, by the way, that I do adopt a
>civil tone with John, though people like Munson are beyond all hope.)
>
>It is the responsibility of the union to enforce and uphold INDUSTRY
>STANDARDS for its members. The power of unions in most industries
>has been broken, but in those places where unions still have
>industry power, it is right and correct for them to do everything in
>their power to defend it. Any departure from industry standards in
>this context constitutes a threat to union power and therefore to
>all other workers in the industry. Individual workers do not and
>SHOULD NOT have the option of cutting their own deal with a boss in
>these situations, and even less so should an individual boss be
>allowed to break the pattern.
>
>In this context, also, one part of the industry standard is that
>every worker in the industry in that particular market be a member
>of the union. This demand is NON-NEGOTIABLE, and a union is within
>its rights to use whatever means at its disposal to enforce this. If
>you want to call yourself part of the left (as opposed to a
>liberal), you are duty-bound to extend solidarity to the workers.

Normally, though, unions tend to concentrate their organizing efforts on hot shops (where workers are angry and want to organize) and low hanging fruits (relatively easy targets that constitute relatively large bargaining units).

John's neighbor Bill's grocery store is neither. Not counting Bill and his partner, the store has only nine workers, five of whom are family members: "the majority Bill (my neighbor) employs himself, his wife, his mother, his wifes mother, his daughter, his son, a friend of the son, and a friend of the daughter occasionally. Both his children are attending university. His partner runs the meat counter (among other things)" (at <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20050117/001242.html>). Nor is the store strategically important. That's not a promising target for union organizing.

Besides, the labor market is highly segmented. Bill's family members and workers for the bigger union and non-union grocery stores in the same city aren't really in the same labor market (Bill and his partner probably won't have their business if they can't rely on their family members' self-exploitation), so Bill's family members can't be said to be putting downward wage pressures and eroding industry standards. I'm not even sure if we can talk about wages here. Presumably, the living standards of Bill's wife, mother, children, and mother-in-law are more positively correlated with the store's profits than with their "wages," which puts them into a different class than workers for the bigger union and non-union grocery stores.

Is Bill's store waging a price war against the unionized grocery store(s), taking customers away from it (them)? Highly unlikely. It lacks economy of scale. If anything, it must be bigger stores -- especially non-union ones -- that are putting price pressures on Bill's store.

In short, it's improbable that the union can uphold industry standards by picketing Bill's store. The union is just wasting its resources (time, money, potential allies, etc.) by doing so. It makes more sense to focus on organizing workers at the two non-union stores that are part of large chains.

It would be a different story if the union were saying that there shouldn't be ANY mom-and-pop stores because they, by nature, undermine industry standards (because they create exceptions to the idea that employers should pay good wages, health care benefits, old-age pensions, and so on and because self-exploitation of small business owners and their family members, which tends to make them willing to work for long hours, can have an effect of degrading working conditions of wage workers), but no union in the United States (or anywhere else for that matter) would go that far. -- Yoshie

* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * "Proud of Britain": <http://www.proudofbritain.net/ > and <http://www.proud-of-britain.org.uk/>



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