Unions exert excessive influence

Machinists prove relevance using strike power

This Labor Day, union workers in Wichita (KS) are flexing their muscles. Advised to strike by their leaders, about 700 Boeing Machinists will vote on a new contract Wednesday. Hawker Beechcraft Machinists just ended a 25-day strike by ratifying a new contract.

Yet labor unions have suffered a long, slow decline in membership both nationally and in Kansas. In the 1950s, 35 percent of the American work force was unionized. Today, it's about 12 percent.

In Kansas, union members make up just 7 percent of the work force. There isn't much union membership outside of Wichita, Topeka and Kansas City.

Some wonder whether unions are relevant in a fast-moving global economy dominated by multinational corporations that can ship jobs to low-cost locations on a moment's notice.

Experts say the reasons for that decline are numerous and deep.

A manufacturing economy has given way to one based on services. Service companies are much more varied and spread out geographically. Jobs come in thousands of types.

Service workers often are part-time, with higher turnover rates, and are less invested in their jobs. For them, the fight to unionize might not seem worth it.

And many companies have fought hard against unionization -- think Wal-Mart, which has even shut down operations in a store in Canada where workers voted to unionize.

"It doesn't take too much to intimidate people," said Martin Perline, a professor at Wichita State University.

And as American companies have become increasingly internationalized, corporate managers and workers have found themselves fighting new, lower-cost competitors.

Where once the United Auto Workers could deal from a position of strength with the Big Three, now there are many non-unionized foreign companies making cars here or shipping them in from abroad.

If unions put a company at a price disadvantage, as company managers say, they really work best in companies that have a very strong competitive position -- such as Wichita's aircraft industry -- or in a monopoly, such as government.

"The more competition the company has, the more difficult it is to have a union," Perline said.

Unions in Wichita

Does that mean unions are no longer relevant?

There was no question in the minds of most Machinists lined up last week at the Kansas Coliseum to vote on the Hawker Beechcraft contract.

They say the company will get away with whatever it can. The union is one of the few protections employees have.

"You can't leave the fox guarding the henhouse," said Wayne King of Winfield, a Hawker Beechcraft Machinist.

Unionization definitely raises pay, said Harold Schlechtweg, business representative for Local 513 of the Service Employees International Union, which represents more than a thousand workers at the city of Wichita and Wichita schools.

He said the city of Wichita workers represented by the SEIU, such as janitors and clerical staff, earn more than their counterparts at Sedgwick County.

He said county commissioners have blocked SEIU's efforts to unionize county workers by not giving approval to organize them, he said.

Wichita has a long history of sympathy for unions, he said. But there's also a deep-seated hatred of unions and unionism that goes back to the state's roots, he said.

"Kansas is an agricultural state, and lot of folks from the country don't have experience with unions," he said. "They can be very prejudiced."

That cultural distrust is a good part of the reason why organizing a union in Wichita can be hard.

Shirley Breth was a nurse at Wesley Medical Center in 2001 when she tried to unionize the nurses.

The nurses felt unhappy with their workloads and working conditions, she said. But she was never able to get the 30 percent of nurses to sign the cards needed to bring in union organizers, especially after the hospital reclassified some nurses as salaried workers.

The nurses had a hard time seeing themselves as members of a union, which they associated with militancy and blue-collar production work, Breth said.

Nurses are unionized elsewhere, she said, but here, they haven't asserted themselves at the big hospitals.

"In Wichita, they just don't understand what unions are for," she said.

She acknowledges that the economy has provided other options for nurses. She now works for a local specialty hospital where the working conditions are just fine, she said.

Union issues

There are a few battles coming up that could signal a revival of the national union movement -- or its continued decline.

Kansas is one of 22 right-to-work states, which are heavily concentrated in the South, Great Plains and Mountain West. But Colorado is not one of them -- at least, for now.

This fall, Colorado will become a battleground between corporate-backed groups and organized labor.

Right-to-work laws hamper unions by not requiring workers covered by a union contract to join the union, which significantly reduces union membership.

An effort that would affect Kansas is federal "card check" legislation, which would eliminate the requirement for secret ballots in union elections. This would allow unions and companies to know how particular workers voted.

(kansas.com)