Your Humble Blogger has been spending lots of time in Union stuff this week. I find it fascinating, and I'm really curious about how a particular paradox will play out.
You see, I'm in a New Union (or whatever we call it), one which prides itself on rejecting the Old Labor philosophy, which is, after all, just an extension of the Old Capital philosophy. I'll caricature it in brief.
The Old Philosophy: Management owns the workplace, the job and the work. Therefore, they own every aspect of the work, and during the workday, they own the worker. The only limits on management power are those voluntarily agreed to in The Contract; the definition of a worker grievance is that the management has violated The Contract, which they agreed to. In any area not covered by The Contract, Management can do as it pleases. As a result, the workers have to force the Management to agree to a contract that limits Management as much as possible. Further, if Management violates the contract in any way, the grievance that results has to be judged only on the basis of The Contract; the resulting decision means that either Management loses or the worker does.
The New Philosophy: All workers at every level are morally culpable for their own actions, and for the well-being of the community. It is in everybody's best interest to agree on certain things (among them wages, benefits, etc.); those agreements should come with representatives from all areas and levels discussing possibilities with the goal of making everyone as happy as possible. All aspects of the work and the lives of the workers are potentially subjects for discussion and compromise. A portion of that is put into The Contract, which makes certain promises and outlines certain procedures, so that everybody can act with some confidence and predictability. A portion of it is simply the subject of ongoing discussion and work to attempt to find solutions and compromises. Any specific problem that comes up should be handled with two goals: First, find a specific solution that takes into account the varied needs and desires of all the people concerned. Second, establish a relationship of trust and respect among the people concerned, to make future dealings easier and to more completely include them in a community, working towards consensus, mutual understanding, and respect.
The paradox (OK, it isn't quite a paradox) is this: If management thinks they own the place, just because they happen to own the place, how do the workers stop thinking of them as owning the place? When we sit down at the table to negotiate, how do we work towards consensus, compromise, and mutual benefit, if management thinks that their task is to make sure that their slice of the pie is as big as possible?
Take the pie analogy. The old idea, everybody agrees, is that when my slice is big, it's because your slice is small. The new idea, say the books and articles, is to increase the size of the whole pie, so that everybody's slice gets bigger. The way I see it, (A) there is no pie, and there is no need to slice it up so that everybody gets one piece, and nobody gets a bite of anybody else's piece, which is impossible anyway, and (2) there is a pie, and it's vitally important that everybody gets enough pie to share with their landlords, banks, spouses, children, parents, grocery stores and communities.
I don't know. There's a lot of learning to be done, and by its nature it's learning that will happen slowly. I can't imagine a workplace where the New Philosophy dictates action, and I can't imagine one where it doesn't.
Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.
If management thinks they own the place, just because they happen to own the place, how do the workers stop thinking of them as owning the place?
Many workers do that by taking part of the place home.
I do not speak here from personal experience as management, because my assistants have all been wonderful people who I trust completely. I have been incredibly lucky in that respect.
Business fraud and theft losses are often far greater to employees than they are to outsiders. So say all the business magazines I’ve read over the past decade. They don’t mention that fraud and theft losses are dwarfed by the absurd pay to upper management, not to mention the fraud and theft committed by upper management.
The New Philosophy which you describe sounds wonderful, and quite similar to the supposed paradigm of the graduate student union at Cornell circa early 1990s. Some said there that the New Philosophy simply hides greater abuses by dressing them in guilt-inducing rhetoric. Some said there that the administration sought to exploit the sense of moral responsibility among the graduate studens while exhibiting no comparable traits themselves. Some said there that legitimate grievances were harder to pursue because of the infinite mutability of the Contract, and that a failure to accept and enforce any rigid constraints makes the inherent power imbalances worse, not better.
Those who said that were malcontents and fear-mongers, of course, whose words I report not as endorsement but as warning.