Author: Paul Deaton

As a child Dad would take us to the Eagles hall for a Labor Day event sponsored by his union. There were speeches and socializing, food and beverages, and one year I won a canned ham in a raffle which I proudly brought home to Mother. A lot of people attended and I got to know some of them after joining the union to work at the meat packing plant for a couple of summers while I was an undergraduate. It was an open shop, but I joined the union and still have my union retirement card.

After college, I joined the U.S. Army and was assigned to an infantry company. In the military, and in a number of government and private jobs, I was occasionally a worker, but mostly have managed people and resources over a 40-year worklife. I’ve viewed unions from multiple perspectives, with a personal stake in the union-management relationship. Two things seem most important about the changes in worklife over the years.

Work is not valued adequately. The rise of management consulting firms—that purport to help companies drive profitable growth through the effective use of compensation—have methods of assigning value to work. What they do is help companies optimize and reduce human resources costs. Private business has been working to shed people-costs for years and some believe there is an application for these skills in government as well. The growth of outsourcing, temporary job agencies and part time workers are all part of this successful-for-business movement.

What is the value of food security, a livable homelife and a strong social support network? People who do the work to provide these things are taken for granted.

Compensation is a murky endeavor at best. At a job interview in 2014, the district manager of an international service organization emphasized there were no benefits in his company which employed more than 20,000 workers. The work was part-time, and under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, companies who employed people more than 30 hours per week are required to provide health insurance. The company kept employees under 30 hours per week.

The starting hourly wage was above average for the kind of work in the area. To get health insurance mandated by the ACA, people who worked there when I did often turned to the ACA health exchanges for coverage and subsidies. My policy through the exchange costs about $1,200 per month without subsidy. There are stories of much higher premiums for families. If you take the premiums divided by the number of hours worked, it amounts to a $9.89 per hour subsidy of my worklife.

Businesses have methodologies to understand the value of benefits packages. Workers often don’t. While some appreciate the fact that an employer will provide a benefits package, few workers I know put a pencil to it. The focus is almost totally on wages that can be spent and this distorts the value of working for a company. Too, it is hard to define the value of benefits like disability insurance, life insurance, paid time off, and employee appreciation days. People who focus solely on hourly wage rates often don’t understand the broader context in which wages exist in society.

It’s a personal tradition to work on Labor Day. Even when I worked for an oil company, I drove to the office on Labor Day. Besides security, I was often the only person in the high rise office building on Michigan Avenue in Chicago.

These days the jobs I work are part time and temporary. Working on Labor Day now means finding my way to a home writing table to work on a freelance article, or making a trip to the garden to pull weeds. All of this has value, just not monetary value. Maybe that’s my point.

What is the value of living a reasonably secure life? It’s a lot higher than it feels for working people.

~ Written for Blog for Iowa

As we approach Labor Day, the lockout of United Steel Workers at six Allegheny Technologies plants is a sad commentary on the state of affairs of public sector unions.

“Management has locked out more than 2,000 workers in an effort to extract concessions on health and retirement benefits from union members,” according to Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times.

“ATI is demanding steep increases in out-of-pocket health care expenses and the elimination of pensions for new hires, essentially creating a two-tier wage and benefit system. In addition, ATI wants to expand the use of outside contractors and impose work rule changes that would turn workers into casual laborers, with irregular and unpredictable shift times, less access to overtime pay and worse working conditions,” according to Evan Winters of the World Socialist Web Site.

It is no secret that American business has been working to shed pension and health insurance liabilities, and for the most part has been successful during the post-Reagan era. If they had their way, companies would seek to eliminate most operational liabilities from having employees by outsourcing and using temporary, part-time workers without benefits.

That the company (through a third party) is able to offer temp workers as much as $3,000 per 84-hour week without benefits – plus a guaranteed layoff if a new contract between labor and management is signed – is a demonstration of the power of capital in this capital intensive industry. The average annual wage for a USW worker at Allegheny Technologies is $90,000, which includes mandatory overtime.

If $90,000 per year plus benefits seems like a lot, the work is physically demanding, dirty, repetitive and resoundingly dull. For long-time steel workers, it is a way of life, fraught with injury and physical deterioration. On a scale of wage justice, steel workers should be at the higher end of the range.

Yet the company can, and likely would pay a premium rate to keep the plant operating, albeit at a lower rate of efficiency, until the union contract is settled – or when the temporary workers are made replacement workers. Hiltzik called it a “race to the bottom,”  and friends of labor would agree.

The union is damned if they do and damned if they don’t. On the one hand, some members believe USW leaders are too cozy with Allegheny Technologies management, according to Winters. Rank and file may or may not accept a deal presented for a vote. On the other hand, if there were no USW, management would long ago have made the changes they seek in this new contract.

In 2014, 6.6 percent of private-sector workers in the U.S. were union members, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Iowa, it is slightly higher at 6.9 percent, or 84,791 union members. As a right to work state, there are another 7,500 private-sector workers who are not union members, but work at a company where the pay and benefits are set by a union contract.

The Allegheny Technologies lockout is a case where each contract negotiation has become an opportunity to break the union, rather than to make adjustments in pay and benefits to serve both employees and the company. Because of the capital intensive nature of the steel industry, labor is required to keep plants operating. Just not workers represented by a union.

~ Written for Blog for Iowa