Give unions credit, not the blame
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Connie Schultz
Plain Dealer Columnist
Sometimes, it takes an outsider to remind us just what labor unions did for the dreams and living standards of the average worker in Cleveland.
Kevin Boyle drove here from Columbus on Sunday to visit an art exhibit, and he couldn't help but notice our proud legacy of union labor as he drove through the old neighborhoods.
"You can't drive through the city without seeing what the union has done for Cleveland," said Boyle, who teaches American history at Ohio State University. "You see entire sections of the city that were built after World War II because of union wages, neighborhoods full of single-family homes that working people could buy and know that their children would have a better life."
Boyle's academic emphasis is on class, race and politics, and he's written a great deal about the auto industry. The history of the labor movement is the history of a growing middle class, he said.
"For people working in the '10s and '20s, in the steel mills and the auto plants, there was no health care, no job security. They lived lives of fear. In an auto plant, if you lost a hand, you weren't working anymore. There were no vacations and no health care. And the thought of your children going to college was incomprehensible."
Boyle's observations are timely in light of the anti-union response I got to last Friday's column on the Ford plant closings in Brook Park.
First, I want to address another group of responses aimed at my wrong-headed arithmetic. I compared Ford CEO Alan Mulally's compensation package of $39.1 million to the average pay and benefits of the nonskilled laborers at the Ford plants, which is about $70,000. In attempting to illustrate the disparity, I miscalculated the total compensation of Ford's 1,800 workers in Brook Park, saying they made $12.6 million when it should have been $126 million.
An inexcusable error. To claim, however, that this is an acceptable difference in pay suggests a whole lot of you ought to join me in remedial math. Compare $70,000 to $39.1 million, and no matter how you divide the numbers there's no justice in the equation.
I corrected the error in my online column by 9 a.m. Friday and ran a correction in Saturday's paper. I thank all of you who kindly reprimanded me for the faulty math. For those of you who wrote nasty e-mails, I suggest you add more fiber to your diets.
As for blaming organized labor for all of Ford's woes, here's a little more history. David Halberstam, in his 1986 book about the auto industry, "The Reckoning," described the long and troubled relationship between Henry Ford II and the United Auto Workers. Ford refused to join Chrysler and General Motors in their post-strike agreements. In 1937, his thugs beat up union organizers outside one of his plants. The unions ended up strong and contentious because they had to be. And Ford had only himself to blame.
"By fighting the union so intransigently," Halberstam wrote, "Ford and the other Detroit industrialists had ensured that when the unions finally won power they would be as strong as the companies themselves, and that there would be a carryover of distrust and hatred which would make them . . . an adversarial, distrustful partner."
That was then, and this is now. And unions still matter, says Boyle, even for those who don't join them.
"Studies show that unions do raise wages for other workers in companies who compensate at a level to keep unions out," he said. "As long as unions are a threat, other workers benefit."
Two companies come to mind: Toyota and Honda. Their workers have consistently resisted the union because their wages are competitive, Boyle said.
When I asked Boyle to explain why so many nonunion workers resent the unions -- a consistent theme in reader response -- he sounded frustrated.
"They race to the bottom. They look at the salaries of these workers and, instead of saying, We should all have that,' they denounce the workers as greedy. This is so depressing, especially in a town like Cleveland that owes so much of its growth and prosperity to union labor."
Just as depressing is knowing it takes an outsider to see that.
To reach Connie Schultz:
cschultz@plaind.com, 216-999-5087
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