Unionize!

O

K, so I used this title as an attention grabber. I’m sure that I’ve already upset some people with this title and they will proclaim to never read my column or newsletter again… at least until the next edition. You should know me by now.  When I want to make a point I sometimes get a little sarcastic.  But, I’ve got a very important point to make here about unions.

As we gather for our summer barbecues over the next several months and discuss the business woes of the world, someone’s father-in-law or other cranky old guy will state, after making sure that cousin Bob (the union electrician) is not within earshot,  “You know, unions were needed at one time in this country, but not any more. They’re screwing up our country… and the weather too.”

Let’s face it, back in the day, management did treat employees poorly. People were worked to the bone, without concern for their safety, as long as they were older than eight years old. Companies did not respect them! But over time, many of us realized that unions weren't needed any more. They had become a wasteful, bureaucratic mess—much more so than the management systems that they were supposed to fight against.

When I worked at Saturn, I remember the requirement that there must be one United Autoworker (UAW) counterpart for each person in management. How can a company be competitive in that environment?

But ask yourself, “Are unions really not needed anymore? Do we now fully respect our employees?” I wonder about this not only to scare management, but perhaps to create some change in Western management styles.

Yes, unions are wasteful; very wasteful. In this era of lean, I shudder to think of the waste we have in our organizations. No wonder we ship all of our production overseas—we have too much waste in our systems, and a lot of it resides in the fact that we have too many unions. But like all of our waste, unions came into being as a resolution to poor management practices after the people revolted.

Remember that the preamble to the United States Constitution states, “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union….” Our founding fathers formed the first union, and we revere them.  They formed a union to replace a tyranny.  It’s in our blood to stand up for what we believe. It’s in our blood to fight for our freedom. It’s part of the American way.  I admire those who stood up and formed the first company unions, because so many of those leaders were immigrants who decided to live up to the American ideals and help themselves in their pursuit of happiness. They were like our founding fathers.

The “United” (a form of union) States of America and the “United” Auto Workers (as an example), were born out of crises based on systems that disrespected either the citizens of a new country or the employees of a new company, respectively. The USA and UAW were born from “taxation without representation” and “horrid working conditions without representation,” respectively.

So why does the word “union” carry such a negative connotation to some? Why do so many people in business despise the term? Perhaps the problem is that the United States was not a band-aid; it was an ultimate solution. The U.S. Constitution and the American Revolution eliminated the root cause of our ills at the time—it eliminated a tyrannical government full of tyrannical systems, including taxing its citizens on American soil who had no voice when it came to the tax laws, percentages, the system itself, and the officials who developed and enacted the laws.

On the other hand, unions should never have been an ultimate solution. The unions didn't replace management, nor could they have. They were just band-aids to cure poor management practices and demand some level of respect for the employees. In the ideal world, the union should have been a short-term fix (or a containment action, an immediate action, or an interim action, as we call it in the quality world).  The unions should have been a band-aid that got ripped off as soon as the root causes in management practices were eliminated. But they never were pulled off because the practices were never eliminated. The union band-aid, like the inspection and inventory band-aids that result from not getting to the root causes of our problems, grew bigger and bigger as the wounds beneath the band-aids began to fester and ooze with more problems.

And then the unions themselves became wasteful. An old UAW buddy of mine from Saturn once said that it was more difficult to work with UAW management than regular management. I joked with him about the necessity to start a “Union Union” or the “Double U” to fight for the people’s rights taken away from them by their union.

So we might be tempted to think,  “We don’t need unions anymore. We are much better than we were. Unions are wasteful.”

But if unions were the band-aids to the problem of not respecting employees, have we really ridded ourselves of that problem? Do we respect employees so much that the band-aids are no longer necessary? Have we evolved from the management systems of many decades ago that had no respect for employees to systems of total respect for employees? Is it really that black and white? Do we really not need unions, perhaps even as a band-aid that acts as a containment action, until we improve our management systems and truly respect our employees? Or do we need true change in our management systems and the elimination of practices that continue to disrespect our employees, such as:

1) Suggestion systems in which some employees can participate and some cannot. In these systems, an idea is thrown into a box by a suggester, to be reviewed by a separate committee perhaps a month or two later. A suggester might be given feedback a couple of months later, if at all, and the idea might be enacted without the suggester’s involvement, and a paltry sum of money might be rewarded to the employee (but far less than what had been expected).

2) Annual performance appraisal systems that treat adults as children through forced ranking systems utilized in a big ol’ batch at the end of the year by command and control managers, as Tripp Babbitt described in the article, “The Needs of the Many Outrank the Needs of the Few”. 

3) Systems in which people who own special colored belts come in and resolve all of your problems.

4) Quota systems to drive increased performance with little or no respect for quality (See "Quotality!" article).

5) Probationary systems. 

6) The “get as much out the door before the end of the month as possible” attitude, taking away one’s pride in work.

7) Management never visiting operations and asking the people how they can help them improve.  Management never watching or participating in the process.

8) Making capital investment decisions based solely on return on investment.

9) Managers who tell people what to do “because I’m the boss” rather than using one’s knowledge and tact.

10) A management system that encourages managers to tell people what to do, not why it is important.

11) A management by objective system in which the objectives, not leadership, become most important.

12) Reward systems for suggestions and employee of the quarter/month rewards that take away one’s intrinsic desire to improve and innovate.

13) Micromanagement

14) Managers who are not taught how to lead and teach.

 

Unions are not the answer for eliminating disrespect of the employees. They're wasteful.  Management, however, needs to stop any desire for employees to unionize by building in systems of respect for the employees and eliminating those systems that continue to disrespect the employees.

We still have a long way to go in Western management.

About The Author