The election last year of Jimmy Hoffa to the presidency of the Teamsters union means business owners in Ohio and elsewhere are going to hear more about organization efforts in their companies.
While unions once represented about 30 percent of the American work force, they are now down to about 14 percent (just 10 percent if you exclude union membership among government workers).
However, unions aren’t going to vanish. After a period of decline, there is evidence that unions are gaining strength. Wage increases have been modest in the last few years, and unions have been slowly whipping up sentiment that employees deserve more. This has given rise to a slight but steady increase in the number of union representation elections.
Ohio is a key industrial state and has always been a target for union organizers. In Ohio, there are approximately 960,000 union members, and union representation elections have been increasing.
In the first six months of 1998 — the latest data available — there were 78 union representation elections in Ohio, up from 71 the year before and 69 before that.
Of the 78, workers voted in the union 40 percent of the time.
Victory is only second best
For employers, however, it is not enough to win an election. The goal should be to avoid elections altogether. They are costly — legal and consultant fees, cost of labor paid to sit and listen to speeches, executive time devoted to the campaign and, possibly, delayed shipments because of time lost to the campaign — and there is always risk of losing.
To avoid an election, most employers turn to attorneys, who can be very helpful at telling you what not to do. More helpful is knowing what to do.
Why unions get a foot in the door
Normally, employees aren’t looking for more money. More typical are complaints about abusive supervisors, lack of a grievance procedure to voice complaints, absence of a human resource director to answer questions, unpleasant working conditions and excessive overtime.
Union organizers know how to seek out such problems and promise to rectify them — making the workplace a veritable Garden of Eden. We know that most such campaign material is malarkey — that the union’s major object is to increase its membership and dues income.
Hence, any campaign promises that will accomplish those ends are used. Money too, is promised, but our research has long shown that the motivating force for employees to welcome a union is not money, but the personal grievances that make them simmer.
What to do
Start with an audit of employee opinions. This enables the employer to pinpoint the grievances.
Physical conditions —such as poor lighting, inadequate eating areas, dirty toilets, etc. — can be easily remedied, even though it requires effort.
The difficult matters to correct are abusive supervisors, not having anyone to listen to employee complaints or correct paycheck errors, etc. These require management planning, perhaps some supervisory training, assignments of office staff and other adjustments.
Also, take steps to improve the environment. Employees do not like to be taken for granted, nor do they like to be treated as if they were only adjuncts to the machinery. They would like some attention, some recognition, if only a daily “good morning” from the plant manager or president.
Union decertification
Just because a union is in place doesn’t mean it has to stay there. While the number of union representation elections has been slowly moving upward, so has the number of decertification elections — held under the auspices of the National Labor Relations Board to determine whether employees want to continue being represented by the union in place.
According to the latest data, employers win 74.2 percent of these elections. Matthew Goodfellow, Ph.D., is executive director of the University Research Center, an organization funded by private industry to maintain non-union environments.
Resources
Free reprints of the following articles are available on request from the University Research Center, Box 59638, Chicago, IL 60659; (312) 263-7321.
- Is your company vulnerable to unionization?; Area Development Magazine, February 1993. Provides description of employee opinion audit procedures.
- How to win a decertification election; AMA Management Review, September 1988.
Matthew Goodfellow, Ph.D., is executive director of the University Research Center, an organization funded by private industry to maintain nonunion environments.
