Workers and the Tooth Fairy
It’s So Unfair
If you are a worker, you may have noticed that you have been taking quite a beating. Workers are in a real squeeze these days, not that they haven’t always been caught in a vise, but it’s a lot worse now, because of the pandemic, the recession and the loss of business revenues, meaning that any talk of worker unions is something that even the tooth fairy wouldn’t address. In any profession just the mere mention of organizing workers is enough to get metaphorically transferred to South Dakota or to be transferred to an assignment that is totally untenable, resulting in an employee having no choice but to quit.
Without unions, workers have no power, other than to appeal to management’s ethics and values and fairness, and that too, is too often, in the realm of that imaginary tooth fairy.
Workers are expected to accept pay cuts, reductions in hours, scheduling changes, less benefits and still to fulfill their jobs as they did before, all in the name of keeping the business afloat in troubled times. And it just doesn’t work that way because these changes have psychological effects and they don’t go away with management’s good wishes, words of encouragement or crocodile tears. It is largely an employer’s world, the employers set the rules and they decide what is fair but the perverse thing about it is that employees usually go blithely along, not questioning management and even forgetting about essential fairness.
Take, for example, the employee who has worked for a company for 15 years, with an exemplary record, only to be told suddenly that the economic situation requires that the employee must now work a night shift. That is so unfair and the employer should not be allowed to rearrange a person’s life in the name of business revenues. For the employer who says they have no other option, the response is that is not acceptable and find a fair alternative.
Or how about salaries and how for many workers, their pay has been cut, either through outright salary reductions or through fewer work hours or cuts in health benefits. None is acceptable and the fate of a company should not be placed on the backs of the workers. The fact that such a thought is so foreign to employers and employees alike attests to the brainwashing the workers have endured.
An employee should have the right to demand to be treated fairly. That means that salaries should not be cut but should be increased to reflect competency and accomplishments. It should not hinge on the company health, that is the problem of the ownership, not the workers. Management should open its books and prove its case about cutting pay, hours or benefits; it is not good enough for management to tell workers, “trust me.” That is another myth that has permeated and become simply a fact of life for employers and employees, both. That is that the private sector does not have to answer to employees, does not have to show that in fact the company finances are faltering, does not have to justify measures that effect workers. Management has an ethical responsibility to be transparent, another reference to that wifty tooth fairy. The fallacy that we are all in this together, management and workers, and we all have to sacrifice is pure bunk because ownership or management will never voluntarily give up anything because that is just not the way it’s done.
Workers have a right to be treated with dignity and politeness and they should not to be humiliated by superiors just because they can. And in the wake of humiliation and under-appreciation, workers have a right to be heard without fear of recriminations and we all know where that goes, right into the tooth fairy domain.
The Economic Policy Institute reported that union workers had more job security during the pandemic, but unionization remains historically low. There is hope for workers in President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan which would partly dismantle the barriers to union organizing and collective bargaining. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that in 2020, 15.9 million workers in the U.S. were represented by a union, a decline of 444,000 from 2019. The rate is less than half what it was roughly 40 years ago.
Somehow businesses manage to survive and pay union members more than their non-union counterparts. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that among full-time wage and salary workers, union members had median usual weekly earnings of $1,144 in 2020, while those who were not union members had median weekly earnings of $958.
A report by the Economic Policy Institute shows that unions have a substantial impact on the compensation and work lives of unionized and non-unionized workers.
Among the conclusions:
Unions raise wages of unionized workers by roughly 20 percent and raise compensation, including both wages and benefits, by about 28 percent.
Unions reduce wage inequality because they raise wages more for low- and middle-wage workers than for higher-wage workers, more for blue-collar than for white-collar workers, and more for workers who do not have a college degree.
Strong unions set a pay standard that non-union employers follow. For example, a high school graduate whose workplace is not unionized but whose industry is 25 percent unionized is paid 5 percent more than similar workers in less unionized industries.
The impact of unions on total non-union wages is almost as large as the impact on total union wages.
The report notes that “the most sweeping advantage for unionized workers is in fringe benefits.” Unionized workers are more likely than their non-unionized counterparts to receive paid leave, are approximately 18 percent to 28 percent more likely to have employer-provided health insurance, and are 23 percent to 54 percent more likely to be in employer-provided pension plans.
Unionized workers receive more generous health benefits than non-unionized workers. They also pay 18 percent lower health care deductibles and a smaller share of the costs for family coverage. In retirement, unionized workers are 24 percent more likely to be covered by health insurance paid for by their employer.
Unionized workers receive better pension plans. Not only are they more likely to have a guaranteed benefit in retirement, their employers contribute 28 percent more toward pensions.
Unionized workers receive 26 percent more vacation time and 14 percent more total paid leave (vacations and holidays).
Where is the tooth fairy when you need her?