Unions Admit Errors, Call for Reforms in Harsh Study

The AFL-CIO released Thursday the harshest self-assessment it has ever made, a 2 1/2-year study in which it concedes that it has made serious errors in pursuing its goals and in which it advocates a series of major internal reforms necessary to keep pace with the “magnitude and velocity of change in the work place.”

The study said that unions should consider abandoning the traditional labor contract in some cases. Instead, unions could negotiate minimum wage and working condition guarantees that would serve as a floor for individual bargaining between employees and employers, thus allowing workers greater rewards for enterprise and talent.

In addition, the report said that strikes could almost be eliminated if disputes were resolved through arbitration, a process now rarely used to reach contract agreements.

Such steps could “enable unions to remain the authentic voice of workers and their chosen vehicle for expressing their will,” said the report, compiled by 28 union leaders with the assistance of a panel of labor experts from business and academia. It was released at the annual meeting here of the AFL-CIO executive council.

“It is not enough to search for more effective ways of doing what we always have done,” said AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland. “We must expand our notion of what it is workers can do through their unions.”

Americans no longer believe that unions are “the best available means for working people to express their individuality on the job and their desire to control their own working lives,” and neither do they believe that “unions are democratic institutions controlled by their members,” the union study said.

The study reiterated the position of the federation that the recession in highly unionized industries and new anti-union efforts by management are largely to blame for the decline in union membership. Union members constitute less than 19% of the work force today, compared to 35% in 1954.

But the federation said that its efforts to counter those forces have been almost futile. The study found that 65% of non-union workers believe that “unions force members to go along with decisions they don’t like,” that 54% of the same group believe unions increase the risk that companies will go out of business and that 57% believe that unions “stifle individual initiative.”

Public Relations Drive

The AFL-CIO should substantially expand its recently started public relations campaign to “reverse the near-invisibility of the (real worth) of American unions” and do more to “seek out and address new issues of concern to workers,” the study said.

The panel suggested also that new categories of union membership be established for workers not employed in a unionized company.

Kirkland said that too often workers seeking a union contract do not become members when the union fails to win a majority of workers in a representation election.

“No matter what degree of enthusiasm, no matter what degree of commitment the rank-and-file worker has exposed himself to, when we lose the election we have to leave the worker out in the lurch,” Kirkland said.

Service, Benefits

Even without contracts, he said, unions could offer workers such services as job training and fringe benefits such as supplemental medical insurance. That would encourage workers to join unions even when they do not have formal written contracts with their employers, he said.

The panel urged a major increase in orientation programs for new union members, noting that, because of employment turnover, up to a million workers a year join existing unions but frequently those workers do not know why they should belong to unions or why they might be required to belong under union shop contract provisions.

The report called also for unions to follow the example of organizing campaigns in Houston and Los Angeles, where many unions have banded together in membership drives instead of fighting one another for representation rights.

Targeting Small Firms

The panel urged new efforts to organize workers in small companies, pointing out that 35% of the national work force is employed by companies with fewer than 25 workers. The labor conditions in smaller companies tend to be inferior to those in larger firms, it said, and thus their workers are perhaps in even greater need of union representation than workers in larger firms.

Also, the panel said, small companies are less likely to resist unionization and are less able to hire high-priced “union busters” to fight organizing campaigns.