Los Angeles Times Interview : Audrey Freedman : Trying to Figure Out Where American Labor Went Wrong

Just a few decades ago, a walkout by America’s railroad workers would have halted commerce across the nation. A long strike against the New York Daily News would have brought the newspaper’s management to its knees. And with unemployment on the rise, union leaders would have persuaded Congress to enact a variety of new jobs programs.

But instead, the news of today’s labor problems brings fresh evidence that the influence of organized labor has virtually evaporated. The rail strike has gone almost unnoticed. The Daily News did not bow to union demands. And Congress has done nothing new to assist the unemployed.

While most experts attribute big labor’s decline to the greed of union members, Audrey Freedman has a different explanation. One of the nation’s pre-eminent labor-management experts, she thinks unions faltered not for what they did, but for what they failed to do. Unions, in her view, mistakenly ignored needs of workers other than wages.

Freedman’s thoughts cascade when she talks. On employment issues, she is both sharply analytical and keenly sensitive to the aspirations of workers. Always a provocative and independent thinker, Freedman, 61, is an economist for the Conference Board, a research group funded by business. In that capacity, she advises managers how to properly handle employees. Or, as she puts it, “I scold them a great deal.”

Freedman has been interested in labor matters ever since she grew up in the shadows of Pittsburgh’s steel mills in the late 1930s and 1940s. “I saw a lot of union-management relationship right up close,” she recalls. She graduated in economics from Wellesley in 1951, but had no money to go on to graduate school. So she worked as an 80-cents-an-hour research assistant at Harvard Graduate School in order to attend the graduate classes that interested her.

Freedman went on to hold a number of important positions in Washington, at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Labor Department, among others. When President Richard M. Nixon imposed wage-and-price controls in 1973, she was recruited--even though she disagreed with the policy.

Now a grandmother, she lives in New York City with her husband, an attorney and professor of law at Hofstra University.

Question: The New York Daily News strike pointed up, again, the declining impact of organized labor in our country. Now, when the disparity between the haves and have-nots appears to be growing, how do you explain the inability of unions to organize new workers?

Answer: I think it’s a combination of the unions’ past victories, so to speak . . . and the changing life of American workers today. Let me explain.

First of all, beginning in the 1940s, when the industrial union movement really began to grow very rapidly during World War II, the unions were able to bargain higher wages in the industries with which they dealt, and even industrywide wage patterns, and then leap-frogged on those, always bargaining for more because those industries had a great deal of market power. So it was just a question of bargaining higher wages and having the industry raise its prices and cover the wages.

That kind of success led the unions to think that they were successful because they were good at bargaining. It really wasn’t until the late 1970s and the early 1980s that we began to see that they were successful in a derivative way because of the market power of the companies . . . .

The unions, being so successful at one particular appeal, sort of ignored the possibility for expanding their appeal or their services. Unions are a business, too. They’re offering a service. So they should be responding to their customers. But when you’re very successful at offering one service and you can claim, “Join a union, we’ll get you higher wages,” and it works, you tend to ignore the possibilities for expanding your services.

Q: How could they have expanded their services?

A: There are two in particular that I’ve thought a lot about.

Beginning with World War II, people were exposed to all layers of society, and more people were exposed to blacks and whites working together--not only in the Army, but also in defense plants--and women and men worked together. So there was an opening in American society for a different point of view. And there began to grow, during the 1940s, what was then called the urge for fair employment practices. Unions ignored this, but it began to be such a public urge that grew and grew and grew until the early 1960s, when eventually it was enacted into national legislation. First it was called civil-rights legislation and then equal-opportunity legislation.

The unions not only stood aside from it; but, in fact, they fought it after the legislation was passed. At the operating level, unions were very much against changing any of their practices (of) discrimination against women and against blacks . . . . So the unions were sort of fighting it on the basis of seniority and a variety of other things, past practice.

But what they had done in sticking to their appeal of “We’ll get you higher wages” was to ignore the possibility of expanding the appeal to “We will represent the people who would like to be in the system--blacks and women who want to be in the working system.”. . . So in a sense, unions were missing the opportunity to define themselves in broader service terms . . . .

Q: You mentioned a second opportunity. What was that?

A: The next public ground swell of opinion that unions missed in the way of an opportunity was the concern that began to build in the late 1960s over the environment and occupational health . . . . The unions sort of didn’t do much about that. In fact, in some situations, for a union it might even be a conflict-of-interest situation, because an employer would say we’re going to close down if we can’t operate these coke ovens.

So this urge for a safer working environment and a safer community environment began to build, starting in the late 1960s, and the union movement is somewhere else busy--still claiming “We’ll get you higher wages” but not expanding the bundle of services that it offers. Not even seeing the possibility of offering something in addition. Again, it eventually worked its way into legislation--TOSCA (Toxic Substances Control Act), RCRA (Resource Conservation and Recovery Act), OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Act) . . . . Unions sort of stood on the sidelines--occasionally trying to get better enforcement inside of industries, but not adopting it as a union agenda. Again, what it looks like is a narrow--and narrowing--focus on getting wages only.

Q: But historically, didn’t unions play a role in improving the lives of members?

A: Some unions did positive things, particularly the clothing unions. In the early quarter of this century, they were educational institutions and provided all kinds of social support for immigrants who came to this country with nothing, who had no friends, who were easily exploited. Most everyone has heard of the Triangle shirtwaist fire, but people don’t know the desperation in those sweatshops. The unions did their best to counteract that and also to help people assimilate to the New World.

And for many unions, the majority of their members were women, very young women. They had English classes. They had classes in how to vote. They had classes in how to work and they gave social help. Some unions are still doing the same things. I think particularly of the Amalgamated (Clothing and Textile Workers) and ILGWU (International Ladies Garment Workers Union).

Q: Are there any new opportunities for unions today?

A: . . . . In this society and this economy, the problems of workers mostly have to do with their lives outside their work. At the same time, their employers are much less able to control the whole environment in which they live. So bargaining with the employer, which is what the law says unions do, can’t solve most of the problems where people really feel exposed.

Q: Aren’t today’s low-wage workers interested in getting higher wages?

A: If you and I stayed late here tonight, late at night, there would come a cleaning crew through here probably. There would be window washers, maybe. There would be floor-cleaning people and floor waxers and people to clean the wastebaskets and the desks. If we said to them, “Hey, we’ll organize you into a union and we’ll get you higher wages,” they’d probably say, “No thanks, please. Because the Allied Cleaning Service will lose the contract, or I’ll certainly lose my job because Allied just doesn’t make that much money, anyway. I don’t want to lose my job.”

But if we said to them--if we were union organizers and we looked like them, which most union organizers don’t--”What do you need?” the people who clean this building might say--I know in New York they’d say: “When I get on the subway at 11 o’clock at night, it’s not safe. I really would like to have a patrolman down there on the platform. I’d like to have a guard in my children’s school. I’d like to have some place for them to go after school where it’s safe and where they can play and learn. I’d like to have somebody help them with their homework, because I can’t.

“In fact, I would like to have an English-language class because I can’t really read, and my native language isn’t English. Do you think you could help me get an immigration lawyer, because, my status isn’t quite secure, and I’m not sure--can you give me a little advice? I’m actually illegal. And while we’re at it, I’ve got a problem with heat in my building, because there hasn’t been any this winter and some of the pipes are cracked, and I don’t know how to deal with my landlord. I can’t even find him . . . . My neighborhood is a shambles and my family life is a shambles, and it would be nice if somebody could sort of tell me how to live.”

Those are things that a union cannot do anything about, given this limitation that you must bargain with the employer. The employer can’t do anything about it, either. If you think about what the union’s basic concept of life is, it’s very much like a company town in 1900: Where the employer lived in the big white house on the hill and the workers lived down below in the valley and they worked in the factory. The employer owned the factory, but also the stores, the bank, their houses, the school system, the mayor, for sure, very likely a good deal of the state legislature. So if you wanted anything, you went to the employer and you bargained . . . . It was a useful social instrument confronting the employer who had a great deal of power.

But the Allied Cleaning Service . . . isn’t that powerful. Our economic and social life is not only far more complex, but it’s so diffuse that the only help there could be would be sort of self-help groups. Now unions could do that, but if I proposed such a thing to (AFL-CIO President) Lane Kirkland, he would rumble, “Well yeah, but where do we get the dues?”

I’m not sure. What I am sure of is that the unions are all geared up institutionally to combat a situation that doesn’t exist. They have a whole superstructure that is like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. It all fits together, but with something that doesn’t any longer have that shape and form.

Q: If the unions wanted to revitalize themselves, is it possible for them to do it?

A: I don’t know, but I don’t think so. The other thing that impedes this kind of fundamental change is that the union officers . . . are essentially administrators of large institutions, or old and growing smaller institutions. So their own interests, their personal interests, are not for radical reform. They’re preservationists . . . . They’re administering trust funds and real estate and staffs. These may not be as large as they were 15 years ago--none of these things are as large as they were 15 years ago. That doesn’t mean that there’s any incentive to totally redesign.

Q: Will unions disappear entirely?

A: No, I don’t think they will totally disappear. The construction unions--some of them might still be around. Of the employers who are still in business in a decade who were unionized, I would think most of them will still be unionized, at least in some of their operations. There’s a certain inertia to a union-management relationship that as long as the plant is still there, and the company, in some cases, is still there, the relationship will remain, simply because it isn’t that disruptive.