Amy Dean
Since its heyday in postwar America, organized labor’s grip on the work force has been steadily shrinking. Forty years ago, fully a third of American workers carried union cards. Today, that number has dropped to one in seven. While labor still ranks as an important political force, the perception among many is that unions are archaic, hidebound institutions run by a leadership more concerned with self-perpetuation than the concerns of their members.
But there are glimmers of change and rebirth within the U.S. labor movement. AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney has encouraged new thinking about the way labor unions operate and organize, and he has placed a number of progressive leaders in positions of power. These young turks are redefining the role of labor unions in today’s service and knowledge economy, organizing in nonindustrial occupations such as education, health care and technology.
While labor has chalked up some impressive successes of late in organizing teachers and health-care workers, the technology sector has been a far greater challenge. Unions are about as popular as slide rules among those who toil in Silicon Valley’s information factories. Yet, there are a number of factors that make these workers ripe for organizing, not the least of which is the pattern of short-term contract jobs that define the employment of the majority of technology workers.
The task of organizing Silicon Valley’s geeks falls on the shoulders of a 5-foot, 3-inch fireball named Amy B. Dean. As head of Silicon Valley’s South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council, she’s trying to remake labor into a potent force that appeals to professionals while also taking care of the low-wage workers left behind in the technology boom. She successfully directed a long and often bitter campaign to establish a living wage in the valley’s capital, San Jose, and she has gone as far as establishing a union-based temporary agency that offers workers better pay, training and a portable benefits package.
Dean, 35, sees unions becoming the one stable force in a workplace where, increasingly, employees move quickly from job to job and employer to employer--40% of Silicon Valley’s workers are temporary employees, twice the national average. While she has focused on Silicon Valley, she is clearly interested in a broader, national agenda and is an outspoken advocate for rewriting the nation’s labor laws to reflect the changed nature of employment as we move into the new century. Dean is intimately familiar with the lives of knowledge workers: Her husband, Randy Menna, is involved in a technology start-up firm. In an interview from her San Jose home, with her young son occasionally interrupting, she talked about changes in the way we work and how unions need to change, as well, to address the needs of workers in today’s global economy.
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Question: There are some strong comparisons between workers in the entertainment industry here and technology workers in Silicon Valley. Both groups essentially sell know-how, and both usually work job to job. But in Hollywood, workers are highly organized into unions, while workers in your area are not. Are there things about the way the entertainment unions work that you can apply to technology workers?
Answer: First of all, everybody is a knowledge worker in the new economy. Knowledge is the basis for wealth. Bill Gates is the wealthiest man in the world, but he doesn’t own oil fields or vast amounts of land or huge industrial properties. This fact represents a fundamental change in the employment contract. That’s the same for workers in Los Angeles, in Silicon Valley, anywhere else. It means that the way we represent workers has to change.
Q: So do you see knowledge workers forming the kinds of craft guilds we see in Hollywood?
A: Yes. Occupational unions make sense. People no longer work directly for one employer and move from job to job, so it makes sense to have organizations that speak to their occupational and professional needs, and not just economic needs.
Q: The more purely knowledge-based your work is, the more you own your own tools. This means employees and not the employer can own the means of production. How does that change the relationship between the worker and the employer and the worker and a union?
A: It’s a great question, but I don’t think that’s what’s driving the change in the way people go to work. The fact that people are moving from job to job, and that assignments are increasingly short-term, is being driven by the fact that we compete in a global context. Also, technology allows us to set up new kinds of work relationships. And innovation is now the key. We compete on the basis of how quickly we can take a concept and get it to market. That means we have to shed any functions within our organization that are not directly contributing to that goal.
Q: Silicon Valley is steeped in a culture of itinerant work relationships. People take short-term assignments at all levels of employment, from high-paid programmers to the folks who maintain the building. What’s the secret to organizing these highly mobile, contingency workers?
A: We’re creating organizations that have portable benefit structures and give people a permanent connection to the labor market even as their employers change. We’re also creating new ways to place people in jobs. So we need to provide for the same basic, permanent needs that people have, but under a very different arrangement.
Q: You’ve started your own temporary employment agency, and, in many ways, it seems that unions may be going back to the era of the union hall, when workers showed up and employers hired them by the day.
A: The next generation of employee organizations may look very much like a page from the past. In the first industrial revolution, we were a craft-based society, and in the second, we became an industrial-based society. We are now in our third industrial revolution, and, in many respects, we are turning back to a craft-based society. The original labor organizations were craft-based: They represented people based on the function they performed. They were also regional in scope, and agreements were made at the local level. When we moved to an industrial economy, representation became more national in scope, because industries were national. So not only might we take a page from history in terms of the way we organize employee groups, but we might also do well to look at the scale which we organize as well.
Q: The perception among many workers is that unions are primarily for industrial workers and that they are rigid and unresponsive to membership. What are you doing to counter these perceptions among young workers?
A: Historically, our strength has been in representing industrial workers. But if you look at the numbers, our growth has been in the service sector and in other nonindustrial areas. As to the perception that we are unresponsive, just look at the new leaders in the union movement. There has been a great change in the complexion and makeup of union leadership. They are young, diverse and they represent the new workers in this economy. It’s not just the leadership--there’s change at the grass-roots, too. There’s a far broader range of faces coming to the table. . . . It is going to be women, people of color, immigrants and youth that are going to swell the ranks of this new labor movement.
Q: One hears again and again from technology companies that there are not enough qualified workers, yet, by hiring through temp agencies, technology companies seem to be actively discouraging the growth of a stable work force. As a union leader, what should management be doing to improve the quality and quantity of available workers?
A: The biggest challenge for the leaders of the information-technology companies is reconciling the need for a flexible work force with the need people have to feel a sense of loyalty to their employer. Human resources are critical to their success. But the days of the Hewlett-Packards are over. Companies that keep people gainfully employed over the course of a lifetime are a relic of the past. It’s not because these companies used to be run by good people and are now being run by bad people. It’s because the rules of the market have changed, and they can no longer be competitive and maintain large, permanent work forces.
The challenge is how to get people to give 110% when workers increasingly have more loyalty to their Rolodex than to their current employer. I would argue that just as organized labor solved a problem 60 years ago that neither management nor government could solve on their own, and created an enfranchised middle class and a stable economy, so, too, will labor help solve these problems in the coming century. It will be labor unions, associations of employees, that people will be connected to, and I believe labor unions are the only institutions that can create a certain amount of stability given the rules of the new economy.
Today, here in the valley, people are more connected to their social network than they are to the employers they work for. That’s how people find jobs, by using an informal social networking system, telling each other what might be open and who might be hiring. We’re just beginning to understand how these networks play a role in brokering supply and demand in the work force. They work, but not always very well. They speak to the need for something more formalized, which will evolve over time.
Q: One success of the new labor movement has been in winning acceptance for the idea of a living wage. Why should someone who’s making a comfortable living support a living wage for lower-paid workers?
A: When people go to work and are still poor, we all suffer. When working people can’t afford to pay for the basic needs of their families, the whole community suffers. We pay when people don’t have health care and show up sick at emergency rooms. We pay when a growing percentage of our population becomes disconnected from the life of the community. Political extremism inevitably crops up in such situations.
Perhaps even more importantly, the issue of a living wage allows us to take this issue and thrust it into public debate. We haven’t talked about these issues for many years, and to address them and put them on an agenda is critical if we’re going to build a stable society. Also, in an era where Democrats and Republicans both seem confused about what role government should play, the living-wage campaigns show that government can take an activist role, contribute to the common good and try to take some steps toward narrowing the tremendous wage gap we have in this country.
Q: All indications are that the wage gap continues to widen at a rapid pace. What’s driving it, and what’s the solution?
A: We have a massive restructuring going on in the economy. Any time that happens, we have some people who win and a lot of people who lose. There’s no historical evidence that prosperity is evenly shared. It takes institutions or other powerful forces to intervene in the market and cut up the fruits in a more equitable way. But the institutions that are capable of doing that, such as government and the labor movement, have been, at least until recently, in decline. Remember, the automobile and steel industries didn’t automatically create a strong middle class in this country. It took collective bargaining to make that happen. More recently, we’ve had decades of rising productivity but lower wages. I believe that’s because organized labor has not intervened to make sure the wealth created by that productivity is more evenly distributed.
Right now, the bottom 20% of the population in income owe more money than they are worth. Think about what that means. It will get worse until we hit a political crisis that will give us the will to make some meaningful reform. One important part of that reform will be rewriting the National Labor Relations Act so it makes sense for the new economy and the new workplace. The second part will be negotiating a new New Deal. Things like Social Security and unemployment insurance, which were designed to buffer the risks of the inevitable ebbs and flows of the business cycle, need to be recrafted to fit the needs of today’s workers.
No matter what end of the political spectrum you occupy, whether you run toward compassion or self-interest, you have to understand that economic injustice can rip apart the social fabric. That’s not Karl Marx, it’s James Madison. *
