Most Union Workers Work Government Jobs

When you think unions, being of a certain generation, you may hold some yesteryear vision that the typical union worker manufacturers something, somewhere deep in the bowels of a factory rife with health threatening tasks. It’s the classic vision that union advocates want you to think of, and one that I default to.

But the numbers don’t lie. More union workers work for government jobs than in your private sector employment. Which means that they work for us, as in we the people, rather than some mindless corporate profiteering entity unconcerned with worker safety.

The New York Times reports:

For the first time in American history, a majority of union members
are government workers rather than private-sector employees, the
Bureau of Labor Statistics announced on Friday.

In its annual report on union membership, the bureau undercut the
longstanding notion that union members are overwhelmingly blue-collar
factory workers. It found that membership fell so fast in the private
sector in 2009 that the 7.9 million unionized public-sector workers
easily outnumbered those in the private sector, where labor’s ranks
shrank to 7.4 million, from 8.2 million in 2008.

“There has been steady growth among union members in the public
sector, but I’m a little bit shocked to see that the lines have
actually crossed,” said Randel K. Johnson, senior vice president for
labor at the United States Chamber of Commerce.

According to the labor bureau, 7.2 percent of private-sector workers
were union members last year, down from 7.6 percent the previous year.
That, labor historians said, was the lowest percentage of
private-sector workers in unions since 1900.

Among government workers, union membership grew to 37.4 percent last
year, from 36.8 percent in 2008.

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  • just asking…

    And you’re assuming that government and/or non-profit sector is more concerned with providing benefits and fair wages to employees? How do you come to this bright utopian vision?

    • turfgrrl

      just asking: Well, clearly we don’t seem to care about maximum productivity out of government elected officials, so therefore we don’t seem to care about productivity in government employees. Example 1: The TSA. Do we really need to scan shoes and put shampoo in 3 ounce containers in order to travel with carry on bags? Example 2: The DMW. Where to start? How about why we need to stand in lines with paper forms again? Example 3: Garbage Dumps: Shouldn’t they be open when people, that is residents are home to take garbage to the dump and closed when people are at work?

      • Jim C

        Turfgrrl: Perfect response! The people that defend unions might have the right intentions but they just don’t get it. They really don’t get it because they have been ingrained to believe and see it one way.

  • OLD TIMER

    Best union organizer in the world has always been a bad boss. The best union organizers, working for a union, cannot sell the idea of paying substantial dues,with no guarantees, when a majority of employees believe they are being treated fairly.
    Most union jobs are with big employers. The small business owner is more likely to be personally involved with his employees and treat them well.
    Larger employers, on the other hand, are more impersonal and tend to treat employees as numbers on a spreadsheet where every dime saved adds to stockholder’s profits, and mangement bonuses. Public employees working for Cities, counties, states. or federal government tend to be in unions. There are benefits, and disadvantages , but the decision to form a union is always driven by how the employees feel they are treated. There are virtually no unions in small towns where town employees and elected officials (management) all know each other on a first name basis and have been friends since grade school.
    Norwalk has an interesting history with unions. There weren’t any when Norwalk was a small town. Anyone who takes the time to study that local history will have a much better understanding of why, and how, unions are formed and continue to be supported. Norwalk had the first teacher’s strike in the country, in protest of established gender discrimination in pay for teachers, before they had a union. City employees felt compelled to form unions when they felt they were being treated badly by the City.

    • turfgrrl

      Old Timer: Yeah history is important, however, my beef with relying on setting public policy in the 21st century based on historical problems is that it doesn’t address the current problems. I think it’s safe to say that is the case in Norwalk now. Lot’s of pointing fingers at old problems and skipping right past the new ones.

  • OLD TIMER

    Past abuses drove City employees into unions. It is not likely that the City will change management style enough to convince a majority of union members that they no longer need to pay union dues. It could be done, over a few years, but the City does not have the vision. If they did, who could they blame for out-of-control budgets ?

    • turfgrrl

      Old Timer: Abuses? I bet if we dug out the Hour from 1972 we’d find that the complaints and issues that the City leaders and employees are “talking about” are exactly the same. And that then, they were citing “historical abuses.” But in 1972 as in 1982 as in 1992, the arrival of the computer and the internet kinda changed everything. So in 2002 I’ll give you a transition period, but we’re here at almost 2012, and we are discussing “past abuses.” Like what? Like expecting that an employee needs to increase productivity to keep pace with demands of the residents?

      I’ll pick an easy one for you, my expectation of anyone employed by the City of Norwalk in the IT department should be that they can code in 3 modern programing languages, (javascript, php and C#) configure a server that runs any flavor of ‘nix, create web apps for departments to manage information flow, integrate all forms of communication, voice over ip, mobile, sms, and email, and be able to tell what apps and os are installed in any random desktop computer attached to the city network. I would expect, armed with that knowledge that if a city department head asked for a new computer system to be installed, it would take 2 hours to ghhost a machine to city specs and 1 hour to “install” said system in that department. Do you really want to know how long it takes now?

      • Secondhand Rose

        Do you really want to know WHY it takes that long??? Maybe because there’s only about 4 employees in the IT department to sart with. This department is totally understaffed, well underpaid, and extremely stretched to the limit. They spend the majority of their day attempting to fix stupid user screwups like downloaded viruses and worms, or waste time babysitting users who are too dumb to figure out how to use the computer properly in the first place. Not to mention they have to constantly go offsite to the NFD and the NPD to work on their systems, to the Norwalk Museum, and to any other offsite City building that’s hooked into the City network. Additionally, this is the same City department that installs the telephone systems, troubleshoots the telephone and computer network, and repair, rebuild, and install machines all day long. They don’t just sit on their butts waiting for a help desk call, that’s for sure.

  • OLD TIMER

    I don’t agree the evulotion of computers and the internet had a significant impact on employee/employer relations in City government. To repeat one of your favorite mantras, it is all about communication. Until the City finds a way to communicate with employees in a way that inspires some confidence, instead of fear and mistrust, the unions will continue to be needed.
    Productivity, in a particular job, is a management responsibilty, and not opposed by unions. Give an employee the right equipment, training, respect, and show them how they can accomplish a lot more, and most will jump at the opportunity. ( make a dozer operator out of a hand shovel man) If the increase is significant, any of us would expect increased compensation. If I can start tommorrow to do the work now done by three and two will then be laid off, I expect an increase, not my pay and theirs, too, but an increase.
    History goes back a lot further than 1972. I would agree not much has changed since then, some of the players, but not the game. If anything, it has gotten worse, mostly because of poor choices to lead certain departments.

    • turfgrrl

      Old Timer: Er, no I think we are saying the same thing– the evolution of computers and the internet has not changed the relationship between employee/employer relations. I’m saying it should have. And yeah, communication needs to be improved all the way around. But here’s where we part ways, it is the employee’s responsibility to make themselves as productive as possible through good old fashioned acquisition of knowledge and experience, not the employers. The employers responsibility is to reward productive employees who exceed the norm. Yet look at what our unions do? Merit pay for performance? When was the last time, if ever, you see that in a union contract? You do see it in the at will employment world though. Except for tech, there the driver is where you once needed a fleet of techies to support say an install base of 1000, today you need one or two. Pretty much tech support is completely automated, automated diagnostic scripts, repair scripts. Just like why garages are going away. Today’s cars have about 350 computer chips in them. You have a problem, your car gets hooked up to the diagnostic computer and the diagnosis is done. Your average garage mechnaic can now diagnose 6 cars an hour instead of one. Should he be compensated more when he’s not really doing more work? I don’t think so.

      • just asking…

        Depends on your definition of “work”. Sometimes time spent on a job does not equate to value of the job. I think the garage mechanic who now has to interpret what a computer says (and fix something that is way more complex) should get more money because it requires more education, is more of a speciality, and requires more thinking. It also requires regular updates on the newest models. No longer a simple wrench-turner, he is now a “custoemr service specialist.” Plus he may have to have better communcaiotn skills as he expalins why a simple error message about the airbags is going to require a complete replacement of the “command module” and cost $3000.

  • OLD TIMER

    He is compensated quite a bit more. Most shops pay technicians a percentage of what they charge the customer and the customer is charged what the flat rate book calls for. A really good tech can make excellent money, but fewer are required to run the same shop and turn out more dollar volume. Where the flat rate book calls for an hour and a $60 part to fix your car, you will pay for the part and an hour labor, even if a really good tech completes the job in 20 minutes. Customer ends up happy, boss is happy, and tech is happy. Boss paid for the equipment and tech training, and gets excellent return on his investment. Not every guy who calls himself a mechanic can qualify to make the big money, so most big shops have one excellent tech and several parts changers. The pay schedule works out so each is paid a percentage of what his work brings in. (piecework ?)
    The problem of City employee relations will not be fixed by technology. If it ever improves, it will be because the employees come to believe they can trust the employer to live up to agreements and stop trying to cheat them at every turn.
    Department heads may not start out trying to cheat, but they are pressured by bean counters, who have no understanding of the real work being done, to cut costs at every turn. Sadly, it gets to be a competition. Who can be the most effective cheater ? The public (us) ends up paying the price when the workers and the bosses devote more energy to that competition than they do to serving the public, and blaming each other for rising costs and lower productivity. Smarter management would go a long way, but is not encouraged. There are conscientous, hard working, people working for the City and the sytem does not encourage recognizing them, partly because nobody has ever developed an objective evaluation process that both management and employees trust. Very few jobs in public service lend themselves to simple, objective measurement. Come up with a good honest system to evaluate employees in public service jobs and adjust compensation to reflect those evaluations and you will be amazed how fast the unions will agree to it. Nobody is more aware of who really works and who doesn’t than the guys who work alongside them.

    • turfgrrl

      Old Timer: Where are you dredging up your facts? Are you talking about Pep Boys? Or the dealerships? Because they pretty clearly have mastered the whole, check the car in and then run down the exact labor and parts cost because the whole thing is computerized, down to 10 minutes on the hour.

      And why is it that you think the CIty managers “cheat.” Cheat at what? Poker? City work isn’t all that complicated, it’s easy to track, it’s easy to create shifts, it’s easy to understand. You’re just throwing old some unsubstantiated accusation of cheating, without providing a single example. Of course this is the type of mindset that fosters all the mistrust in the first place. In the end a city job is a job that has a single proposition, an employee gives up time for pay. What the employee does for that exchange of time for pay should be irrelevant. But I’m sure you’ll think that some leaf blower who can now cleanup up 10 leaf bags per hour deserves more pay than the guy who used to have to use a rake and could only do 5 leaf bags per hour. Forget the cost differential on rake versus gasoline powered leaf blower. And there’s not a union in the world that wouldn’t try to make that argument that the newly “skilled” leaf blower somehow deserves more compensation because of the new skill. I think the leaf blowing tool is the productivity increase.

      Efficiency experts have likely figured most basic jobs out. But in my leaf blowing example, some Californian grandmother kicked some ass with a rake:

      Grandmother Proves Rake and Broom as Fast as Leaf Blowers
      (January 8, 1998 press release from Zero Air Pollution, Los Angeles)

      In fighting the ban on gas powered leaf blowers gardeners have argued that it would take them twice as long to do jobs if they had to use rakes and brooms. But Diane Wolfberg, a Palisadian grandmother in her late 50s, proved them wrong in tests conducted by the Department of Water & Power Leafblower Task Force last Thursday.

      In three tests involving gas powered leaf blowers and battery powered leaf blowers, Diane cleaned the areas using rakes or brooms faster than any of the battery powered blowers and almost as fast as the gas powered leaf blowers and she did a better job in cleaning up the areas.

      The Task Force, formed at the direction of the Los Angeles City Council, is composed of two representatives from the gardeners’ associations and one representative each from the landscape contractors association, the dealers, DWP, the Department of Parks and Recreation, General Services, the City Council, and the homeowners. It is evaluating electrical alternatives to the gas powered leaf blowers. When it was proposed that the electrical equipment be tested against gas powered leaf blowers which would be the baseline for comparison, the homeowner representative, Jack Allen, also of the Palisades, suggested that rakes and brooms be included in the comparison.

      Wolfberg, who like Allen, is a member of Zero Air Pollution (ZAP), volunteered. In the first test, which required each participant to clean a pebbled cement patio area approximately 100 square feet in size with eight chairs placed on the patio, diminutive Wolfberg cleaned the area in two minutes and 30 seconds. The gas powered leaf blower operated by a large, well muscled gardener cleaned the area in two minutes but like all the leaf blowers, did not clean the area of small nuts or leaf stems, something Wolfberg was able to do.

      In a second test involving the moving of paper cups and wadded paper down a 50 foot slope and back up again, she was as fast as the gas powered leaf blower and faster than the electric blowers. In the third test, requiring the cleaning of a heavy bed of pine needles and dirt down a thirty foot concrete ramp, she was the fastest and the cleanest. The leaf blowers all sent columns of damp dirt flying into the air as much as five or six feet.

      Wolfberg’s performance did not impress the gardeners but did impress others who had been convinced that using rakes and brooms was not feasible. The representative from DWP told Wolfberg that she had won him over.

  • OLD TIMER

    TG
    Dealers, mostly. Smaller shops may have different ways of calculating your bill, but most follow a flat rate manual for the time to charge you, rather than clock the real time spent. Very few are unionized. A really good tech gets paid for a lot more hours than he spends at work. An inferior tech gets paid a lot less.
    I didn’t say anybody was cheating. I said there is a perception on the worker’s part that the bosses are trying to cheat them and a similar perception of the bosses that the workers are cheating every chance they get. Both sides know of occassional examples that confirm their positions. Until management styles change and communication improves, so the basic perceptions change, there is no way the unions will ever be voted out. It is mistrust that keeps unions in place. Nobody enjoys giving away union dues money every payday, unless they believe they are getting value for it.
    As for productivy improvements, I used the example of training a hand shovel operator to operate a bulldozer, where the amount of earth moved is increased by an enormous factor. In that example, a higher pay grade is justified, not directly related to amount of earth moved, but more than any hand shovel operator could ever get. In addition to the increased productivity, there is a lot more responsibility and potential for injury and major property damage. The possible productivity improvement from using leaf blowers depends on the size and type of blower and is certainly debateable when comparing small, back-pack blowers against an energetic raker, with a good rake. The fact that one person can work hard enough to out-perform someone using a small blower doesn’t mean much without a lot more information, and some standard for how hard a raker is expected to work when he is doing that all day, every day, rather than in a quick competition.

    • turfgrrl

      Old Timer: Must be an American car thing, because the dealers that I have serviced my cars at certainly had detailed and varying labor charges. Nothing like having to pay for taking out the dashboard in order to change out the bulb on the speedometer.

      You implied someone was cheating, and still haven’t exactly explained what cheating was in even a hypothetical situation. Any “boss” could be a card cheat, and not someone you want to play Texas Hold ‘Em with, but that doesn’t mean anything in the workplace does it?

      Okay I’ll give up my grandma rake toting leaf worker and try to understand why I would pay someone more for sitting in a bulldozer moving chunks of earth around. Hey I’d pay for that experience of sitting in a bulldozer and moving piles of dirt. Reminds me of my sandbox days … er. So somehow you want me to believe that my newly minted bulldozer operator has attained skills that will somehow be worth more? Because of potential “major property damage?” Hey my hand shovel operator should be as concerned about major property damage too! Now if my hand shovel or bull dozer operator could design a process where I can move twice the amount of earth an hour, then I’d be more inclined to pay that worker more. But sorry, being able to operate multiple forms of equipment in my world is just required. And as grandma proved, sometimes the manual process is better. I think the article I snipped explained the “competition” rather nicely.

      • just asking…

        In my expereince, the people who DO the work — at any level — benefit from being organzied into a group — call it a union or a professional organization — to get fair treatment from those who contract for the work.

  • Union Schunion

    Anyone who thinks Unions and ‘programs” benefit the public has an inborn error in their brain metabolism which precludes logical thought.

    • Anon

      100% RIGHT! UNIONS REEK! Hey how about the City Waste station now open on Wednesdays only for City of Norwalk/Tax paying Residents to drop off waste. Yippee! It’s not like we aren’t at work on a Wednesdays. But hey, I’ll push my luck and ask for a Wednesday off. I guess if I had a Union to defend me I wouldn’t even have to consider it! I smell a rat! Would anyone really be surprised if a City & Union contract anything to do with THAT decision? Can’t work Saturday cause of some clause???

  • John

    unfortunately unions are a necessary evil, especially In the government employee sector. They provide a checks and balance system, much like the President, Congress, and the Supreme Court. The taxpayers would like nothing better than to pay less wages and benefits, resulting in a lower tax burden. Elected officials and Department heads answer to the taxpayers. Where is their incentive to treat their employees fairly? A union serves to protect the interests of the employee against overzealous managers. If you look at government employees in non unionized southern states, you will find underpaid staff who serve at the whim of local elected officials with little job security. Their are numerous stories of government employees who were terminated for failing to donate to political campaigns or not campaigning hard enough for their bosses in an election year. Many times the winning politician will replace government employees with their own supporters.

  • sonoresident

    Tell the families of the 300+ firemen, police officers and port authority workers who lost their lives on 9/11 that unions are these terrible things that coddle their employees and benefit at the expense of the public.

  • sonoresident

    Tell the families of the 300+ firemen, police officers and port authority workers who lost their lives on 9/11 that unions are these terrible things that coddle their members and benefit themselves at the expense of the public.

  • OLD TIMER

    Does anybody believe the union decides when the yard waste site will be open ?
    If the city agreed to pay a premium to anyone working weekends or any other time outside the normal work schedule, then they need to pay that premium or negotiate a change in the contract. Why is that so hard to understand ? The City, and some here, prefer to blame the union than to arange for service the public wants. Should we go back to the days when schedules were set arbitrarily and anyone could be told to work weekends, with no premium, anytime a supervisor thought that was a good idea ? I don’t understand why the City agreed to the work schedule now in the contract, but I’ll bet somebody thought it would save money.
    Anyone who doesn’t understand that shoveling by hand, and running a bulldozer, require different skill sets and different levels of responsibility, has very little understanding of how labor is valued in the real word. I didn’t imply anyone was cheating, although it probably happens, once in a while. I said there was mistrust on both sides, mostly because of poor communication. I also said the first step in getting rid of the unions would be fixing the mistrust issue. I don’t see any chance of that happening.

  • From Spain

    To add to the discussion, here is what Spain’s Fire and Rescue guys think about privatization of essential gov. services. Cops next? Well we do have Blackwaters new world super intelligence operative 00ZE Sir Prince hop skipping over sovereignty lik a a frog jumping lilly pads across the pond.

    http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=afd_1264918848