By Bradford Plumer
Before talking about how unions can appeal to a younger generation of technical and professional workers, I want to revisit the question of why they should do so. Let me rephrase that: How much effort should organized labor really spend reaching out to the professionals that Grossfeld describes — professionals who are already skeptical about unions — given that resources are finite and there are many other battles to fight? We can all agree that the workers themselves would benefit from better representation of some sort. But what does labor get out of the deal? And what would it have to give up?
On the face of things, white-collar workers seem terribly important to the future of organized labor. After all, the AFL-CIO estimates that a little over half of its members are “white-collar”. And in 2003, the organization published a report noting that 30 percent of all new members were professionals — “the fastest growing occupational group within the federation.” So this looks like the backbone of labor, right? Won’t unions wither and die unless they can learn to appeal to the professional class?
Well, hold on. The trouble is that “white-collar worker” is a rather vague and overly sweeping term. Looking at the AFL-CIO’s report more closely, it seems the vast bulk of new “white-collar” union members were actually teachers, health-care workers, and telecommunications workers organized by the CWA. In other words, the AFL-CIO seems to be making most of its headway among groups that have traditionally backed labor quite enthusiastically — rather than the young college-educated professionals in, say, Silicon Valley that Grossfeld appears to be targeting.
Now, granted, just because organized labor hasn’t depended on young professionals in the past doesn’t mean they won’t have to in the future. But a few years ago, the Bureau of Labor Statistics put out a handy table: “Occupations with the largest job growth, 2004-2014.” Despite all the talk we hear about “the new economy”, here are the jobs that will grow most significantly in the coming decade: Retail salespersons, registered nurses, home health aides, food servers, janitors, waiters and waitresses, and customer service representatives. Again, these are all fields in which labor unions are already working hard to bolster their presence. Now my impression is that the main obstacles to organizing drives in these areas — that is, efforts to organize janitors and retail clerks and nurses — have been ruthless opposition by employers, rather than skepticism about unions among the workers themselves.
So to my eye, one could almost say the following: Look, organized labor has made the bulk of its recent gains by focusing on the sorts of workers who have traditionally been very receptive to unions — and it has ample reason to continue doing so well into the future. Yes, it would be nice if more college-educated engineers and technicians and so on joined unions, but if they’re going to make a fuss about it, why bend over backwards for them? And while the status quo is nothing to brag about, obviously, unions can grow most effectively by pushing for legislation that curtails employer resistance to organizing — the Employee Free Choice Act, for instance — rather than fretting too much about winning over workers who tend to cast a wary eye at the labor movement.
Of course, that’s not necessarily convincing, either. Why does it have to be one or the other? Why can’t unions do what they’ve long been doing while also trying to reach out to young, college-educated professionals who have very real concerns about workplace security and — as Kusnet nicely illustrates — the quality of their jobs? After all, as Grossfeld mentioned in his original report, too many Democrats in Congress would prefer to buck union influence if they could. Perhaps the only way to nudge them in a more labor-friendly direction — so that bills like the EFCA can actually get signed into law — is for organized labor to make new allies among college-educated workers. Why can’t they do both things at once?
I suppose it all depends on the details. If the idea here is that labor unions simply need to market themselves more effectively to college-educated workers, well, that seems wholly unobjectionable. As Grossfeld points out, this would involve pointing out — rightly — that unions have evolved a great deal from the days of wildcat strikes and bitter clashes with employers, and now often focus on expanding access to health care, creating better child-care options, cushioning the effects of rampant job insecurity, offering employees a voice in the workplace, and so on.
My own anecdotal experience suggests that this strategy can be highly effective. For several years, I was part of a local union comprised of college-educated professionals and white-collar workers. A great many friends and associates my age — I’m 25 — often wondered why on earth our office needed a union. Many of them shared the attitudes described by Grossfeld in his study: They were all sympathetic to labor in theory, but thought that unions often went “too far”, and assumed that most unions either fostered hostility in the office by fighting with the bosses or else hampered flexibility in the workplace by creating too many silly work rules. I would have to explain that, no, no, our union actually gave us an outlet to air our various concerns, and, when the organization faced a severe budget crisis, allowed us to work out a plan with management to avoid painful pay cuts and layoffs. And this was a run-of-the-mill union — our local was part of the UAW, one of the supposed “dinosaurs” of the movement. Once people I talked to realized what unions actually did, they were a great deal more receptive. Better marketing really does work.
Meanwhile, some unions are now taking concrete and often unconventional steps to appeal to white-collar workers. The SEIU has backed Barbara Ehrenreich’s new organization, United Professionals, which provides support for white-collar workers who find themselves either underemployed or hurt by job insecurity. And a few years ago, Grossfeld reported that the CWA helped sponsor Techs Unite, an advocacy group that offers training to IT workers who experience high turnover. These efforts no doubt help attract a number of young technical and professional workers to the ranks of organized labor. The question, as I’ve mentioned above, is how much energy unions should put into these efforts, relative to traditional organizing and political action.
Meanwhile, I’m curious to hear more about Grossfeld’s argument that unions need to create “new structures” to suit the needs of white-collar workers. The CWA has offered some modest steps in this direction with a number of creative endeavors such as Alliance@IBM, which uses the internet to bring IBM employees together. That seems perfectly sound — more unions could probably stand to learn a few tricks from the CWA and SEIU. What about more drastic changes, though? Grossfeld writes: “Democrats ought to showcase new approaches to workplace organization — and the modern labor laws that make them possible.” What, exactly, will this entail?
In the past decade, after all, various scholars and politicians have proposed changes to the labor law ostensibly designed to suit the wants and needs of white-collar workers. In 1997, Republicans in Congress — with the support of New Democratic groups like the DLC — put forward the TEAM Act, which would have allowed businesses to form non-union “teams” of employers and supervisors to address workplace issues. The idea was to create a more flexible sort of bargaining arrangement. So what was the problem? By repealing section 8(a)(2) of the National Labor Relations Act, the TEAM Act would have opened the door for management-dominated unions, which could be used to thwart organizing drives. Traditional labor groups objected, and Bill Clinton eventually vetoed the bill.
I don’t think anyone in this forum is proposing we resuscitate the TEAM Act. But it does pose a possible conundrum. The GOP sold the bill by declaring that it would “empower employers and employees to act as a team, rather than as adversaries, to advance their common interests.” The DLC sounded a similar note at the time: “Labor law should seek not only to protect workers, but also to empower them to participate in decisions that affect their livelihood and workplaces.” According to Grossfeld’s findings, this is exactly the sort of rhetoric — and potentially, the sort of “new product” — that appeals to college-educated professionals. Nevertheless, it proved radioactive to traditional unions.
So there are several questions here: How can Democrats and organized labor find ways to offer a “new product” that can appeal to college-educated professionals without clashing with the interests of the existing labor movement? Will those two goals ever conflict? Moreover, if Democrats and organized labor are going to talk about new approaches to workplace organization, how can they prevent their rhetoric from being co-opted by opponents of labor — as happened in 1997? And, to return to the question posed at the beginning, how much effort should unions spend chasing after white-collar workers, relative to other strategies?
I certainly don’t know the answers to all of these questions. But I do think they’re worth exploring.

Bradford Plumer is a reporter-researcher at The New Republic. His blog can be found here.

By Will Marshall
Economic change has been especially brutal for Americans who work in factories. Now office workers are feeling their pain.
Thanks to corporate restructurings, automation, cheap communications and the rise of global sourcing and supply chains, U.S. white collar workers face unprecedented levels of job churning, demands from employers for “give backs” on wages and benefits, and the growing risk that their jobs will be sent offshore.
On top of that, middle class workers aren’t getting a fair share of the nation’s economic growth. Although U.S. labor productivity has risen a healthy 15 percent since 2001, the median hourly wage has barely budged.¹ Meanwhile, the top one percent of households is reaping a bonanza, claiming fully 53 percent of income gains in 2004.² This growing concentration of wealth, combined with job instability, has put economic insecurity and inequality front and center in the voters’ concerns — as Republicans learned the hard way in the 2006 elections.
Given office workers’ well-founded sense of economic vulnerability and unfairness, labor analyst Jim Grossfeld asks, shouldn’t more of them turn to unions for protection? It’s a good question. In White Collar Perspectives on Workplace Issues, a report on polling and focus group research into white white-collar attitudes, he makes an intriguing case that workers with professional and technical skills, especially women in “helping professions” like nursing, are ripe candidates for union cards.
Put me down as sympathetic but skeptical. There’s no question that working Americans need a new social contract to replace the unraveling World War II era safety net. In theory, unions could play a key role in such a compact, but they’d first have to reinvent themselves to serve the interests of largely autonomous knowledge workers who compete in global markets. Despite some promising experiments here and there, it’s not clear the U.S. labor movement is ready for such radical change.
Ever since the Reagan years, union leaders have complained that the rules governing organizing drives are rigged in favor of employers. That’s undoubtedly true, though whether it’s the main cause of labor’s dwindling membership is another question. Nonetheless, I note that the Democratic Leadership Council, though often at loggerheads with labor, has endorsed card check registration as a way to redress the imbalance of power. Solidarity forever! But the main barriers to organizing office workers, as Grossfeld’s research makes clear, are cultural, not legal.
It’s no secret that many white-collar workers view unions as relics of the industrial economy they have gladly left behind. They see unions as fomenting conflict between workers and employers, when a dispersed, networked economy relies puts a premium on teamwork. And they view unions as an obstacle to the flexibility and ceaseless innovation U.S. companies need to win in global competition.
Yet their growing disenchantment with the risky new world of global commerce, says Grossfeld, is making them more sympathetic to unions. This is plausible and he should be applauded for asking the right question: What do unions have to offer insecure white-collar workers? While he stresses the need for unions to take a “non-traditional approach,” this passage from his report gives me pause:

In the era of economic globalization, unions and the collective bargaining process remain the most effective vehicles for workers to win economic security for themselves and their families. Regardless of how profitable their employers are, workers who are denied the opportunity to negotiate their wages, hours and working conditions lack any significant means to share in the profits they create. This is the case for the 87 percent of U.S. workers who have no union representation today.

Today’s knowledge workers might well benefit from innovative mutual aid organizations. But industrial unions and collective bargaining rose in response to a specific historical circumstance–the reorganization of America’s agrarian society for mass production — that lies well in our past. The percentage of private sector workers in unions today (around 7. 8 percent) is not much greater than it was as that industrial reordering began in 1901: 6.5 percent.³
Industrial-era unionism scored important victories in protecting workers’ basic rights (now largely codified in national policy and law) and equalizing power between labor and big corporations. Collective bargaining was generally a progressive force (although sometimes minorities were left out). When labor and management struck deals for better pay, benefits and working conditions, the costs were passed on to consumers. Since most consumers workers were also workersconsumers, the result was a virtuous cycle as long as inflation didn’t get out of control.
Global markets confound the old model of labor-management relations, which was designed to work in an hierarchical, national economy. Companies seeking competitive advantage readily move production from high-wage to low-wage countries. Communications satellites and the Internet make it possible to shift specific jobs, typically in business and other services, to well-educated but lower-paid workers in countries like India. With foreign competitors breathing down their necks, U.S. workers and employers really don’t have the luxury of indulging in adversarial relations. Moreover, union-negotiated work rules sometimes stand as obstacles to closer collaboration between managers and workers in making the adjustments necessary to keep pace with global competitors. If U.S. workers want to keep high-wage jobs in America, they have to focus as much onon their company’s productivity, innovation and quality, not just their pay and working conditions.
The contemporary case for traditional unionism seems strongest for workers at the bottom in the labor market, especially in low-paying service jobs: child care, big-box retail employees, hotels and restaurants, etc. Most of these jobs are insulated from the pressures of global competition (though not large-scale immigration), and collective bargaining could help to lift low-wage service workers into the middle class, just as it did steel and auto workers in the industrial era.
But white-collar workers don’t see themselves as victims, as alienated from their labor–which usually often involves collaborative problem-solving rather than performing repetitive tasks on assembly lines–or as incapable of adapting to changing labor market demands. What they need is a new model of unionism that focuses on assuring their employability, mobility and earning power rather than protecting specific jobs or compensation packages.
Today’s workers know in their bones that education and skills are ultimately the keys to their economic security. Yet companies nowadays have weak incentives to make big investments in training their workers, who could pack up and take their new skills to competitors at any time. A creative effort to solve this “free rider” problem is the Wisconsin Regional Training Partnership, a consortium of business, labor and government. In effect, it spreads the risk of investing in worker training and, by insisting that training be company-based, makes sure workers get skills for which there is demonstrable market demandthat are really in demand.
This is one model for a new unionism; Grossfeld cites others. The point is, post-industrial unions must provide office workers with what it takes to succeed in the global economy. For example, they could help workers acquire valuable marketable skills, and create “virtual hiring halls” to match them to employers. They could also provide services like portable pensions and health insurance, which would smooth workers’ transitions from job to job. And they could experiment with novel concepts like wage or mortgage insurance, which aim at keeping families’ living standards from collapsing when workers lose their jobs.
Modern labor associations could help workers bargain with their employers for a better work-family balance–for flextime, paid leave, telecommuting and part-time jobs with decent benefits. They could operate, in short, like a back-to-the-future update on the old craft unions, which were defenders of quality workmanship as well as worker’s interests.
In an article for the DLC way back in 1998, Stephan A. Herzenberg, John A. Alic and Howard Wial captured the essence of the new bargain unions might offer today’s knowledge workers:

The essence of the new social contract–the New Deal for the New Economy–must be: Workers and unions will deliver responsible, high quality service; in exchange, society will support a union’s right to exist and all workers’ right to economic security.⁴

Still sounds like a deal to me.

Will Marshall is president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute and editor of With All Our Might: A Progressive Strategy for Defeating Jihadism and Defending Liberty.
¹Bureau of Labor Statistics, www.bls.gov/cps/labor2005/chart1-18.pdf.
²Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, www.cbpp.org/7-10-06inc.htm.
³www.publicpurpose.com
⁴“New Unions for a New Economy,” The New Democrat, March/April 1998. This publication has been replaced by Blueprint magazine.