JUST QUIT IT!

By Suzanne Sparrow Watson

Well, here we are at Labor Day.  I know that because I saw the Christmas decorations up at Target this week.  I wish that we could celebrate one holiday – heck, one season – at a time but I suppose there isn’t any money in that.  Still, as a former Human Resources professional, I do give some thought to Labor Day and its origins.  Our annual honoring of labor dates back to 1894, when Congress declared that the first Monday in September would be set aside as a “general holiday for the laboring classes”. I think they assumed that a day off once a year might compensate for low wages and deplorable working conditions.  When I searched for Labor Day photos, I found this one of the Women’s Typographical Union float.  Ironically, our dad was required to join the typographical union when he first went into the newspaper business.  Fifty years later, when he went to retire, the Typographical union bosses had “mis-invested” his 50 years of contributions.  I have not been a fan of Big Labor since then, but regardless, I have enjoyed having a day off at the end of summer.

I like to follow the trends in employment, not because I’m considering re-joining the workforce, but because I am fascinated by the dynamic between employees and the companies they work for.  In the 80’s the trend to become an entrepreneur was popular, albeit some pretty wacky ideas stemmed from people who tried to out-invent each other.  That led to the “intrapreneur” phase, where people tried to be entrepreneurs within a corporate structure.  Let’s just say that didn’t go well.  In the mid-1990’s Fast Company published Tom Peters’ The Brand Called You.  The article became the launching point for the “Me, Inc.” phenomenon, whereby employees were encouraged to develop a personal brand that they could use to advance their careers.  Michael Jordon posed for Inc Magazine as the poster child for personal branding.  I’m not sure anyone working for a big company achieved the pinnacle of branding Jordan did and the idea died within a couple of years.

Now we are in the era of either “quiet quitting” or “quiet firing”, depending on your vantage point.  Quiet quitting is the act of doing the absolute minimum required to hold on to a job.  These people used to be known as “slackers” – expert at getting others to do all the work.  Today it’s been elevated to an art form.  There are several threads on social media discussing tips on how to fool your employer into thinking you’ve actually accomplished something. No doubt the COVID pandemic and the resultant “work from home” wave made it far easier to fool a boss into thinking work was completed when in reality the only work completed was the laundry. Perhaps as a natual reaction to that, employers have started “quiet firing”, whereby they withhold information, give interesting assignments to just a handful of people, and don’t provide a pay raise for years.  They stay just this side of “constructive discharge” to avoid lawsuits.

Lost in all of this “quitting” is that the people who actually do a lot of the real work in this country don’t have the ability to quit while still on the job.  They are the checkers at the grocery store, the truck drivers, the construction workers and God knows, the medical professionals.  So, I suggest that on this Labor Day we honor the people who do all the work that is often unappreciated and let the people in the corporate “quitting” wars throw their tantrums until finally, on some sunny day in the future, they learn to simply be quiet.

I’M LABORING OVER UNIONS

Note: On holidays, and other occasions as they strike us, we will divert from our normal rhyme and post opinion pieces.  Think of it as our two cents.

Monday, September 5th

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York.  For those of you who have never heard of it, 146 women either died in the fire or jumped to their deaths because they had no means of escape when the fire started.  You see, the managers had locked all of the stairwells and exits so the women were trapped in their workroom.  This incident, appalling even in the day of railroad barons and cigar-smoking tycoons, helped spawn the growth of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, or ILGWU, as it is known.  If ever a situation warranted a union, this was it.

In 1932 my father graduated from high school and, because of the Depression, felt grateful to land his dream job – working for a newspaper.  The price of admission?  Joining the International Typographical Union.  He did so reluctantly, as he was not a big believer in unions, but a job was a job in those days and he could ill afford to turn it down.  Over the next 40 years, even when he was a newspaper owner and thus considered “management”, he paid his ITU dues.   When he decided to retire in the early 70’s he contacted the ITU to claim his retirement pension, only to be told that the pension funds had been “poorly invested”.  It didn’t take a genius to interpret their actions – the ITU had stolen my dad’s pension.   After all his years of contributions, his monthly annuity was a meager $75.

Fortunately, beginning in the mid-70’s federal and state employment laws began to emerge to protect workers.  Regulations were passed regarding everything from the minimum wage and pension reform to gender and race discrimination and equal access for those with disabilities.  The EEOC developed into a powerful and influential government agency. To some extent, labor unions were at the heart of getting these baseline entitlements passed and as a result, the workplace became a much fairer, albeit legal, environment.

At the same time, most American companies were defining their culture and values which invariably covered how employees were to be viewed and treated within the organization.  Were there still some rogue managers who treated people poorly?  Absolutely.  But now there were clear-cut procedures for employees to follow within their own company to seek resolution.  For those companies that practiced unfair or abusive treatment, employees could seek assistance in another venue – the American justice system.  And the EEOC assured protection from any sort of retaliation for doing just that.

So what is the role of unions today?  To gain better wage and benefit packages?  If so, one might say that they have overshot their target.  Companies with unionized workers state that union contracts have caused the price of products to skyrocket and have resulted in them becoming uncompetitive.  Auto manufacturers, once the bread and butter of the U.S. economy, cite that the union compensation packages result in an increased cost of $1500 per car.  In many of our traditional industries, we are seeing massive layoffs due to the complete closure of manufacturing plants and an increase in the number of companies moving jobs offshore.

If their role is to provide job security, they haven’t been terribly effective.  The fact of the matter is they can do nothing to stop corporations from moving factories and call centers to other countries.  This is partially due to a U.S. tax code that effectively rewards companies to move jobs offshore.  And partly we are now in a world where we have to compete with other countries that target some of our time-honored manufacturing bases.  That is globalization, whether we like it or not.  For those of us who have been stuck in a circular conversation with someone working in a call center in India, I acknowledge that it isn’t always a pleasant reality.  But it IS reality.

In the final analysis, unions have failed to recognize that the U.S. economy has changed and the skills needed for today’s workplace along with it.  The jobs that have been shipped overseas are most likely not coming back.  There ARE jobs available in the U.S., but they require a different skill set than in the past.  Are unions ready, willing and able to re-train their members so they can better assimilate into this new work environment?  Or have unions outlived their usefulness?

Finally, for those of you old enough to remember, the ILGWU used to have a catchy commercial on TV requesting us to “look for the union label”.  If you’ve never seen that label, it’s because all of our clothes are now made offshore.

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