Vox had a good piece the other day on sexual harassment in corporate America. The thesis was simple: the rise of human resource departments corresponds to the collapse of labor unions. Both, as it were, are ways for which labor-management issues are dealt with, but whereas unions are meant to represent the interest of the employees, HR departments are basically tools used by employers to smooth over labor issues. They put employees on the couch, try to make them feel good about the company and their place in it, but when push comes to shove in labor disputes they’re fundamentally designed not to side with employees and problems will either be resolved by sweeping them under the rug or with good old fashions coercion. They may work for management, but they don’t work, much less for employees, because they lack independence and teeth and everyone knows it.

It’s a worthwhile insight, and one we need more. It’s not a new insight, however. As I was reading the article I was struck by how the broad outlines matched those of Economists Freeman and Lazaer’s 1995 paper on the failure of corporate mandated works councils in the 1920s. As with modern HR departments, these councils were meant to make corporations function better by engaging employees, as they did eventually in countries like Germany. However, in the United States these efforts failed because people recognized that the corporate works councils had no meaningful power, and were simply tools used by management that could be ended at any time. As with any effort to patronize employees without giving them a meaning stake or power, nobody put any real confidence in them and they failed.

The point here isn’t to one up the original article by citing an obscure corporate trend from nearly a century ago, but rather to point out they’re bother pointing to a basic, and really obvious truth: you can’t have effective employee protections or meaningful worker engagement without empowering employees. And this goes well beyond simply HR or simply workers councils. There are countless other areas where organized labor would not only curb abuses and make day to day work more bearable, but also improve the whole socioeconomic system.

Unionize Human Resources

There’s a good deal more than cynicism to the idea that Human Resources largely developed as a corporate alternative to empowering labor. Indeed, if you look back at the origins of Human Resources and the “Human Relations Movement” in the 1930s, as Chris Nyland and Kyle Bruce did in a 2012 paper, you’ll find this was more or less the stated intent.

The whole paper by Nyland and Bruce is really quite fascinating, and I’d encourage everyone to read it. But to give the cliff notes version, in the early 1900s management theory was committed to the ideas of Frederick Taylor and other acolytes of Scientific Management, who emphasized meticulously controlling and optimizing processes on engineering principles. However by the 1920s it seemed like they were reaching the limits of what you could accomplish by treating workers as inert cogs in the machine of industry. This was a point Taylorists, and even Taylor himself, started to recognize, came to appreciate. And the solution to the problem, and increasing number of them concluded, was to actually give workers a voice in the organization. Managers, by and large, balked at this idea and instead embraced the ideas of Elton Mayo and the Human Relations School, which humanized workers as people motivated by complex motivations, but ones who could likewise be satiated through empty patronizing. And so, Scientific Management fell out of favor and Management Theorists spent the next 80 years putting employees on the couch, trying to understand them, but never actually thinking to give them anything.

The idea that labor relations can be reduced to essentially mass con artistry has been at the heart of much of our economic dysfunction. We need to get back to rediscover the fundamental truth that in industry, as in politics, the only real way to engage the people at large is through democratic principles. Either those democratic principles should be brought into the economic sphere, or the attempts to deconstruct and manipulate the irrationalities of people in the interest of con artistry will bleed back into the political sphere.

Unionize the Civil Rights Department

It’s not just employee protections, strictly speaking, that unions can aid with. There are plenty of disputes of worker empowerment that go beyond strictly issues of pay or being coerced by management. In particular, all this applies to protecting and empowering women, minorities, the disabled, and others. We often tend to think that Civil Rights issues are fundamentally distinct from labor issues, and let’s make no mistake that in a variety of issues that is the case. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that in the work place, they’re exactly the same issues. And, as with other Human Resources, voluntary corporate efforts to self-regulate are always going to be lacking.

Furthermore, corporate mandated diversity drives are always going to be lacking because, at their core, they’re more about projecting a good image for management than actually empowering people. To this end, they’re always going to be biased towards the sort of “trickle down” diversity of putting a select few into visible positions. While this is not bad, and putting women and minorities in high profile positions is important in its own ways, it does little to help the population as a whole, much less make a real impact on the systemic disenfranchisement of people stuck in the underclass. Only a program based on protecting and empowering the employees themselves could do that.

To be sure there are laws designed to provide employees with legal power to combat discrimination, and government agencies and NGO’s which have taken it upon themselves to see these laws are executed (as the NLRB does with general labor issues). However, most people don’t have ready access to them in the same way they might with a union. Nor, for the most part, could people claim to have the same sense of ownership that they could with their own labor unions or employee based Equal Employment Opportunity Committees. Without this sense of closeness, it’s easy for right smears of Civil Rights organizations as bureaucratic and/or limp wristed outsiders pressing frivolous charges to seem believable. This is not to dismiss these NGOs or government agencies, they’re essential. But it is recognizing that without things like unions they’re fighting with one hand behind their backs in work place discrimination.

Unionize the Technical Schools

What can you say about America’s patchwork system of technical schools and for profit colleges that attract low income students with poor prospects in todays economy with promises teaching them valuable skills, and then fleece them and leave them little better off than where they started. At worst, they’re barely legal con artists, and at best they’re wholly inadequate. The fact that many people, rightfully, don’t take these seriously is a big reason why so many end up either not continuing their education or getting funneled into increasingly expensive colleges that focus on a curriculum that’s not likely to be useful to them. But it’s more than that: our patchwork system of vocational schools fails to provide the US economy with the sort of skilled technicians who are essential to modern industries. This structural failing is a major factor in the hollowing out of the middle class and the sorry state of American manufacturing.

It’s a shame that we don’t see labor organizations, which are a reservoir for the collective skills of Americans workers, isn’t seen as an essential resource for dealing with this problem. Unions offer a far more workable path for low income people to acquire skills and invest in themselves that over-priced or shady colleges ever could*. To be sure, there are union based training and artisan programs, but again these are generally limited and insufficient to meeting the needs of the population at large. Empowering and expanding unions to serve this function in the economy would serve an obvious public good, and would give labor unions themselves more leverage in their mandate to protect workers.

* To be fair, we should give credit is due and say more modestly priced Community Colleges do good work.

Unionize the Temp Agencies, Unionize the Sharing Economy

Recently the Trump Administration reversed the Obama era rule that said that employees for companies like Uber must be treated like employees of the company, entitled to the same labor protections. This was only one of many ways in which companies have spent the last couple decades denying their responsibilities, and Uber is only the tip of the iceberg. Walmart and other retailers systemically under-employ their staff so that they can label them as “part time workers” not entitled to pay and benefits, while even full time employers restlessly push to limit their responsibilities in terms of benefits and retirement plans. Employers spend countless hours of litigation to argue against the right to contract, otherwise treated as a sacred part of the market, in favor of protecting employer’s “right to fire”. In the face of this systemic shirking, an entire industry of staffing companies, temp agencies and the like fueled by the labor of young and low income people working on has sprung up to fill the gap. Between 1990 and today, “temporary help” jobs have grown by 160%, against 33% for the economy at large, almost 5-times the rate.

And to justify all this, we’re told labor markets need to be that flexible in order to make American industry competitive. There are many problems with this mentality, namely that it reflects a chronic tendency to undervalue the importance of investing in workers in America’s particular form of industrial policy, which is probably a much large drag on American competitiveness that “rigid” labor markets. But beyond this, the policy leaves individual workers horribly exposed, and makes it next to impossible to plan for things like starting a family or planning for retirement.

To this issues, labor unions offer many answers. They prevent companies from engaging in such reckless short termism, provide insulation to individuals from the vicissitudes of the market, and provide a mechanism for cultivating worker’s skills. More than that, and I feel this gets overlooked, organized labor offers a way of organizing labor. The drive for market place flexibility wouldn’t be such a bad thing isn’t a bad thing per say if you could keep workers from falling out the labor system. Labor unions can, and should, be instrumental in helping employees manage the transition from one position to another, or even one field to another. This was the idea behind the idea in Denmark and the EU of flexicurity, and while the concept isn’t without its flaws it certainly represents a more reasonable paradigm then one that relies on for profit placement companies which dumps all the costs of the economic system on individual workers least capable of handling them.

Unionize the Service Workers

Part and parcel with the above point is the ongoing effort issue of organizing service workers, who today represent the vast bulk of the working class. These are people who have been victims the “dumbing down” of jobs and loopholes in labor protections than just about anyone. The fight for 15, virtual representation, and other forms of social activism have helped make gains for people in these industries, but we need to take the idea of organizing outright them seriously. People will say that the low skills and high turnover of people in the industry are a barrier to organizing service workers. And yes, this is an issue, but it’s no more of an issue than it was for industrial workers, coal miners and the like a century ago. It’s an achievable goal. Furthermore, the effort shouldn’t just be limited to retail and fast food workers. Low level “white collar” should be just as much target for this sort of organizing as anyone.

Unionize the Work Visas

Immigration can be a contentious issue when it comes to labor policy. Contrary to popular belief, labor unions have by and large abandoned the idea that shutting off immigration is a viable way of protecting domestic workers since at least the 70s. However, it’s often hard for labor advocates to reconcile a broad support for open immigration with the knowledge that immigration programs like work visas and H1-B visas are frequently exploited by companies who want to use them as little more than a pipeline for them to acquire cheap labor, to say nothing of the horrible exploitation it exposes the visa holders to.

The problem isn’t the immigrants themselves, it’s they’re used as a way to undermine the carefully crafted system of labor protections and organizations that we’ve spent decades trying to build. Working immigrants into those systems renders that issue a moot, which is largely the position of labor unions today. The obvious answer, then, seems to be that labor organizations should be the key sponsors for things like work visas, rather than the businesses themselves. Or better yet, don’t bother with work visas at all, and simply make it easier for new immigrants, legal or otherwise, to be integrated into the labor system. This would not only turn the issue of immigration from one that’s largely seen as contradictory to labor interests to one that’s more of an asset, while also emphasizing the invaluable role labor organizations can, and should play, in our society.

Unionize Professionals

It’s worthwhile to stop for a second to stop and recognize that the collapse of labor unions in recent decades has been somewhat overblown. To a large extent, the decline in industrial labor unions simply reflects the lower share of industrial workers in general. Many of these workers have transitioned into the service sector, and I’ve already comment on the failure to unionize them. But another part of this is simply that a lot of people, and their descendants, have “moved up” into becoming professional like doctors, lawyers and so forth.

We tend to think of them as categorically different that low skill workers, and in many respects they are, but that shouldn’t obscure the fact that these are people who make their living through their labor, even if it is primarily mental labor. Likewise, we don’t think of things like the American Medical Association or the Bar Association as being comparable to labor unions, but at a basic level they are labor organizations aimed at representing the interests of people in specific trades. Emphasizing this point is important in helping emphasize that labor organizations still highly significant in the economy, perhaps as much as they’ve ever been. Likewise, it’s important to helping a large swath of middle class people recognizing that labor isn’t an abstract issue that only effects other people, but one that effects others. Viewing professional organizations in this light is also worthwhile because we should discourage things like the over-reliance of such organizations on protections like licensing, which primarily benefits only small portion of said professionals, with more effective forms of solidarity.

Unionize the Discourse

As ambitious as all this sounds, when you get right down to it all makes sense. In fact, I’d argue that it’s almost so obvious that it’s shocking we’re not treating it as common sense. Of course labor unions should be seen as a means of empowering employees in a broad variety of issues, like Civil Rights issues, beyond what we currently do. Of course labor unions can be a resource for training and organizing the labor market in an integrated system that’s both more humane and more rational and efficient. Of course professional organizations are basically labor organizations. And so on and so forth. The only reason we don’t do it is because we tend to treat labor as little more than a niche issue among many. We also get caught up in focusing our efforts on other efforts through government intervention, which has legal power but lack a grass roots presence, and elements of the civil society and social sectors, which have a grass roots presence but little economic power to speak of. These things are important, of course, but they shouldn’t obscure the key role a labor program can, and should play in reforming society.

We also need to combat the tendency of mainstream discourse, especially among nominally left wing figures, to dismiss a broad labor program as some sort of pie in the sky fantasy. You’ll frequently dismissals that “of course America will never have something like Sweden”, but rarely will anyone ever feel compelled to justify this position. At most, you’ll hear some vague reasoning like the US is “too big”. But why should size be seen as some kind of intractable problem? From the perspective of social programs and the like they’re a benefit in that they offer higher returns to scale and greater opportunities for things like risk pooling. And even where size might be an issue, it’s not like you can’t get around that through some kind of federated system. Or maybe we’ll be told that “America’s culture and history won’t allow it”, as though America wasn’t home to some of the earliest and most ambitious advocates of the labor movement. Sure, the typical West Virginia town may not be seen as the fiercest advocates for the labor movement today, but their ancestors who pushed for labor unions until the national guard was called in to bomb them certainly were. America has plenty of precedence for this.

We need to push the benefits of a broad labor program. We need to challenge the idea that this offers nothing for the typical person, or is a dead end. We need to challenge the idea that it’s impossible and impractical. And we need to lay the groundwork for this vision every day.