Itâ€™s the Economy: Do Unions Have a Shot in the 21st Century?

Illustration by Jasper Rietman

For 25 years, Monty Newcomb has worked at the same chemical plant in Calvert City, Ky., making products that hold pills together and remove sediment from beer. In his early years, Newcomb watched his union, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, lose one battle after another in its ongoing struggle with management. In the '80s and '90s, workers throughout the country justifiably feared that their plants might close and move to a union-free state. Or that they might simply import products from low-wage, nonunionized countries like Mexico and China. Newcomb told me that at his company, International Specialty Products, workers were disgruntled and the work suffered — for example, more than 20 percent of one chemical they produced didn't pass inspection.

Deep thoughts this week:

1. Organizing has been successful in some of the least likely industries.

2. But a world without unions is not hard to imagine.

3. And that could make our inequality problem much worse.

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As a union steward, Newcomb feared that unless something changed, the plant would shut down and everyone would lose his job. So in the mid-'90s, his union asked management to attend its High Performance Work Organization Partnership program, which was creating a revolution in labor-management relations. In addition to regular collective bargaining, union members and their managers engaged in trust-building exercises and developed plans to collaborate on improving conditions, products and profits. After a tough few years ("I mean really tough," Newcomb said), the union persuaded management to provide an incentive program and improve the pension and insurance plans. When management requested more efficiency, Newcomb helped them downsize not by firing workers but by not replacing retiring ones. These changes helped it thrive despite two recessions in a decade. And although the plant, now owned by Ashland Inc., currently exports about 50 percent of its product, it's keeping production in Kentucky, where it recently invested $15 million in upgrades. "We make things so much cheaper than anyplace now," Newcomb explained. Ninety-nine percent of that particularly pesky chemical now passes inspection.

For decades, the growth of technology and the global market has created an existential crisis for U.S. labor unions. While the country's manufacturing output continues to grow steadily, it no longer produces significant job growth. Factories compete against low-wage foreign labor by investing in automated machinery and implementing new techniques — like the aptly named Lean system, which focuses on efficient work flow — to make them far more productive. Since 2000, factories have shed more than five million jobs. Last month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed that union membership is at a 97-year low of 11.3 percent.

Workers have obviously chafed at these job-shrinking strategies, but Matt Vidal, a labor sociologist at King's College London, told me that Lean actually works best for everyone (executives, employees, customers) when managers work with unions to preserve jobs and foster worker support. This tends to lead to more worker self-management. "In my research, it was clearly the case that the leanest factories I saw in the U.S. were largely union factories," he said. In 2010, Bob King, the president of the United Automobile Workers, embraced this when he called for a new age of union-management collaboration.

Collaboration, however, is definitely not the only technique being used to successfully combat the perceived existential threat. Stuart Appelbaum, the president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, has become something of an organized-labor star by employing the old-school approach of unifying workers in distrust of rapacious managers in new ways. And his successes have come in unlikely places: vulnerable, often immigrant workers in low-skill, itinerant jobs. He recently organized the workers at five New York City carwashes and at a poultry plant in Alabama, a state particularly allergic to unions. "We don't argue to owners, 'We're doing this for your sake,' " he said. "We're not going to be the ones who say, 'We think you have to cut back on things to make your stockholders more profitable.' "