When I heard the spokesman for the U.S. Airways employee union
explain that there was no concerted job action going on when
everyone called in sick for Christmas and left a million pieces of
luggage clogging airports in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Florida, I
thought of my old friend Stewie.
Back in the 1970s, a magical blend of insolence and indolence
came to be known as “cool.” As Yeshiva boys, we were no different
than the rest of the country in adoring the chosen few who mastered
this irreverent tone, usually addressing the rabbis with the
faintly derisory “Reb.” The coolest guy on the planet, the prince
of insouciance, was my friend Stewie Rabinowitz. Next to him, the
Fonz looked like a College Republican. One day, the head of the
Yeshiva called him on the carpet for missing the morning
prayers.
“Sorry, Reb,” he said. “I had to pop a pimple.”
“Stewie, it does not take forty-five minutes to pop a
pimple.”
“Yeah, Reb, but I had to grow it first.”
We know, and the union guy knows we know, and we know that the
union guy knows we know, and he knows that we know that he knows we
know, that this was a job action — and that’s the whole point.
They are trying to send us a chilling message that they have the
power to leave us holding the bag — or not holding the bag. Like
Myron Cohen’s waiter character used to say when he brought you food
you didn’t order, “You’ll eat it and you’ll like it.”
And there’s not a thing we can do about it. We know they bluffed
their calls but we cannot call their bluffs. The Samsonite is in
the hands of those philistines; we get to whine but our power is
gone. Yet I believe there is a solution. Not now, not this time,
but over the… er, long haul.
It seems to me that it is time to form a new sort of labor
union, one founded upon conservative principles. Until now, the
reigning assumption has been that trade unions are by definition an
expression of political liberalism. Republicans were identified by
pro-management or right-to-work positions. At most, a labor union
and an incumbent Republican might reach some kind of standoff. But
conservative policy thinking had focused on containing unions, not
redefining them.
The fact is that the role of the conservative in making business
work better as a pillar of a free society need not be interpreted
to compete with the interest of the worker to protect his rights as
a citizen. On the contrary, the highest interest of the worker
should be the success of the business enterprise, as long as he is
secure in the knowledge that this will accrue to his benefit. A
union could negotiate arrangements that maximize the identity of
the employee as stakeholder. If the employee is not nervous about
getting fired for no reason, and the boss is not nervous about the
employee quitting for no reason, the commonality of their interest
in the success of the business is magnified and a greater sense of
partnership is fostered.
To take one prime example, the current orthodoxy in unionism is
to resist the idea of incentive pay, because it isolates the weaker
workers at the bottom of the ladder. If there was a union that
proceeded from a sense of confidence and ambition, it would
actively promote incentive structures that build upon the baseline
of the current wage system. Members would feel that better work
meant more pay, creating the same sort of motivation that is our
ultimate repudiation of Communism — from each according to his
ability, to each according to his ability.
Another system that could be tried, at least in certain
industries, would involve hooking employee pay raises into the
growth of the business. Say the business has been growing only two
percent a year, and they want to raise salaries only the two
percent. The union accepts that as the baseline raise, with the
proviso that it will rise in conjunction with the growth rate. If
the workers could push growth up to five percent, their bonus pay
reflects the additional three points.
In conjunction with that, a position of comptroller could be
designed, someone who functions as an executive in the company but
actually works for the union, to be aware of the correct accounting
status of the corporate entity and to advise the union where they
should be encouraging the company to expand or diversify or
modernize. A new class of MBAs might find this a very stimulating
challenge, and greater balance might be built into the world of
business. Fewer Enrons might happen; it’s easier to fool the
stockholders and the government than the union comptroller. And the
whole idea of unions pushing companies in more dynamic directions
than hidebound executives is very counterintuitive but
exciting.
I would go so far as to commend for consideration the
possibility of creating a class of competing unions, perhaps even
eschewing that title and reviving the name of “guilds,” offering
the employee a new dynamic role in building this nation’s economy
and paving his own pathways to success. We can burst the balloon of
the misconception that unions and conservatism don’t mix — or the
pimple, as the case may be.
