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Themes in need of development. Apologies in advance for the lack thereof.
Public employee unions are facing the same threat of extinction in the 21st century that private sector unions are nose-to-nose with in the war on organized labor, fueled by the ‘Reagan Revolution’ of the late 20th century. In furtherance of their tactical assault on an organized public sector, the Reagan revolutionaries attempted to brand two slogans; ‘government is inherently bad,’ and ‘a government that governs least, governs best’ to have the same moral authority as the Christian commandments. While they have been successful in creating a government that historians have almost unanimously declared to be the worst in our history thereby creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of government as inherently bad, these ideologues have failed miserably in their quest to validate their maxim that governing least is in the best interest of the people. New Orleans stands as a tragic and too silent memorial to the folly of that discredited dogma.
At issue is no less than a battle for the American soul and the outcome of that struggle will define whether a public sector of, by and for the people in this country will continue to exist. Evidence in support of this admittedly bleak thesis is pervasive. The United States has already outsourced its manufacturing base, turning our economy into a third world style exporter of our natural resources. More recently, we have seen the flight of our intellectual capital infrastructure in medicine, engineering and information technology. Service sector jobs are taking wing as well. Nonetheless, the level of complacency demonstrated by public sector unions seems to be predicated on faith that government is immune to being outsourced.
That type of faith might be characterized as ‘whistling past the graveyard.’ United States foreign relations are being conducted by forces at least fifty percent of which are provided by private corporations. Federal, state and municipal agencies have been replaced by private subcontractors since the Clinton administration. This trend has accelerated during the Bush administration. Roads and bridges are being sold to private businesses in some of the Midwest states. If insanity is truly defined as the expectation of achieving a different result from doing the same things repetitively, public sector unions’ who blithely expect continuing vitality as the fruits of their present course of (in)action want to check in with a mental health professional.
It shouldn’t need to be said that in order to build strong, vital public sector unions, a strong vital public sector is required. The only palatable alternative for organized labor would be to ensure that the public sector union jobs replaced by the private sector must become private sector union jobs. The underlying philosophical debate of the relative value and balance of a healthy public sector versus governance by a “free” market economy is a luxury for which organized labor has neither the time nor the security to allow proper consideration.
Pragmatically, the public sector unions are in a much stronger position than the private sector unions and any accommodation made by public sector unions to allow the conversion of public sector jobs to unionized private sector jobs bargains a strong position into a weak position. Public sector unions have been characterized as the last bastion of the New Deal. Health and retirement security gains by private sector employees have eroded at a far slower rate than for private sector employees. Defined benefit retirement plans continue to be the standard for public sector collective bargaining in comparison to the alarming disappearance rate of any type of retirement plans in the private sector. Public employees have demonstrated a tenacious willingness to sacrifice wage gains in order to maintain high quality health care plans that substantially limit their risk of economic ruin due to family health issues. However, these past successes have created a ‘security gap’ disparity between public and private employees that chambers of commerce and similarly focused organizations have used to drive an ‘envy’ wedge between the taxpaying public and public employees.
The foregoing analysis of the current environment in which public sector unions are operating clearly identifies three key leverage points that should be addressed through broadly focused organizing efforts. Union members must view their union as being essential to their well being. The public must demand the existence of a strong public sector as essential to their well being. Public sector unions must commit their resources to restoring organized labor to a prominent place at the public policy table. These leverage points may be summarized in the language of organized labor as the need for individual public sector labor unions to develop their internal capacity, to organize coalitions around shared common ground and to mobilize those coalitions to achieve organizational goals that are rooted in the organizational values.
Ongoing internal capacity development requires public sector unions to identify, acknowledge and respond to the core values of their members as the organization’s highest priorities. Organizational attention to these values must be genuine. An organizationally shared value system is the wellspring of meaning to constituent stakeholders. However, sincerity without accompanying skills is not sufficient of itself. The organization must expect its values to evolve to meet the demands of a changing environment and it must have sufficient agility to embrace those values as they evolve. These factors require the organization to establish processes for monitoring the evolution of its value system and its responses to those changes.
Public sector unions must stop chiseling their goals into granite unless they intend to create headstones. Goals do not create the purpose of the organization. Goals must serve the organizational purpose. Expressing purpose and goals in a military context provides a useful perspective. The purpose of the organization is its strategic objective. Goals are the tactics the organization designs with a view toward achieving the strategic objective. This acknowledgment of the relationship between goals and purpose provides the foundation for a culture that encourages well considered risk taking. There is probably no greater illustration of the relative importance of an organization’s purpose and goals and the relative value of tactical failure than the brief dialogue that occurred following the Viet Nam conflict. U.S. General Westmoreland’s statement that,” The U.S. forces won every battle of the war,” was met by Viet Namese General Giap’s response, “We won the war.” The organization should focus its efforts toward achieving goals that the organization has designed to fulfill its purpose. However, an organization that fails to achieve the goals it has set and yet retains the same goals in a demonstration of hubris, earns an opportunity to rest under the headstone it created.
Unless the union is so omnipresent that it is able to effect the change it seeks through no greater effort than ongoing development of its internal capacity, it must join with other organizations that have similar objective in order to build power sufficient to prevail. There may be no greater impediment to unions’ ability to build coalitions than ‘ideological purity.’ This is commonly expressed in the type of coalition building effort that may be characterized as ‘take and no give.’ Dictating the establishment of a coalition based on the ‘moral authority’ of one coalition partner’s issue while refusing acknowledgment of the ‘moral authority’ asserted by the coalition parties in support of their issues, is a recipe for failure and ostracism. Unions and other potential coalition partners need to recognize that their value systems will rarely, if ever be congruent with all of the potential coalition partners.
A coalition is not a marriage or any other type of lifetime contract. It is an agreement to work to achieve commonly held goals. Correspondingly, an organization that is seeking to build coalitions should not define its goals so narrowly that few, if any other organizations share those goals or that it is unable to share the goals of other potential coalition partners. A major risk associated with establishing broadly focused external policy agendas is increased internal discord. Public sector unions should recognize that the relative internal harmony resulting from provincial restrictions on issues the members have given its leaders license to address is inversely proportional to the amount of coalition leverage that the members have permitted to be developed.
If the issues around which building coalitions is required to develop leverage are too narrowly defined, identifying any common ground with potential coalition partners will prove difficult if not impossible. Unions whose culture places a too high value on internal harmony tend to permit the membership to micromanage the union into gridlock. The leadership of these types of organization will be challenged to create a change to the culture that promotes restoration of the members’ trust in their leadership’s decisions. Restoration of the trust relationship originates from mutual acknowledgement of shared values and is built one issue at a time through mutual assessments of the consistent application of those values for each decision that the leadership makes. Therefore, the challenge of elected leadership is to anticipate and manage conflict within the organization while negotiating parameters for cooperation with potential coalition partners. Successful coalition building requires the organization to have a clear understanding of its values at the level of its individual membership. Successful cooperation with its coalition partners should be continually communicated with the members within the common ground framework of the operating value systems.
After putting their house in order (capacity building) and establishing harmony within the family (coalition building), public sector unions face the challenge of restoring the trust of a public whose mistrust of ‘bureaucracy’ has been fueled by an unrelenting torrent of purposefully designed disinformation for the past thirty years. To that end, successful public sector unions will engage the public in vital conversations related to unions’ the common ground between union value systems and America’s values. The first two values the union should proactively address are expressed by the public as their refusal to be forced to purchase a bad product, and the public’s demand for transparent government.
The response to the public’s demand for transparency is within the control of public sector unions through the collective bargaining process and other internal union policies. Refusal to lead, or at a minimum, join the public discourse about public sector accountability may have the short-term effect of blocking what public sector unions view as concessions. However, the other side of that coin is that by adopting the tactics of obstruction, public sector unions have reinforced the public’s perception that they have been coerced into paying for a product for which there is no quality control.
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