Where are the Unions Going?

                As I was going through my email this morning, I saw an announcement for a speaker from the Food Chain Workers Alliance. I have been thinking, off and on, for some time about alternatives to the traditional labor union structure that we are currently saddled with, and which is being driven into the ground by the relentless forces of greed. I see the FCWA as a model for organized labor to examine as a possible alternative to the across the table model in which we are bemired.

                It is a labor counterpart to the “wellhead to gas pump,” production chain control. AFT/NEA and others could evolve into parts of a Human Development Professionals Alliance, dealing with all those involved with the development of every child from prenatal medicine to college graduation. Think how this would align the development of citizens by democratically and largely locally organized engagement.

                It would of course take a much smarter and more knowledgeable mind than mine, but the overall concept seems positive, and unifies the development of American children into true American citizens. Of course, such a design works counter to corporate efforts to atomize society allowing them to more easily fleece their sheep. It shifts its emphasis from workers’ rights and wages to the tasks and quality of work; it negotiates how to get the job done for the benefit of all. Such an alliance would set its performance goals based on the needs of the employers and the desires of the people to become a society of their own making. And, oh, it would be tough to implement. The rich and powerful will not want to give up control of the peasant masses to use as cannon fodder in their global “econowars.” Many workers would not want to give up the petty monetary or seeming autonomy benefits of their patronized niche. There would be sacrifice and discomfort, maybe even real pain along the way, but then people have died in the labor movement of the past. And sycophants should have no immunity.

                Additionally, those who do the work, functioning as a whole, help to restore our corroded democracy. It has the potential of monitoring and developing its members into a cadre of the most desirable and qualified "workers," rather than the cheapest. Workers of the past negotiated for their muscle and bone. HDPA members would negotiate for skills and competencies, brains and commitment. Incumbent upon the alliance then would be the capacity development and quality warrantee of its members. Consumers, employers and institutions could have the best or the cheapest, but if they could have the best at a fair wage, these work providers would come to the Alliance. There they would get the performance skills necessary to maximize their job needs.

                This guild model combined with the end-to-end industry model is but one alternative unions must consider. We need only look at the numbers to see that the unions and the middle class that they generated is deeply eroded. In twenty or thirty years without real change, unions will be the “Jamestown Settlements” objects of the future, historically significant and quaint. We will, by then, be beyond class warfare; we will have become an economically occupied nation.