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Straight Talk

By James Hettinger
Senior Advisor, Battle Creek Unlimited
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Throughout the years, I have been criticized and praised over my working relationships with organized labor in Michigan. I know a retired ironworker who used to say I was the only economic development practitioner in Michigan who took his problems to organized labor.

My interest in working with Labor resided in our shared agenda: a well-trained, well-compensated workforce, be it union or otherwise. It is also most likely embedded in family DNA as my grandmother and mother were both very active in the labor movement.

In spite of that, I must confess that I am having a real hard time understanding the rhetoric of the public sector unions these days. Most puzzling is the charge that governors in certain states are trying to balance badly out-of-whack budgets on the “backs of working people.” I wonder if they think of the union plumber, union carpenter and union production workers who, nonetheless, are working people and paying taxes to support public sector compensation level and lifestyles.

I wonder if the public sector likens their workplaces to the still-dangerous conditions of the coal miner. Is the public sector worker safer and more comfortable than say, the union ironworker, and toiling 10 stories up in 10 degree weather?

Is the job security of the public sector worker as precarious as that of the overstressed union production worker who must toil in a hypercompetitive global economy?

Against whom are public sector unions organized? We know private sector unions were organized to combat greedy owners, robber barons and people who did not give one iota of a care about the dangerous working conditions in which their employees, children notwithstanding, toiled. We know many workers organized and used their united strength to gain higher wages, safer working conditions and to end shameful practices like child labor. In so doing, private sector unions were in on the creation of the great American middle class.

Do we have the same kind of abuses in the public sector? If so, I would like to know about it. I sure do not want my tax dollars going for the mistreatment of any workers, just like I stay away from certain private-sector establishments where I believe certain practices are unacceptable.

But again, the question: against whom are public sector unions organized? Perhaps my definition of “working people” is too traditional. I have had trouble in the past with the phrase because I worked 60-80 hours a week for 35 years and have always been denied access to the “working people” country club.

So I have to wonder how recently the public sector workers got their credentials as “the working people.” Not that they do not work, that is an argument for somebody else to make. But it is interesting to explore. Like me, the ironworker has to work at least 30 years to have any decent retirement. Like me, the ironworker has to sweat it over the next work opportunity. Like me, the union production worker must compete daily with workers all over the world. Like me, the union plumber has one pension and one pension only, unlike many in the public sector. And like me, the union plumber usually cannot collect a pension until age 60 or more.

All of this rhetoric is attended by the phrase, “It is not fair.” Now that rhetoric is finally something with which I can agree. But then, as my mother used to say, “Tell me what is fair.” I just spent the previous paragraph describing conditions where “fair” is a very relative term.

Apparently, what is fair to many people is unfair to me, but that is life and it is not going to get in my way.

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