It Is Simple For Companies to Treat Employees Ethically. And Yet.
An easy guide to not being an oppressor.
In the children’s book “Are You My Mother?”, we readers have our patience tested. A newly hatched baby bird wanders around asking ridiculous things if they are his mother. He asks a cat. He asks a dog. He asks a cow. He asks a plane. Again and again, we are subjected to the young bird’s ineptness. His inability to master the rudimentary task of recognizing his own species is thrust upon us repeatedly, until we want to grab him by his little wings and shake him and yell, “You’re a bird, damn it! Your mother is obviously a bird as well! Stop confounding us with your lack of common sense!”
I don’t know if that is the message of the book, but that’s what I take from it.
This book reminds me of what it is like to have a conversation with the world’s most sophisticated organizations when their workers decide they want a union. Suddenly, these masters of complexity—corporations able to execute global logistics, master financial engineering, and generate fantastic wealth—are struck dumb by the task of adhering to the most basic possible sense of human manners. Treating their “valued team members” “like a family,” which was the day before proclaimed to be the way that they operate each and every day, becomes, overnight, riddled with complexities that simply must be chewed over for hours in (mandatory) meetings. The word “union” is a talisman that turns a smiling Human Resources Department with an Open Door Policy into a sort of fanged and vicious version of Columbo, forever grabbing your arm to remind you of one more reason they just remembered why something that is clearly good for you is actually bad.
I am being sarcastic. I know that the reason why companies become snarling monsters on the topic of unions is that they are unfeeling machines of capitalism optimized only for the maximization of profits and programmed to destroy anything that they believe stands in the way of that. But that is not what they say. And companies spend billions of dollars per year on corporate branding and marketing and public relations to hammer home the idea that they are actually Nice Entities With Souls who are Good Community Partners. This desire of companies to be perceived positively despite the fact that they are, in essence, Terminator robots creates a space between their words and their actions that can be exploited for purposes of class war. Much of the leverage that workers try to exert against employers during organizing campaigns is PR that lives in this space. It is always worthwhile to shine a light on corporate hypocrisy. To presume yourself too savvy to bother with it is to walk away from leverage, to leave a treasure buried underground.
Another factor is the humans who work on the management side of these companies, and who are tasked with carrying out the company’s anti-human wishes. Some of these people—especially as you ascend higher into the ranks of upper management—are just cold blooded capitalist motherfuckers who don’t give a fuck. We’ll set them aside for now. Others, however, are people who think of themselves as moral and decent and caring and humane. In order to maintain that self image (a powerful need for a healthy psyche), those people are forced to rationalize. If you are an HR person and you’re friendly with all of the employees and you all get along fine and one day they employees say that they want a union in order to better their own lives and gain fundamental respect at work, and then your boss tells you to carry out a plan to ensure they do not get those beneficial things, you must then either A) quit your job, or B) concoct for yourself reasons why it is okay for you to oppress your friends. Those justifications will be paper-thin, because they will be bullshit. They will be weak band-aids holding back a flood of moral injury. At any given time, across America, there must be thousands of management-side corporate employees who are resolutely determined not to examine these justifications closely, for the sake of their own mental health, because if they did, the inarguable fact that they are spending their lives in service of oppression would come down on them, and that would be an inconvenient burden to carry.
How Things Work is not just read by fans of the labor movement. This site has a hefty number of subscribers who work in “labor relations”—management-side lawyers, corporate HR professionals, and others who sit on the opposite side of the negotiating table from unions. Most of these people, certainly, do not think of themselves as evil oppressors. And there is nothing inherent in their jobs that makes it necessary for them to do bad things. In fact, by following one simple rule, it is possible for this class of person to be… not worthy of praise, but at least morally neutral in the context of the war between labor and capital that defines our society.
When employees decide that they want to have a union, this is what it takes to be an ethical company: Nothing. Do nothing. That is all that decency requires of you. Be neutral! Do not tell people that unions are bad. Do not tell them unions are good. Do not tell them anything. Shut the fuck up and let them figure it out and then, if they unionize, proceed to negotiate a contract with them in good faith, as is required by law. That is all. That is the low, low bar you must clear to be ethical. As you can see, it should be very easy.
All of the invective that I have written in the past decade about evil companies who bust unions is aimed at those who could not do the extremely simple thing described in the paragraph above. As soon as you, the management professional, do anything that implicitly or explicitly tells your valued employees that they should not have a union, you are bad. Why? Because you have lied. They should have a union. A union is good for them. A union will make their lives better. A union will protect their interests. That is precisely why the company does not want them to have a union. Every single anti-union action that a company takes—captive audience meetings, fliers and speeches and websites deriding unions as outsiders who only want dues money, desperately tossing out raises and incentives to convince workers not to unionize, implying that unionizing could place jobs at risk—all of these things are morally bad. They are not “free speech,” in a vacuum. They are all, top to bottom, dishonest arguments in service of maintaining a highly unequal power arrangement that advantages the company and disadvantages the workers and that over time results in workers living worse lives, economically and socially and politically. That is all that it is. It is a straightforward act of oppression, using the tools of fear and deceit and economic force. There are not shades of gray in this particular matter. That is why they created the question, “Which side are you on?”
A union gives workers the ability to negotiate collectively. That is a basic human right. You cannot deny people this right and claim to still be on the side of the angels. Notice, please, that this is separate from the negotiation itself. I do not say that companies are evil because they do not give unions every last thing they ask for in a contract. Contracts are negotiations. The company has interests, and the workers have interests, and those things are negotiated until a consensus is reached. There is nothing immoral about this process, as long as it is conducted in good faith. The obligations of a moral company are to allow workers to decide if they want a union, and if they do, to negotiate in good faith, rather than conducting a sham negotiation whose purpose is to delay and demoralize and make it harder, not easier, to reach that eventual consensus. I think of this is simple fairness in human relations. You don’t steal, and you don’t hit people, and you don’t run people over with your car just because you’re in a hurry, and you grant people the basic right to negotiate collectively. All of these things are equally necessary. It is only in the workplace where these simple things become a battleground.
Be neutral. Let your workers decide for themselves. Act in good faith. This is all that morality asks from those of you who work on the management side of things. Think about what you do all day, and look in the mirror, and ask yourselves if you are meeting this basic standard. Based on the normal behavior of American companies, you probably are not. The normal behavior of American companies is to execute a dishonest, fear-based anti-union campaign at the first sign of an organizing drive, and when faced with a union, to negotiate obstinately and in bad faith until reluctantly forced to negotiate genuinely by concerted labor action. That, my friends, is bad behavior. That is immoral. To the extent that you participate in or facilitate this behavior from companies, you are doing a bad thing. To the extent that your job consists of efforts to prevent working people from being able to negotiate the conditions of their own lives fairly, your job is a tool of oppression. You may think of yourself as a good person. But you aren’t acting like one. If you want to continue to think of yourself as a good person, you need to either change what you are doing, or spend the rest of your life trying not to examine your inadequate rationalizations. If you believe in god, you must know that god sees them, though.
We do not ask you to singlehandedly fix the inequities of capitalism. We do not even ask you to raise a finger to help the workers who are trapped in a disadvantageous position by capitalism. All we ask you to do is nothing. Sit there and allow workers to decide if they want to form a union to collectively negotiate. And then negotiate fairly. It would be impossible to dream up an easier standard for ethical labor relations. And yet this standard is almost never met—not by the shiniest, richest, most famous, most beloved companies, that shower the world with advertisements about their own admirable qualities. We cannot speak to the companies, because companies do not have souls. We can, though, speak to you humans who help to run the companies. Do this minimal thing that is required of you to be a decent member of the family of mankind. Then sleep soundly at night. Or don’t, and carry with you at all times the burden of knowing that you spend your life deceitfully attempting to deny other people their fundamental rights, in order to materially benefit yourself. The choice is yours. You will do what you want, but you can’t escape right and wrong.
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Related: Radical Capital; Keep On Looking for Those "Corporate Values," I'm Sure They'll Turn Up One Day; Corporations Do Not Have Any Rights That We Don’t Give Them.
I did a long interview with the Ralph Nader Radio Hour about my book on the labor movement, “The Hammer.” You can listen to that here. Ralph Nader seemed to have actually read the book, and his perspective on the labor movement—coming from a career spent inside the regulatory side of activism—was interesting. You can buy the book wherever books are sold. I am setting up a few more book events in different cities in coming weeks, but if you’d like an autographed book I’ll send you one for $40 on Paypal. Email me: Hamilton.Nolan@gmail.com.
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Unions, imo, are also the market-based solution. Let workers do what they want, and then they can negotiate with the employers (which by the way can also help firms if they go through a tougher period, unions are able to make concessions too).
Additionally, unionization also helps non-union workers. The decline in unionization rate can actually explain a significant chunk of the observed rise in inequality in the US via both the direct effect (fewer union workers) and the indirect effect (the benefits non-union workers get from higher unionization rates) https://www.nominalnews.com/p/unions-strike-action-and-the-economy
This is an excellent moral argument. Thank you for your work.