Wisconsin's Unions: Victim of Consumer First Culture?

There is no doubt of the political motivations behind the anti-union actions taken in Wisconsin: as explained by Rachel Maddow on her show Friday night, this is "union-busting" behaviour designed to take the biggest funding legs out from under the Democratic party.

What Maddow failed to consider is why we are so anti-union, anti-collective bargaining in the first place. Indeed, this is part of a larger more dangerous trend in anti-employee empowerment. This is a trend that I believe is an unfortunate side-effect to the 'customer is always right', 'putting the customer first' mottos found in business. I would also like to assert that's it's indirectly related to our system of national accounts. How does a government make its GDP grow? Until the great recession began it was unquestionably by promoting the 'C' part of the GDP equation: consumer spending. It's not that I don't think a service orientated customer service is a bad thing, I rather value American style customer service, but I want to poke at the connection and the idea that customers/consumers first has come at the expense of the way we view workers, employees.

Employees have been second to customers: work longer hours, and suck-it-up when dealing with customers, sell-sell-sell.  Poor customer service has nothing to do with poor management practices. 

Actually, that's not the case. Vineet Nayar has a new strategy that both treats employees like human beings by putting them first, and customers second. Result? Customer service, improves.

Employees First Customers Second

View more presentations from HCLT.

This is based in part, according to Nayar (read his book), on trusting your employees.

Instead of harping again on employee trust and intra-organisational productivity, I'll refer you to a post I wrote last week.

We owe a lot to unions -- the minimum wage, shorter working hours, healthy working conditions, the end of corporal punishment for work infractions. And yes, whilst there have been frivolous union actions in the past and corruption and prevention of fair hiring practices (they do partly deserve the negative perception they have), nevertheless we need to remember how important the ability for employees to engage in collective bargaining is.

Unions, to many Americans, and indeed I think to many British reaks of communist-socialism (and is therefore 'evil'). The ability of employees to organise and disrupt society is, as I have experienced many times in London over the last year (RMT strikes), incredibly inconvenient.

But collective-bargaining is unions in action. And collective-bargaining is on the rise: Groupon is an obvious one, London's Unpacked bulk grocery buying store, as well as a number of other group purchasing schemes which use collectivity to bargain with the market.  What does this have to do with unions? Think of collective purchasing like collective negotiation and think of wages as the market price for labour. Got it?

I hope I've made you go a bit softer on unions.