Sober Thought unions

Unions -- otherwise known as trade unions, trades unions, labour organisations, organised labour, guilds, labour associations or collective bargaining units -- form an important part of the economy of Sober Thought. In combination with business and government, unions form part of the triad that runs the Sober Thought economy.

Rationale

Main article: Sober Thought labour-management relations

Why have unions? Sure they might have been necessary in the bad old days when wages were low and occupational safety was non-existent, but haven't unions now outlived their usefulness? If only this were true.

Functions

Unions perform a useful function by representing the interests of workers collectively to both business and government. By negotiating with the owners of business enterprises, either directly or through management, unions secure better wages and benefits for their individual members than the latter could likely achieve singly. It is very difficult for a lone worker to stand up against the full weight of management. The nuclear option, used only when all other means have failed to achieve an objective, for unions has been and will always be the dreaded strike.

Trade unions, as representatives of the working class, are also effective vehicles for increasing health and safety standards in the workplace. The can make presentations to the government and give practical advice on how labour standards can be improved for the health of the labouring class and the economy as a whole. After all, a sick worker is not a worker at all but rather a drain on productivity.

Less obviously, and occasional vehemently denied by management, unions are good for business. They clarify work rules, encourage employee retention, reduce training costs and add a second layer of restraint on workers. For instance, if workers stage an illegal walkout with the encouragement of their union, the union itself can be fined as well as the individual workers losing their pay.

Conservative agents

Contrary to popular belief among both left- and right-wingers, unions are paradoxically conservative rather than liberal. Consider the introduction of a new product line. If it fails and the business suffers badly, an ordinary worker has the comfort of an unemployment cheque while a CEO has the comfort of a golden parachute. Which one is likely to be more realistic and conservative, and which more fantastic and liberal?

Unions, acting as collective bodies of ordinary workers, place a great emphasis on precedent and demand proof of efficacy for new things, all typical hallmarks of conservatism. They are naturally self-interested in wages and benefits, but no more so (and often less so) than executive suits at the corporate compensation trough. In contrast, management is normally recklessly liberal, considering new but half-baked ideas, implementing untried procedures or expanding into new and potentially unprofitable markets.

So if creative but sound management had to make a convincing business case to traditionalist but reasonable labour, the likely outcome would be a synthesis better than either the current state of affairs or the initial future proposal. Of course, if the management side is not sound, the labour side is not reasonable or communication fails, all bets are off?

Types of unions

The first task of a union is to decide which workers should be covered by a bargaining unit. This is done by including or excluding classes of workers who are seen to have common interests. The two basic approaches are craft and industrial unions.

The former organises workers by function, and generally only includes skilled or semi-skilled workers. Examples of this are carpenters in the construction trades, stationary engineers in large institutional buildings or moulders in metal making. Some of these trades can trace their origins back to the guilds of the middle ages.

One problem of craft organisations is that the workers of a single business might have workers from dozens of unions, each with a different collective agreement, work rules and pay scales. In short, it is management's nightmare. An alternative to this is to create company unions which represent all craft trades and unskilled workers at a specific workplace.

Company unions too have their own problems, namely a union with representation at a single workplace is less able to bargain with their employers and less able to afford to strike. Sober Thought workers have largely overcome the weaknesses of both types of unions by organising mainly industrial unions but across all or most business enterprises in a specific economic sector, such as metal working, manufacturing or transit. Where this solution does not satisfy the needs of the workers, for example in obsolescent trades like glassblowing or highly specialised industries like computer chips, they resort to craft or company unions as appropriate.

Inclusions

Many real world countries exclude significant portions of their workers from the possibility of organising unions and conducting collective bargaining. Often this is accomplished overtly by legislation, but sometimes it is more covertly by practice. In large part because of the centre-left orientation of the country, and by the clear business benefits of doing so, most of these workers are enfranchised in Sober Thought.

Disposable workers

RL migrant or guest workers are often excluded on citizenship or residency grounds. RP workers in this class are fully enfranchised on the grounds that if they able to work they are able to be represented at work. Migrant workers, like all foreigners, are protected by the human rights outlined in the Sober Thought Charter. Although the charter reserves voting in elections to the legislatures to citizens, it does not impose such a restriction on unions, private associations or other organisations.

Parttime, seasonal or contingent workers share many commonalities and are among the most vulnerable workers. Paradoxically, it is this class of workers who need protection the most who are given the least protection in the real world. Sober Thought solves this problem by making all benefits and obligations for these workers prorated, so that a halftime worker gets half the health benefits. This encourages employers to make fulltime positions since there is no financial disincentive to do so, and there is a workforce stability incentive to do so.

This leads to the peculiar class of workers who are fulltime yet share many features with migrant and occasional workers. They occupy positions in poorly paid jobs like sales clerks, janitors and launderers, so naturally they quit and are replaced much more frequently than other jobs. In recognition of these problems in labour organising, standards for certifying unions are tailored to fit turnover rates. Furthermore, standards for decertifying unions account for not only turnover but the strength of the original certifying vote.

Women

Pink collar workers describe those who work in fields overwhelmingly represented by women, which may be blue collar or white collar, such as secretarial, nursing, teaching, librarianship and retail sales. Sex discrimination is banned by law, and gender equality is a cherished social value. Nevertheless, women continue to predominate in these professions although men have made more progress than in most RL countries.

Female dominated occupations are excluded in two ways. The less glamourous and less skilled jobs, such as those performed by secretaries and sales clerks, are characterised by high turnover rates which makes membership drives amore difficult.

Employers appeal to those in more glamourous and highly skilled jobs, such as those performed by nurses and librarians, by calling them professionals who do not need to debase themselves with such working class institutions as unions. Through the careful definition of management or "white collar" workers, this ruse is easily disarmed.

Small enterprises

Another common RL exclusion is businesses below a certain threshold of workers, revenues or profits. There is no legal bar or threshold in Sober Thought labour law, but practical considerations mean that very few workers in small enterprises are unionised, and those that are tend to be in craft unions.

Consider an automotive repair garage where the interests of management and mechanics are often so close together that no meaningful aggregate distinctions can be made. Under these circumstances, unions are neither necessary nor missed by either side. A legal secretary knows that her continued employment is contingent upon the clients the solicitor can attract and the work she and the barrister do for the clientele. How could a union help her, especially in a small law firm where she may be the sole "worker" outnumbered by several "management"?

Less obviously but no less importantly, the lawyers are under the same constraints as their employees. Without a union, they are free to adopt personnel policies that violate natural justice such as unequal wages for equal work, nepotism or employee favouritism. However, should they do so they are likely to experience high employee turnover, increased training, greater severance packages and perhaps a breach of contract lawsuit. It is amazing what a mistreated and wrongfully dismissed paralegal can do with all the time and motivation they have been given by a bad boss!

Exclusions

There are three significant classes of workers excluded from unions: managers, public safety employees and federal employees.

Management

Main article: Sober Thought labour-management relations

Managers are defined as those who hire, fire, discipline and schedule other employees. They are often called white collar workers in contrast to labourers called blue collar workers, but the former term can be confusing because it is often applied to accountants, lawyers, surveyors, engineers and other professionals who do not perform the functions of management.

Management represents the interests of the owners of a business, and consequently their imperatives are to maximise profit which is often accomplished by minimising labour costs. If they are unionised, they cannot possibly conduct collective bargaining without a conflict of interest. It seems likely that even if the government had not rejected the daily issue on this subject that the owners of business would have squelched the absurdity of unionising highly paid management types.

Public safety

Emergency workers like firefighters, police, paramedics and ambulance attendants provide a troublesome class of workers to deal with in RL and RP. There are three main RL approaches: allow workers to organise and strike, allow them to organise but not strike and forbid them to organise or strike. When unions are permitted in RL, many of these functional unions have insisted on describing themselves as associations, alliances or brotherhoods to avoid being tainted with the label of union.

The first option is practically a non-starter, and an strike by public safety employees has merely served to inflame the public and strengthen the hand of government. The second option is most commonly adopted as nations struggle to reliably provide lifesaving services while ensuring workplace justice. This is an honourable approach, and governments adopting this policy should be commended for their sense of fairness to all. However, by removing the right to strike, the unions are dramatically weakened. The final option is also a non-starter, since a lack of representation simply results in workplace resentment, loss of productivity, and likely wildcat strikes or work to rule campaigns.

Sober Thought tries to solve this problem by allowing public security workers to form associations to address all issues except wages and benefits. It recognises that labour organisations without the capacity to strike are qualitatively different from trade unions. To compensate in part for this weakness, an association representative is required by law to be present at meetings where wages and benefits are discussed but not able to vote on the issue.

Public sector

Main article: Sober Thought labour-management relations#Public sector

At the federal level at least, public sector managers have it easier because they never have to deal with unions. Left-wing readers might recoil in horror at this apparent travesty of collective bargaining and union organising rights.

However, more forward thinking people might agree with the people of Sober Thought who reason that the people as a whole elect the attendees of the government in a pseudo-annual general meeting and indirectly the government board chair, and these in turn choose the managers. Therefore, unionisation is not required because the workers are already owner-operators in a sense. Sometimes, however, directors would benefit from the stabilising and moderating influences of unions.

Each province and municipality may permit or prohibit its employees from organising. Those who forbid unions might think they have bought labour peace on the cheap, but they may find that they cannot attract and retain quality workers who seek greater job security and more workplace justice. In hypercapitalist Cholmestay, unions are seen as an infringement on the almighty Denkmark so no government employees are allowed to organise. In collectivist Hochelaga, unions are not only encouraged but are explicitly coopted by corporatist (not corporate) government with official union representation at the municipal and provincial levels.

Major labour organisations

Most organisations below are bilingual and have official French names as well which are not listed. The few exceptions are noted below.

• Agri-business Workers Union (AWU): agriculture, farm implements and food processing
• Alliance of Health and Allied Workers (AHAW): divisions for doctors, nurses, paramedics and allied workers
• Amalgamated Manufacturing Union (AMU): secondary manufacturing except transport vehicles
• Automechanics Union (AU): car repair technicians and garage workers
• Construction Workers Council (CWC): branches for each specialty
• Council of Automotive Workers (CAW): branches for each employer like SIAM
• Education Union (EU): branches in each province and sections in each school district or tertiary institution
• Miners Union (MU): sections for coal, iron ore, aluminum ore and potash miners
• Municipal Association of Workers (MAW): represents half the municipal workers, including local pubic transit
• National Association of Soldiers, Sailors and Aircrew (NASSA): Community Defence Forces
• National Energy Workers (NEW): fossil fuels (except coal) and hydroelectricity
• National Smelters Union (NSU): steel, aluminum and other primary manufacturing
• National Transport Union: covers STferro, STaqua, CommunitAir and most public transit
• Provincial Alliance of Police Associations (PAPA): associations in seven provinces
• Public Employees Association (PEA), branches in each federal vice ministry and some provinces
• Retail Workers Union (RWU): stores
• Sober Thought Association of Radio and Television (START): InfoST
• Sober Thought Union of Newspapers and Telecommunications (STUNT): Sober Thought newspapers, telecommunications and private broadcasting
• Syndicat des artistes du Hochelaga (SAH): francophone artists in painting, sculpture, writing and performing arts
• Union nationale des ingénieurs et travailleurs aux édifices (UNITÉ): Hochelaga equivalent of CWC but including white collar workers as well