Detroit – The outlook for organized labor seems to grow worse by the day in this year of turmoil for unions.
Auto supplier Delphi Corp. filed for bankruptcy last weekend, putting thousands of union jobs at risk. Northwest Airlines Inc., also in bankruptcy, is still flying despite a strike by its mechanics union. And the Teamsters and other unions broke from the AFL-CIO this summer, saying the larger union confederation has lost its effectiveness.
Harley Shaiken, a professor at the University of California in Berkeley who has written extensively on labor issues, said the challenges are intensifying. “You’ve got the pressures of the global economy, fierce competition in deregulated industries like airlines and powerful anti-union employers like Wal-Mart,” he said.
There have been some successes. Boeing Co. machinists got increased pension pay and cash bonuses in a contract approved after a month-long strike. In Canada, autoworkers prevented the closure of some facilities and got modest wage increases after contentious negotiations with General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and DaimlerChrysler AG.
But by and large, unions are in crisis. David Weil, an associate professor of economics at Boston University, compares it to the birth of the modern labor movement in the 1930s and says unions could emerge from their current troubles looking very different.
Delphi, which employs 30,000 U.S. hourly workers, filed for bankruptcy after the United Auto Workers refused to accept a cut in workers’ average wage rate from $27 an hour to the $10- to $12-an-hour range. The pressure to cut costs is accelerated by competition from places like Mexico and China, where laborers will work for less than $5 an hour.
“They want us to drop wages down to what they make, and there is no way,” said Allen Huguely of Dayton, Ohio, who has worked for Delphi for 30 years.
