Tracking New Trends in the Labor Movement
An Interview with Steven Greenhouse
Steven Greenhouse was a reporter for The New York Times for over 30 years. Joining The Times in 1983, he served as a correspondent for 12 years working in Chicago, Paris and Washington DC. Steven became the Times’ labor and workplace reporter for 19 years, from 1995 to 2014, where he covered a myriad of topics, including conditions for the nation’s farm workers, the Fight for $15, Walmart’s locking in workers at night, the New York City transit strike, factory disasters in Bangladesh and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s push to cripple public employee unions. He retired from the paper in December 2014.
Steven is a graduate of Wesleyan University (1973), the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (1975) and NYU Law School. He is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and a prolific freelancer for numerous publications. His most recent book, Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in August 2019 and Anchor Books (paperback version) in July 2020, and was listed on Powell’s 50 Books for 50 Years list.
Anthony Mohr: Thank you for agreeing to this interview, Steve. It looks to me as if there is kind of a Renaissance of unions among younger people. Are older labor union veterans supporting it?
Steven Greenhouse: I think this is the most exciting, inspiring time for labor unions in many a decade. Most of the excitement comes from younger workers. So much of the organizing energy we’re seeing now at Starbucks, Chipotle, Trader Joe’s, Amazon and Apple is coming from young workers. A lot of older workers aren’t so eager to stick their necks out. But if you look at a Gallup poll that came out in late August, it showed that 71% of Americans approve of unions, the highest level since 1965. Basically, the approval levels for unions are the same for Americans in their fifties and sixties as for those in their twenties and thirties.
I submit that many Americans feel positively about unions because they’re sick of decades of wage stagnation. They’re sick of worsening income inequality. They’re sick of seeing their wages hardly budge (except recently, with unemployment so low), while profits at many companies have soared. How do we build a fairer economy? Well, many young people are told to get a master’s degree or go to law school or get an MBA to raise their pay, but a lot of them can’t do that. They simply can’t financially afford to get an advanced degree; many can’t even afford to go to college. Plus, a lot of young people aren’t great students. Every high school class has its bottom 50%, and those students aren’t going to become lawyers or software engineers. So nowadays, a lot of young people think, “how can I improve my lot, how can I raise my pay?” They realize that one way to improve their economic lot and get better treatment at work is to form a union.
Mohr: I read an article saying the American public is back in love with labor unions. So why aren’t workers?
Greenhouse: I take issue with that assessment. Many workers are in love with unions. The Gallup findings go hand in hand with pro-union findings from a study by Alex Hertel-Fernandez of Columbia University and also findings by Thomas Kochan of MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Hertel-Fernandez did a study that found that 52% of non-union workers say they would like to join a union if they could. His study also found that 74% of workers aged eighteen to twenty-four said they would like to join a union. Seventy five percent of Hispanic workers and 80% of African-American workers also say they’d like to join a union if they could. Thomas Kochan, who’s considered one of the leading labor relations experts in the nation, did a study a few years ago that found that nearly 50% of non-union workers say they would like to join a union if they could. And that’s up from 33% in the 1970s and 1990s.
Corporate executives often say that workers don’t want to join unions. Then why do they spend millions of dollars trying to twist workers’ arms not to join unions? Why do they hire these $2,000-a-day anti-union consultants to pressure workers to vote against the union? Why does Amazon put posters in the toilet stalls trying to convince people that unions are bad? I strongly believe that many more workers would be joining unions if it weren’t for the concerted, elaborate, sophisticated efforts by American corporations to stomp on unionization efforts.
Mohr: The article I referred to earlier quotes people saying that workers are wary of having, quote unquote, another boss. They don’t want old union leaders telling them “this is the way we do it.” Also, I recall being told in school that unions tend to be corrupt, going back to the days of Jimmy Hoffa.
Greenhouse: Several answers: first, there’s much less corruption now. During the 1950s and 60s, there was unfortunately a lot of union corruption, famously — or perhaps I should say infamously — in the Teamsters union and the East Coast Longshoreman’s union. We older folks remember On the Waterfront, a terrific movie about corruption in the longshoremen’s union. I’ve spoken to many college classes and asked students about On the Waterfront, and many students say they’ve never heard of it.
The federal government and its prosecutors have done a very good job getting the Teamsters and the Longshoremen to become much cleaner, much less corrupt. The federal government deserves a lot of credit for doing that. But sadly there is still some union corruption. The most notable, very bad recent example was the United Auto Workers (UAW), which had a tradition of being a very honest union. It was sad to see the auto workers, the great union of Walter Reuther, take a seriously wrong turn, with two former UAW presidents sent to prison as part of a scandal in which 15 people were convicted and several million dollars were embezzled. I strongly believe that there’s at least as much corruption in corporate America, perhaps more, than in unions. Look at Enron, WorldCom, Purdue Pharma, Theranos, Bernie Madoff, just to give a few examples.
As for the notion of “union bosses,” back in the days of United Mine Workers’ leader John L. Lewis, and David Dubinsky, the garment workers’ leader, unions were often very much top down. Now things are somewhat more bottom up. A lot of young workers don’t have an image of labor leaders as big, beefy union bosses who are authoritarian — like John L. Lewis, who in many ways was great, even visionary, but in many ways was an autocratic boss. They see Chris Smalls, a worker who was fired at a Staten Island Amazon facility and then headed up the historic unionization effort that led to victory at Amazon’s 8,200-worker warehouse on Staten Island. The Amazon workers in Staten Island consider him a friend, a co-worker, a young guy, thirty-two, who stuck his neck out to form a union. They don’t see him as a boss at all.
Many of the unionizing Starbucks workers don’t understand the concept of union boss. There’s no union boss at the Trader Joe locations that have unionized in Hadley, Massachusetts and Minneapolis.
To my mind, there should be more democracy in unions and in corporations. Workers should have more of a voice in workplace matters. Put them on corporate boards as in Germany, France and many Scandinavian countries.
Look at Jack Welch, who many people say was the greatest CEO of the second half of the twentieth century. He was a boss, an autocrat. He didn’t put up with much dissent, and we have all these business journals singing hallelujahs to the great Jack Welch.
Or take the leaders of the nation’s largest labor unions: Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers; Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Union; and Mary K. Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union. They’re not union bosses.
I think that many of the young workers who are pushing for unions see unionization as a way to democratize the workplace. I just saw a quotation from a worker who helped the first Chipotle to unionize, in Lansing, Michigan. She was asked why they unionized. She responded, “Workplaces today are basically authoritarian regimes. We’re supposed to live in a democracy. We’re in the place where we spend most of our waking hours. I think unions are a step towards challenging the basic lack of democracy in our society.”
Mohr: Job stability and pension protection are major subjects in connection with collective bargaining. Can you discuss that? Also, management often says collective bargaining prevents them from rewarding good workers.
Greenhouse: The assertion that if you have collective bargaining, you can’t reward good work, that everybody will get the same salary, that’s such a lie — or charitably, a gross distortion. I worked as a reporter at The New York Times for 31 years. We had a union. We had merit raises. They were given out all the time. It’s wrong to say that having a union means you can’t reward good workers. It’s true that at some unionized workplaces, management and union agree through collective bargaining not to have merit pay, but at many unionized workplaces, the two sides have agreed to have bonuses and/or merit pay increases.
Mohr: How well do unions protect pensions?
Greenhouse: They’re much better at protecting pensions than when there’s no union. Unions try hard to protect pensions, but unfortunately, we’ve seen predatory wheeler dealers who acquired unionized companies and then sought to gouge money out of the pension funds. Unfortunately, it was often hard for the union to stop them, but not because unions didn’t try. Generally, unions have done a good job keeping and preserving pensions, and some people say that they’ve done far too good a job. You often hear about teachers’ unions being attacked, with critics saying their pensions are too generous. And let’s not forget that in non-union companies like IBM, it was a cinch for management to unilaterally impose and implement a far worse, far stingier retirement plan for its employees. It would have been far harder for IBM to do that if its employees were unionized and had a union contract.
There is also the situation with multi-employer pensions, where there might be a hundred different unionized trucking companies putting money into a pension fund for their workers, and maybe because of deregulation or recessions, seventy of those trucking companies go out of business. So, the thirty remaining unionized trucking companies might not have enough money to put into the fund to fully cover all future pensions. That resulted in some serious underfunding problems for some multi-employer pension funds, partly because the unions and employers didn’t do a great job in their initial projections to make sure the pensions would be adequately funded. Unfortunately, several multi-employer pensions fell into desperate shape, but thanks to pressure from labor unions, Joe Biden, and members of Congress, led by Senator Sherod Brown of Ohio, enacted a rescue plan. Now they’re in far better shape. One could say unions have done a great job protecting and rescuing multi-employer pension funds.
Mohr: What recommendations would you have regarding collective bargaining?
Greenhouse: Many people have little idea how hard it is for unions to win a first contract after they have won a unionization vote — often after employers fought aggressively to defeat the union. Once the workers and the union climb that Mount Everest as they did at Starbucks, as they did at Amazon, and win a unionization vote, they have to climb a second Everest — persuade a very anti-union company to agree to a first contract. John Paul Ferguson, a professor of management at McGill University in Montreal, did a major study about this in 2008. He examined five years’ worth of unionization elections, and he found that of the more than eight thousand union victories over those five years in which employees voted in favor of unionizing, unions got first contracts only 56% of the time, meaning in 44% of cases, the union never got a first contract. Then in a 2009 study, Kate Bronfenbrenner of the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations found that after workers won an initial unionization vote, 37% of the time they ended up without a first contract within two years.
A lot of labor experts would say that one of the things that’s most broken about America’s labor relations system is that even when workers express a strong desire to have a union, it’s usually difficult, often extremely difficult, for them to win a first contract. That’s because many employers want to show their workers that joining a union was stupid; that unions can’t help you because we’re never going to sign a contract with you; and we’re going to leave you dispirited, frustrated, and angry about your union because the union is not going to get a contract. And moreover, you workers whose unions can’t seem to get a contract with your wonderful corporation, you have the right to try to vote out your union with a decertification vote once a year, which elapses after the vote to unionize. So, there’s considerable incentive for employers to delay, delay, delay, and never reach a contract.
A second problem is that United States labor laws are so weak and toothless that even if an employer breaks the law and bargains in bad faith, the National Labor Relations Board cannot fine them or penalize them for deliberately preventing any contract from being reached. As a result, many smart labor relations people say we should do what Canada does. If people vote to unionize and within six or nine months, the two sides fail to reach a first contract, you appoint an arbitrator and both sides put forward their best offers, and then the arbitrator decides what a fair contract should be.
Mohr: So that would be a recommendation you’d make?
Greenhouse: As I said, I believe the system is broken. Professor John Paul Ferguson told me that many people don’t understand that when you vote to unionize, all you are voting for is the right to try to get a contract for a year or two without any guarantee that you’ll ever get a union contract that increases pay and benefits. In that way, unionizing can be an empty promise. When over 40% of the time, workers who vote to unionize never get a first contract, that shows something’s really broken. My recommendation is that if workers vote in favor of unionizing and after six months, the company and union still haven’t reached a first contract, then appoint an arbitrator that both sides agree upon and have that person make binding recommendations about what the contract’s terms should be.
Mohr: Doesn’t union membership contribute to employee stability? To fewer people leaving? When a person leaves, a new hire costs the company money. It could amount to 20% or something of the salary that first year. Some have written that if you’ve got a unionized shop, people tend to stay.
Greenhouse: Absolutely. There’s a big debate about whether unions are good for business or bad for business. In their seminal work, What the Unions Do, Richard B. Freeman and James Medoff talked about this. On one hand, yes, unions might push down a company’s profits by taking a larger share of profits (in the form of increased pay) than workers get in non-union workplaces. But on the other hand, unions bring some big advantages to companies. They often mean a company attracts more and better job applicants. They create a more stable workforce with less turnover. At unionized workplaces, employers often end up investing more in their workers and training them better. So, workers at unionized workplaces are often more productive than those at non-union workplaces, where turnover is typically greater. Also, various studies have found that in unionized workplaces, the workers are happier, more dedicated, experienced and loyal. There’s less turnover, and when workers are happier, they’re generally more productive, loyal and diligent — even though you sometimes hear corporate officials say, “Once a place is unionized, the workers become lazy jerks and don’t do anything.” But again, many studies have shown that unionized workforces are more productive per hour than non-union workforces.
I should note that Richard B. Freeman, a labor economist at Harvard, joined two other professors to study the effects of unionization on productivity. They surveyed 300 studies around the world and concluded that unions do not, overall, reduce productivity. So, their findings contradict the assertions of many union bashers who assert that unions undermine efficiency and productivity.
Mohr: Let’s move to other ways workers can protect themselves. I’m thinking specifically of California, where Governor Gavin Newsom recently signed the Fast-Food Accountability and Standards Recovery Act, (AB 257). What’s your thought about that?
Greenhouse: A lot of labor leaders say we need sectoral bargaining, where we bargain on behalf of 80% or 100% of the workers in an industry, as is the case in France, Italy and Denmark. You can’t do that here, partly because unions represent just 6% of the workers in the private sector. So, labor strategists have been thinking, how do we create more bargaining power for workers in the U.S. when just 6% of private sector workers are in unions and when we try to unionize, we have to battle mightily to win? These strategists came up with this idea in California to essentially create a species of sector bargaining for some 550,00 fast-food workers. It entails a ten-person so-called standards council with four representatives of the fast-food industry, four representatives of workers in the fast-food industry and two state officials.
That ten-person council will make recommendations to the state legislature, saying the minimum wage for fast-food workers should be x dollars an hour, they should have minimum health coverage of X Y and Z, and they shouldn’t have to pay more than 8% or 6% a year of their pay towards health coverage. I imagine the standards council would make recommendations like that. It is somewhat like the sectoral bargaining that we see in France or Scandinavia. They’re representing the whole of the industry, one hundred percent. The full power of the workers in the industry is harnessed to pressure the government and the industry. So, this is one of the most innovative co-worker laws passed in the United States in years. [Note from editors: It is being challenged in court.]
I wouldn’t be surprised if unions and workers in other progressive states like Illinois, Washington, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey or Maryland pass similar laws, and then I wouldn’t be surprised if workers in other industries, perhaps nursing homes or car washes, push for similar legislation in various states.
Mohr: Should sectoral bargaining be able to cross state lines? In other words, if it works in California, do we want to apply it in Mississippi?
Greenhouse: AB 257 is written in a way so that corporations can’t say that the law is preempted by the National Labor Relations Act. The California law deliberately doesn’t talk of collective bargaining so as to prevent lawsuits that seek to overturn it by asserting that federal law governs collective bargaining and therefore the California law is preempted. The Mississippi State Legislature is so conservative and so controlled by corporate forces, it would be very hard to enact something similar in that state. So maybe a California-like law can be enacted in other blue states like Massachusetts or Illinois, but I don’t see red states embracing a law like that.
Mohr: Looking at the future of work, what recommendations in general would you make? What policy changes?
Greenhouse: We’re the only industrial nation that doesn’t have national rules or laws that guarantee paid sick days, paid parental leave or paid vacation. We’re the only industrial nation that doesn’t have universal health coverage. We’re the only industrial nation, where, if the Wal-Mart where you work closes down, workers and their families could lose health coverage altogether. That’s unfair. I think something needs to be done to increase the power and voice of workers in the United States because in so many ways things in the U.S. are tilted against workers.
In my view, we also need to reform our campaign finance system. We have to have a fairer democracy if we’re to have a fairer economy. We need a campaign system that gives the little guy a bigger say. The Koch brothers donated a hundred million dollars in a recent presidential campaign. So did Sheldon Adelson. That’s a hundred million times the voice of a typical teacher or steelworker or McDonald’s worker.
In high school, we all learned about one man, one vote; one person, one vote. But when one very wealthy person can give a gazillion times more to political campaigns and have a gazillion times more political influence because they’re richer, that weakens the voice of average working Americans, and that leads to a political and economic system that is skewed in favor of the wealthy and corporations. I think we need to do something like have more public financing of political campaigns to give typical Americans more of a voice, so that politicians don’t have to rely so much on hitting up rich people for donations.
This might sound weird for a Jewish person who lost relatives in the Holocaust to say, but I’m a big fan of Germany’s system of co-determination. In Germany, corporations have both a supervisory board and a regular board of directors, with the supervisory board — which sets general policy — on top of the regular board of directors. Large German corporations are required to have their workers elect a majority minus one of all the members of the supervisory board. So, there might be ten worker-picked board members and eleven shareholder-picked board members. Even though corporate representatives still control the supervisory board, workers have a large say. They’re really listened to. As a result, German companies have done much less outsourcing of jobs to China or Vietnam or Sri Lanka than American companies have done. Also in Germany, companies invest more in their workers, invest more in training programs and apprenticeship programs than American corporations do. I think that’s largely a result of Germany’s co-determination system.
Moreover, basically every workplace in Germany and in many other European countries has a works council that is half management representatives and half worker representatives. These councils discuss — and reach agreement on — issues like workplace safety, scheduling, and bullying bosses. These councils often help reduce employee turnover, and lower turnover and increased stability in turn raise productivity.
One of the reasons that the U.S. has experienced the so-called Great Resignation during the pandemic is that so many of our workplaces treated their workers terribly, often underpaying them and overworking them. So, with the jobless rate extremely low these past few years, as soon as workers had an opportunity to take a job across the street, many left.
Another recommendation from me: to my mind, there’s something very broken when CEOs get annual pay increases of 20, 30, 40 and 50% at the same time they freeze their employees’ wages or give them only minuscule raises. I think there should be some linkage. A CEO should be able to receive a large raise only after the workers who make the profits for the company receive appreciable raises so that they, too, share somewhat in the company’s prosperity.
Mohr: Would you change the structure of the National Labor Relations Board (NRLB)?
Greenhouse: The NLRB hasn’t had its funding increased in nine years. Its field staff is literally down 50% from twenty years ago. Amazon and Starbucks arguably are committing many labor law violations to quash unionization, and it’s very hard for the understaffed, under-resourced NLRB to keep up and enforce the law. I feel like they’re playing Whac-A-Mole with their limited staff. I would increase their funding. Corporations hate the NLRB and are happy to see it remain badly underfunded.
Another problem with the National Labor Relations Act is that when a company illegally fires a worker for supporting a union, there are no fines. So, if a company fires the ten workers who are leading a unionization effort and they’re not reinstated for a year or two, it can’t be fined. The worst that could happen to the company is that the NLRB orders the reinstatement of illegally fired workers and says the company must give them back pay, but under current law, the company can’t face any fines.
There are studies showing that between 15% and 20% of rank-and-file workers who lead unionization efforts are fired, and that makes it much harder to unionize. I would amend the National Labor Relations Act to impose fairly stiff fines — fifty thousand dollars for the first illegal firing, one hundred thousand for the next, two hundred thousand for the next. And lo and behold, I believe that corporations will become much more careful, much more law-abiding during unionization campaigns.
Corporations are generally much more careful about not violating environmental laws and wage and hour laws. But with the National Labor Relations Act, they often feel like they’re getting just a traffic ticket when they’re caught breaking the law. They think it’s so minor. They violate it all the time because when you don’t have real penalties, there’s nothing to discourage them. I don’t doubt that there are top executives who say, “fire the top five pro-union workers. Screw them.” That creates huge havoc in those workers’ lives. They might lose their car. They might lose their house, and the CEO who issued the illegal order to fire them can’t be touched. CEOs should face some type of civil and even criminal liability for blatant violations of the law when they’re fighting against unionization. We talk about incentives and disincentives. All the incentives in the world are for businesses to break the law, for executives to break the law, to stomp on unions and fire union workers.
Mohr: Thank you. I appreciate your time.
About the Author:
Anthony J. Mohr is a 2021 Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow and has over twenty-six years of service within the criminal and civil justice system at the state level. He most recently sat on the Superior Court of California in Los Angeles County, where he presided over civil and felony trials. Earlier, he was a judge of the Los Angeles Municipal Court, and in private legal practice. Among his numerous professional affiliations, Anthony served on the Executive Committee of the Los Angeles Superior Court and chaired both the Superior Court’s ethics review and response committee and the statewide Committee on Judicial Ethics of the California Judges Association. He serves on the Regional Board of the Anti-Defamation League’s Los Angeles Region.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.