How Two-Tier Union Contracts Became Labor’s Undoing
By Louis Uchitelle | The Nation | February 5, 2013
Two-tier wage systems go way back. The Roman Emperor Marcus Opellius Macrinus, in need of a larger army but short on cash, cut the pay for new recruits, forcing them to endure the same battlefield risks as veterans, but at a lower wage. That annoyed the new warriors, and their resentment ignited an army revolt that in 218 ad cost the emperor his life.
Centuries later, two-tier wage arrangements are multiplying in America, yet without provoking the kind of public resentment that led to Macrinus’ downfall, mainly because those involved seem to have struck a deal that keeps a lid on passions. In response to persistent demands from employers for lower labor costs, some of the nation’s most prominent unions—instead of protesting or striking—have agreed to reduce the pay of newly hired workers as long as the wages of existing employees go untouched. And the new hires themselves have abstained from open protest, instead preferring the lower tier to no work at all, or to work that pays even less than a union-negotiated lower tier.
That’s Karl Hoeltge’s attitude. The 22-year-old earns $15.78 an hour on the assembly line of a General Motors factory near St. Louis, under a union contract that will cap his pay at $19.28 an hour five to six years from now. That is, if he hasn’t left by then to pursue his dream, which is to commercialize one or two of the children’s toys he designs in his off hours. Karl’s father, Gary, has worked for years on the same assembly line, and the son says he might be more reconciled to a career at the plant if he could work up to the $28 an hour his father earns. But, he says, “I’ll never catch up to my father’s pay—not if the union allows the present setup to continue.”
At the Hoeltge family dinner table, the two refrain from discussing this setback for the son—and for others at the plant in his generation—not wanting to upset the three younger siblings at the table. (At least one of them talks about following his father and his older brother into the factory, where eight-passenger vans like the Chevy Express and the GMC Savana are assembled.) They particularly avoid dwelling on the lifetime cap on Karl’s pay. Despite that ceiling, Karl might stay on at the plant if he has to. “I won’t leave GM until I have something better,” he says. “And I look all the time for something better.”
Finding something better isn’t easy in America—not when more than 20 million people are seeking employment, or hoping to move up from part-time to full-time work, from temporary to permanent jobs, or are too discouraged even to look for work, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That labor market slackness, persisting for years, helps explain why corporate employers have gained considerable leverage over wages and benefits, even in negotiations with powerful unions like the United Auto Workers (UAW). One unspoken goal of that leverage is to roll back wages for a younger generation of hourly workers, while pacifying older ones (like Karl’s father) by leaving their pay and benefits untouched in the final decade or so of their careers.
And so it is that Karl is earning the same hourly pay—not adjusted for inflation—that his father earned when he started at the plant in 1968. And that is where Karl’s pay will remain if the two-tier system prevails and spreads. Some 20 percent of all union contracts currently specify two-tier arrangements, up from very few a generation ago, according to Glenn Perusek, director of the Center for Strategic Research at the AFL-CIO. More often than not, the tiers apply to pensions and health insurance as well as wages. Most of these concessionary agreements have been negotiated since the 1990s, with little public resistance from the labor movement (although suppressed anger at the forced retreat almost certainly contributed to the Occupy Wall Street movement). As Barry Bluestone, a labor economist at Northeastern University, sums up the situation: “There are so many pressures on labor today that the rebelliousness is gone, except maybe in the public sector.”
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