Main Street

Some Friendly Advice for Workers from the Wall Street Journal

Last week the Wall Street Journal published a piece examining the impacts of the economic slowdown on young workers, and found that young workers were at higher risk of becoming unemployed.

Employees in their 20s and 30s are finding themselves more at risk of a layoff, according to labor lawyers, as employers look to avoid age-discrimination lawsuits by adopting a “last one in, first one out” policy and turn to tenure as a means of conducting layoffs.

Fear not my friends; the WSJ ended this great piece with some friendly advice:

You might also try to align yourself with someone in senior management… Should it come to layoff decisions, “It doesn’t hurt to have someone in the executive conference room on your side”…

There you have it folks, we should be sucking up to management and owners across America… what do you say?

Well there is another way, one the WSJ doesn’t even bother telling you, it’s called the union way. That’s right, you can either give sucking up a try, or decide you and your co-workers should have a say about how things go down at work.

What can I get as a young worker in a union? The folks over at CEPR did some research and found that it’s actually quite a bit (PDF). Among their findings:

• unionization raised wages 12.4 percent – or about $1.75 per hour relative to young workers with similar characteristics who were not in unions
• About 17 percentage points more likely to have employer-provided health
• About 24 percentage points more likely to have a pension.

Today I literally jumped up with joy when I read about workers in Manhattan who chose the union way. Last Friday workers at H&M ratified their first contract — maybe they forgot to read the paper last week?

From the NY Times Blog:

More than 1,000 employees at nine H&M stores in Manhattan will receive wage increases and other benefits in their first-ever union contract… The three-year contract provides a 3 percent wage increase in the first year, with wage re-openers in the second and third years. An additional merit-based increase is included in each year of the contract.

What’s so new or exciting about this? Well not sure when the last time you all went to H&M was, but a large part of those workers belong to a demographic which currently only makes up a small percent of the labor movement, young workers. What’s of particular interest to me is that this is definitely not an isolated event, in fact globally there is a growing activity by unions to reach out to young workers and organize them to improve working conditions. (Examples here and here).

I know we often hear about how we keep losing jobs to overseas competitors as a result of “free trade” policies like NAFTA (and I think that’s true), but what we can’t forget is that there IS an increasing job market out there in the service-oriented economy. Imagine what the country would look like if the current batch of mostly low-wage, part-time, and non-union service jobs were turned into high-paying, people-friendly, sustainable jobs that allowed folks to live a good life in their communities. Is this too much to ask for? The H&M workers certainly didn’t think so, and they are right. We can’t give up on the jobs we have. Let’s turn them into good jobs.

For that to happen we will need some basic things to change, first among them bringing an end to the corrupt system workers have to face when trying to organize unions. We can do that with the Employee Free Choice Act, check out the video to learn more about it and get involved.