[PEN-L:270] Union productivity - Sci. Am.

[boddhisatva <kbevans@xxxxxxxxx>]

	I thought you might be interested in this small article from the
August Issue of Scientific American.




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		"Look for the Union Label:

	new analysis of economic data shows that unionization could
	maximize productivity"




	After nearly a century of union-management warfare in the U.S., a
series of nationwide surveys showing that union shops dominate the ranks
of the country's most productive workplaces may come as a surprise.  In
fact, according to lease set in Lynch of tests University and Sandra E.
Black of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, economic Darwinism: the
survival of the fist championed by generations of hard nosed tycoons-may
be doing what legions of organizers could not do: putting an end to
autocratic bosses and regimented workplaces.

	American industry has been trying to reinvent itself for more than
20 years. Management gurus have proclaimed theories X Y. and Z, not to
mention Quality Circles, Total Quality Management (TQM) High-Output
Management.  Only in the past few years, however, had any solid data
become available on which techniques work and which don't.  Businesses do
not always respond to surveys, and previous attempts to collect data ran
into response rates of his low as 6 percent, making their results
unrepresentative.  Enter the U.S.  Census's Educational Quality of the
Workforce National Employer survey, first conducted in 1994, which
collected data on business practices from a nationally representative
sample of more than 1500 workplaces.

	Lynch and Black correlated the survey data with other statistics
that detailed the productivity of each business in the sample.  They took
as their "typical" establishment a nonunion company with limited
profit-sharing and without TQM or other form all quality enhancing
methods. (Unionized firms constituted about 20 percent of the sample,
consistent with the waning reach of organized labor in the U.S..).

	The average unionized establishment recorded productivity levels
16 percent higher than the baseline firm, whereas average nonunion ones
scored 11 percent lower.  One reason: most of the union shops had adapted
so-called formal quality programs, in which up to have the workers meet
regularly to discuss workplace issues.  Moreover, production workers at
these establishments shared in the firm's profits, and more than a quarter
did their jobs in self-managed teams.  Productivity in such union shops
was 20 percent above baseline.  That's small minority of unionized
workplaces still following the adversarial line recorded productivity 15
percent lower than the baseline-even worse than the nonunion average.

	Are these productivity gains result of high-performance management
techniques rather than unionization?  No, Lynch and Black say.  Adoption
of the same methods in nonunion establishments yielded only a 10 percent
improvement in productivity over the baseline.  The doubled gains in well
run union shops, Lynch contends, may result from the greater stake
unionized workers have in their place of employment: they can accept or
even proposed large changes in job practice without worrying that they are
cutting their own charts in doing so. (Lynch tells the opposing story of a
high-tech company that painted scanners a small bonus for suggest to ing a
simple measure to speed nightly office claiming-and then laid off a third
of them.)

	Even if a union cannot guarantee job security, she says, it
enables workers to negotiate on a more or less equal footing.  Especially
in manufacturing, Lynch notes, unionized workplaces tend to have lower
turnover.  Consequently, they also reap more benefit from company-specific
on the job training.

	These documented productivity gains cast the different light on
the declining percentage of unionized workers throughout the U.S..  Are
employers acting against their own interest when they worked to block
unionization? Lynch believes that a follow-up survey, with initial
analyses due at this winter, may help answer that question and others.
Economists will be able to see how many of the previously sampled firms
that have traditional management labor relations managed to stay in
business and to what extent the "corporate re-engineering" mania of the
past few years has paid off.  Most serious re-engineering efforts-the ones
that aren't just downsizing by another name-lead to increase to worker
involvement, Lynch argues, if only because they require finding out how
many people actually do their jobs.  Armed with that knowledge-and with
the willing cooperation on their employees-firms may yet be able to break
out of the productivity doldrums.

		-Paul Wallich


	(reprinted without permission of any-goddamn-body)

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		Peace



p.s. - I copied this by dictating it through the program
"NaturallySpeaking" by Dragon Software.  This program is really swanky,
although it takes some time to "train" and some time to get used to. I
recommend the program.