Part of the reason why unions are seen so negatively today is because they have been all but made ineffectual by union-busting policies that had been put in place since the Reagan administration (ironic since many unions, including the Teamsters, backed Reagan in his bid for the presidency). I think where unions fail the most is in backing politicians that don't do them any favors. I don't think there is such a thing as a pro-labor candidate anymore.
I have always had mixed feelings about the roles of unions. On the one hand, my dad served as vice president and a stewart of his local union. I could easily see how the union offered certain protections for manufacturing sector employees. Insurance for the working class. However, in some unskilled professions, unions do seem to promote inefficiency. Being told that you cannot perform a job because it is not in your narrowly defined job description comes to mind, however I would like to point out that this is a situation that is not isolated to the union shop. While I see unions as valuable to blue collar employees (after all, the SEIU was able to get the pay for security guards in California raised to a living wage standard and afford its members healthcare benefits, and more recently, it was due to the negotiations of United Steelworkers with Harley Davidson that kept jobs here in Wisconsin-even if it meant wages were cut in half from $32/hour to $16/hour-still sucks less than being jobless and further damaging the state economy), I have a hard time justifying unions for employees paid by tax dollars, such as teachers.
There have been cases where unqualified teachers are kept on the payroll simply because they have seniority and it would be nearly impossible to get rid of them given their union protections. The worst case I had heard of was out of New York where a college professor who had sexually assaulted students had been kept on because of this. The university could not have the man teach classes, so he was paid a teaching wage for doing minimal amounts of research. This case came to light in the late 1990s. In Wisconsin, K-12 teachers and certain technical college instructors are unionized, but we have the tenure system for our university faculty, which I personally believe is a far better system for educators.
Professional unions overall enter a murky area. On the one hand, functioning as guilds, they are meant to guarantee a qualified workforce. On the other, the mission the union has to protect its employees and collectively bargain can be in direct conflict with the ethics of a profession. I am thinking of the medical profession and its Hippocratic oath. When teachers go on strike, it winds up costing taxpayers more money. In professional occupations, there tend to be fewer qualified individuals who can cross the line and take the jobs, and even less who would want to risk cheesing off the unions.
That said, I don't believe that professional unions should be eliminated, but there needs to be reform. In order for all unions to save face, they have to be as much about guaranteeing qualified workers with a set of skills for a given job as they are for protecting the rights and safety of the workforce. Certainly, unions have a huge public relations battle to wage. Too many people see them as ineffectual. For one to really realize how a union can help him or her, one has to be on the job for more than five years. That seldom happens anymore. Blame it on a lack of loyalty, but whether it is due to the fickleness of the employer or employee, that is just the way it is now.
I have never worked for a union shop. I often wish I had the opportunity to do so. I have seen a lot of inefficient workers in these non-union jobs. It almost seems like inefficiency is awarded more no matter if it is a union shop or not. I believe that has a lot more to do with our wage-an-hour system. I realize that there needs to be a guaranteed wage an hour, but if someone has greater work output than his or her coworkers, they need to receive an incentive. Drawing a cause and effect inference between inefficiency and labor unions, or between outsourcing and labor unions is a fallacy of logic.
We all have our own experiences which help us formulate our opinions on issues, but we should be careful to discern fact from opinion.
