Another Top-Down Structure

Trey Smith

It’s a scandal that these characters, who’ve presided over years of shrinkage in membership and political power, are nonetheless paid well into the six figures (putting them securely in the 1%, in other words). To take one egregious example, the president of the Laborers Union is paid almost $600,000 even though membership is down almost 30% over the last decade.
~ from Incentivize Labor Leaders’ Pay by Doug Henwood ~

As much as progressives like to rail against the vulgar compensation rates of corporate CEOs, most large labor unions follow the exact same blueprint! While we regularly see news reports of corporate big wigs receiving raises while company profits tank and scores of workers are given pink slips, organized labor treads down the very same path.

The key here is something Henwood mentions parenthetically: Union bosses are of the same class -- the one percent -- as their bosses. They regularly rub shoulders with the elite and are not in touch with the lives of their rank-and-file members. So, it should surprise no one that these same union leaders refuse to "think outside the box." They don't want to lose their status in elites circles!

This is why I am a big supporter of the union movement, but not a hardline supporter of the big American unions themselves. The leadership structure of big unions isn't that different than their corporate counterparts. It's heavily top-down and the people at the bottom -- those union workers doing the lion's share of the work -- have little power and almost no say-so.

For me, this represents the primary reason why the union leadership refuses to walk away from the Democratic Party. Their chief interest is not in serving the needs of their members and the general public; it is on keeping their fat cat salaries and political status intact at all costs. One of those costs is the degradation of the workplace rights of the people they supposedly represent!