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Printer-Friendly ModeSSA victory rare in time of declining unions
December 3, 2007 —
UNIONS -
Long on the decline in the private sector, they remain strong in government and academia, despite attempts to curb their influence. SVSU's Support Staff Association is among these unions, having won a victory last week with the Board of Control approving wage increases for 2006 through the first half of 2009, after over a year of give and take at the negotiating table.
All this occurs while private sector unions - the most obvious and perhaps relevant being the United Auto Workers - are offering serious and wide-ranging cuts to employers at the negotiating table. The question then is this: What's with the discrepancy? How are public sector unions like the SSA managing to improve benefits at a time most other unions are being forced to slash health packages?
There exist nuanced explanations for the trend, but the Cliff's Notes version might read like this: public sector unions don't listen to management when it threatens layoffs because the books are bleeding red. Why? Government programs - state-supported universities included - are not expected to profit, and they usually don't.
More importantly, government spending sends contradictory messages. Why does the Pentagon get a blank check, while the Department of Transportation finds itself scraping together pennies to refurbish dilapidated rail? In university politics, these types of interdepartmental debates stir passions usually reserved for the battlefield. The public coffers, to the disdain of economists everywhere, never seem to empty, a fact that has fostered "me too" attitudes across the board.
Unions often have the impression that the money is there, but is cruelly withheld. That has long been the basis for the adversarial relationship that unions assume with management, whether in government or private industry.
But that assumption is coming under increasing scrutiny in the public sector as private unions continue to lose strength to the point of irrelevance.
Is the current strength of unions like the SSA sustainable?
Probably not in Michigan. Increasingly, state universities are relying more and more upon tuition payments to fund operations, as public appropriations dwindle.
Are students willing to pay more not only for their education, but also for the bureaucracy's insulin injections? Their prescription drugs? Their chemotherapy? In time, we'll know for certain. So far, the market suggests that students are willing to go into significant debt to join the white-collar workforce.
But if that base of state funding continues to erode, state universities might be forced to demand concessions from unions like the SSA. The less money universities get from the state, the closer they get to being private institutions. And everyone has seen what's happened to private sector unions. The market, more often than not, is simply not kind to unions.