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A Better Way with Labor?
Responding to the debates over the ongoing issues of terms of employment at Yale, a former international lawyer suggests turning to Europe for guidance.
December 1996
by Stonewall Jackson Bird ’67
Stonewall Jackson Bird ’67, who lives in Mount Vernon, Washington, recently set aside his career in law to pursue a degree in music theory at the University of Washington.
The recent articles and letters in these pages regarding tenure, unions, and other employment issues have struck a chord. One letter that particularly drew my attention invoked the idea of a compact between workers and employers, a concept that I have long had on my mind. With negotiations between Yale and its union workers now at an apparent impasse, the idea may bear another visit.
For many years I acted as a lawyer for a large American corporation involved in the electronics business. Like many other American companies, they used layoffs as one of the main methods for managing their business. The periodic blood-letting seemed both draconian and wasteful to me. Employees were cut off from their incomes, usually with little notice. My particular company had most of its offices in quite small towns so that the opportunities for alternative employment were rather limited. Not only were the employees cut loose, but they (and their families) were often required to change the communities in which they lived. The consequences of the company’s action extended far beyond the economic one. The company would often lose skills that it needed, earned the distrust of the remaining employees, and had the arduous task of rebuilding its forces if things improved later on.
During my last five years with this company, I was based in England as their European Counsel. I had always known that the United States had inherited many institutions from England. My experience living there made the knowledge concrete, and often made me wonder if we should not have been more critical about the received ideas with which we were choosing to govern our lives. Among those ideas is our notion of the division of authority between workers and bosses in a company. In England, this concept arose in part out of the general division in society between upper and lower classes. It was thought that some people were an aristocracy, not only of power, but also of wealth, intellect, manners, and appearance. Naturally those were the ones who should be charge of things. The rest would get the leavings. Another source was that when one of the members of the lower orders did manage to rise to eminence, he often did it in none-too-gentle a way. Often, too, his aim was to distance himself as soon as possible from his early associations. All managers thought of themselves as servants of the investors. The manager’s role was to increase the wealth of shareholders. All of this combined to mean that those on top of the pile had a low regard for those below them and considered it just and proper for managers to have a monopoly on power in companies. The attitude was not unlike the attitude of the ruling classes in England when the American “rabble” decided that it had had enough of arbitrary rule in the 1760s and 1770s.
The result was predictable. When the workers ceased wishing to be treated as negligible, management resisted. The workers could only respond by forming unions. Management resisted. The workers didn’t give up, since doing so would have been to abandon something fundamental to their interests. Management still resisted. It saw only the threat to its prerogatives, and, like place holders everywhere, confused the continuance of its prerogatives with the essential interests of the company and of society. Workers and management were viewed as being on different sides of a divide. Confrontation and stagnation was the ruling style of interaction.
I saw a different system on the Continent. There the concept was that everyone was, after all, really in the same boat. The details were different in each country, but the general idea was that employers and unions would have nation-wide discussions on how they were going to work together. The negotiations would take place every few years, and the results were applied on a very broad basis, sometimes under authority of law, sometimes because of their prestige. Most significant, white-collar workers were covered. Another consensus-building mechanism was the so-called works council. This again took varying forms depending on the country, but the idea was that the workers of a single company could meet collectively with management to work out matters of common concern (not including wages). A host of other protections existed. Laws regarding termination of employment protected both companies and workers. It was not uncommon for people with seniority to receive up to three years’ salary as compensation for the loss of livelihood. They in turn were required to give the company notice if they were leaving. The more responsible their positions, the more notice they were required to give.
It always seemed to me that these ways of doing things were far closer to the idea of participatory management that is so often expressed in this country, but for which there is no legal framework.
Businessmen in this country often say that they would be “strangled” if they had to deal with so many regulations. The fact is that the industries of Europe are alive and (mostly) well, for all that they are required to exercise more restraint in employment matters. My conviction is that part of their health comes from the workers’ knowing that those they look to for leadership are not about to push them off a cliff. There is a partnership. How petty we must believe the human spirit to be if we think that the only thing that it responds to is naked power. How foolishly we invite it to be applied against us in return.  |
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