Negotiators from the University will meet with union leaders representing workers today for the first time since Dec. 13 to discuss re-opened portions of their contract. The unionized workers went on a one-day strike last month and have threatened a longer work stoppage if the University does not make certain benefit guarantees.

In many ways, organized labor’s struggle at Stanford to expand and solidify benefits is a microcosm for a national struggle between management and unions across the private sector. In nearly a dozen interviews with The Daily, labor, legal and economic experts described a confluence of factors, including globalization, automation, internal dispute, competitive pressures and regulation that have weakened unions and made their future unclear.

Increased challenges in collective bargaining over recent years have more often than not given employers the upper hand in negotiations over benefits. Now, with declining enrollment and service jobs replacing traditional unionized manufacturing jobs, unions are struggling to maintain relevance.

Law Prof. William Gould, former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board under President Bill Clinton, said that “Stanford is a part of the general puzzle that labor and management is confronted by.”

Unions Shrinking

Unions have been shrinking in a downward spiral for the past half century.

“The fraction of workers whose wages are covered by collective bargaining agreements has fallen significantly over the past 30 years, especially in the private sector,” said Economics Prof. John Pencavel.

Law Prof. Charles Craver, who specializes in labor arbitration and collective bargaining at George Washington University, called the situation “dire.”

“If unions are unable to do anything more in the private sector, they will become almost irrelevant,” he said.

As union membership has declined, unions have also been lagging in securing wage increases for the workers they represent.

“The decline of union strength in the U.S. corresponds to a decline in the ability of workers to reap higher wages as a result of higher productivity,” said Stanford alum and University of Utah Economics Prof. Peter Philips. “Productivity has been growing steadily, but real wage rates have largely stagnated with very little real inflation adjusted growth in wages.

“Real wages are not rising because workers do not have the bargaining power that they once did,” concluded Philips, who specializes in labor market analysis.

The Cause

Several diverse factors are at work.

“Decades of really significant changes in the economy and some pretty strong political frontal assaults have taken their toll,” said University of Illinois Prof. Robert Bruno.

Globalization and an increase in imports have reduced the clout of unions and American workers by increasing competition and giving employers more leverage than ever.

“The opening of Eastern Europe and other parts of the world has allowed labor to shift to places where it is frighteningly cheap, and there are not safeguards that we have grown accustomed to in the United States,” explained Bruno, who is also a coordinator of the Illinois-based Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations.

“Many employers are able and willing to pick up facilities and go elsewhere,” Gould said.

“Unions just cannot combat the tides of the global economy,” added Craver, who noted that even hospital work like reading X-rays can be sent overseas. “We are pulling up lower-class countries like India, Ireland and China. As a result, the real wages of workers in wealthy countries are going down.”

“You can’t pack up a university like Stanford and take it to China, but you can move some of the jobs to China,” added Bruno.

All employers, including Stanford, gain leverage because of globalization. There is increased pressure across the market to accept reduced benefits so employers can stay globally competitive.

Immigration has created a flood of workers into the United States who will work for low wages and who do not want to unionize for fear of deportation. This has only added to competitive pressure on unionized employees.

“Undocumented workers are difficult to organize,” said Gould, who pointed to disputes in Los Angeles and Houston as examples.

Many believe that this competition is the biggest factor undermining the power of unions.

“The fundamental reason [for the decline in union membership] is that it is difficult for unions to survive in the long-run in a competitive economy,” Pencavel said. “Unions raise costs by raising wages over what they would otherwise be. In a world where you are in competition with non-union firms, you will not grow as fast as your competitors.”

One exception is public employee unions. Public sector workers — those employed by the government — have been joining unions because many of the factors affecting most workers do not affect them, Craver said. Government jobs are not outsourced, there is little competition and the government does not feel quite the crunch to insist on benefit concessions.

“The fact that unionism has shrunk in the private sector but not in the public sector tells you that when a sector is shielded from competition, unions can slide,” Pencavel said.

Bruno explained that complacency among the leadership of labor unions was also important in the stagnation.

“A whole cohort of workers came into the marketplace without a consciousness to the need for unions,” he said. “Organized labor became rather complacent. The leadership lost contact and stopped trying to replenish membership.”

Ineffective strikes and a supply of replacement workers have also turned the tables on unions that were able to successfully use strikes or threats of strikes to gain leverage in the past. Increasingly, employers have been demanding concessions from workers. When some concessions are made, other employers in the industry become emboldened to ask for more concessions.

“We’re at a point where many employers think they can take on the unions and win,” said Craver, citing the Delphi auto parts company decisions to move jobs abroad, the IBM pension cuts and the failure of the Northwest Airlines mechanics to reach a deal.

Further inequality in the labor force has expanded as unions have weakened.

“Workers have not shared in the economic gains of recent years because they have no collective voice,” said Craver, who claimed that executives make 500 times more than the average worker.

Jared Bernstein, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute said the decline has impacted the well-being of employees in the workplace.

“It is no coincidence that over the period when unions have become such a diminished presence in our economy, we have so much more economic inequality,” he told government broadcasting service Voice of America in July.

Service Employees

The United States economy has shifted from being manufacturing-based to a service-sector economy. Traditional manufacturing jobs — requiring relatively little skill — have been shipped overseas to workers who will do the same jobs for far lower pay. As a result, higher-skilled jobs have become more prevalent stateside.

“Foreign competition has wiped out most manufacturing in the United States,” Gould said. “The nature of the employment relationship has changed.”

At Stanford, both the University and Hospital workers are represented by Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 715. Their status as service workers makes them particularly vulnerable in the changing labor market, observers say. They are better off than their manufacturing counterparts, though in the sense that it is difficult to outsource many of the union jobs at Stanford.

“Service employees have always been in a more difficult position,” Gould said. “You are dealing with work that is more labor intensive. Unlike manufacturing, it is more difficult for employees outside of manufacturing to absorb increased costs through labor saving devices.”

Car makers were able to make substantial gains by employing fewer people with technical innovation. Stanford does not have the same option.

“This poses a greater challenge for service workers at Stanford,” Gould said.

“The unions have not been very effective at organizing employees in the information economy,” he added. “They have been unable to compensate for losses from deregulation of the autos, rails and airlines.”

The Split

As a result of all the changes, the future of collective bargaining is unclear. After decades of somewhat hushed disagreement among union leaders, a contentious debate on the best strategy to reverse these membership losses boiled to the surface last summer. A massive schism developed when the SEIU, the Teamsters and other smaller unions joined in a coalition to split from the AFL-CIO, a federation of labor organizations. As a result of the rebellion, the union lost more than 30 percent of its 13 million workers.

Higher-paid professionals believed political mobilization held the key to increased influence. Lower-paid service workers — whose jobs are most replaceable or threatened by automation — felt that unions should focus their resources on increasing recruitment and adding new members to their ranks.

Dan Cornfield, a labor expert and professor of sociology at Vanderbilt University, argued that the rift within the AFL-CIO was more about class than power.

The split was “a response to the AFL-CIO’s not giving priority to recruiting low-wage workers, who are also disproportionately women, ethnic-racial minorities and immigrants, while the unions who continue to identify with the AFL-CIO tend to represent better-paid workers in the unionized large corporations in heavy industry, communications, transportation, the public sector and the skilled building trades,” he wrote on the Vanderbilt Web site.

Cornfield said a full split among the unions could endanger the labor movement, but predicted that will be short-term membership gains and a likely improvement in the well-being of the lowest-paid, least skilled workers.

“The SEIU has been quite active and innovative under Andrew Stern’s leadership,” said Craver, who anticipates the unions will be strengthened by the split.

“The SEIU is more concerned with organizing the unorganized,” Gould said. “These more aggressive recruitment efforts may result in more new members. The labor movement can only thrive and help employees if it is active and expanding.”

Others say the split also served as a wake up call to the old-school union leadership.

“The split that occurred caused the AFL, in its present form, to take more seriously the amount of resources it puts into organizing,” Bruno said. “The split has had a positive effect at getting people to rethink how best to effectively organize workers. These issues are finally being thought about and studied.”

Some experts think the split has quelled some of the bitterness.

“I think the worst is over in that the two sides have overcome some of their initial bitterness or bad feelings,” said Ruth Milkman, director of the Institute of Industrial Relations at the UCLA in the Christian Science Monitor last month. “Both sides are trying harder to prove that they were right in the debate that occurred in the last year and a half. That can only benefit the labor movement as a whole.”

For Gould, the prospects for the future of labor in America “are not good.” He said that he is not particularly upbeat about where the parties are going in the future. Gould added that it is too soon to say what impact the breakup of the AFL-CIO will have on organized labor. He thinks that, on balance, the development may help labor more than it hurts.

Bruno said that there are 40 million service employees who are not unionized and that polling numbers show at least half would be willing to organize.

“The split allows the new SEIU to focus on the massive number of un-unionized service workers,” he said.