GM workers’ significant concessions (given in the hopes of keeping GM afloat) may go down as a key turning point in the history of the North American capitalist economy and society. Although tension remains, the changing tone of union-management discussion has been noticeable as both finally recognize the challenges their industry faces – and that their long-standing ideological battles are not helpful.
Having employees and employers at odds with each other in any organization is counterproductive – literally, it’s a productivity sink. Every few years or months, the threat of a strike creates new friction and tension in many organizations. Suspicion grows. Supervisors don’t trust managers who don’t trust key workers – hardly an environment in which collaboration, creativity, and innovation can flourish.
It is groundbreaking that the North American auto workers unions have had to face the fact that they are in the same boat as auto company management, executive, and shareholders. They will either sink together, or collectively create the life raft that will save all of them.
In other workplaces today, corporate hierarchies have lessened and many workers are also shareholders. Companies that thrive on creative activities have often worked hard to eliminate the tension between owners, managers, and workers, empowering many people as professionals to make major decisions. The demographically generated talent shortage has also helped many company owners to value employees’ contributions more strongly.
But, as much as many companies based on the brainpower of creative, talented people have tried to offer an alternative view, there has remained an underlying current in society that managers and owners are inherently exploiting workers (an idea that goes back to the 1850s and Marx, Engels, etc.). The media will treat isolated incidents of poor management as if it were more widespread. Strikes still happen in the public sector (very large in Canada), and the grievances become the lead story.
This severe economic downturn is exposing myriad problems within corporations and our broader economic system. The anachronistic idea that employees are somehow separable from the broader success of any company is one of these inconsistencies.
For the world economy to recover and flourish, this belief many need to end. And these concessions may go down as the tipping point for this change.
(Please note that I am not saying that unions did not play a valuable role in human history; just that a consequence of that role was a philosophy of antagonism that no longer serves most employees or society well).
March 9th, 2009 at 10:59 am
Amen to that. The problem is not about pay and benefits (though the media can not seem to get beyond this), it’s about productivity and value creating partnerships with stakeholders. Though GM workers may be getting it now,(although it may be too late,) I’m still pessimistic about government unions.
March 10th, 2009 at 9:13 am
If you had to pinpoint the one key difference between GM and Toyota (company that is also challenged by the economy but in much better shape to come out of it), I think it would come down to the idea you identify that “employees are somehow separable from the broader success of any company is one of these inconsistencies.”
Most people understand that the rise of the knowledge economy has created a class of knowledge workers–the creative class. But it is much more than an elite group of high end workers.
Today, every business is a knowledge business. If GM and so many other traditional businesses are going to survive, they will need to see their employees as resources valued for their ideas, their knowledge and their creativity. Most don’t see it yet.
I see in my own work that many workers do not understand their own potential either. How to help both sides see that the future demands a new paradigm?
December 5th, 2011 at 3:20 pm
what’s happening, r egal blog on lardy loss. analogous helped. Z gwarancją często myślałeś nad tym czemu znawcy z rozdziału prawa spadkowego nie dają wiadomości dotykających takiej zagwostki w wirtualnym świecie. Od tej chwili nie musisz się nad tym męczyć. Możemy właśnie pokazać nowy serwis informacyjny, który robiony jest przez znawcę od prawa spadkowego. Poprzez czytanie zamieszczonych tu wiadomości oraz szybkie dywagacje ze specjalistą dowiesz się tu wiele pięknych rzeczy związanych z zachowkiem.