On the High Road

We are building long-term solutions

Many of us are pleased that the Occupy movement resonates with so many. While not everyone is prepared to join one of the hundreds of encampments that have grown around the country over the past two months, it is not uncommon for mainstream media to recognize that they are articulating widespread public discontent. From MSNBC to the New York Times to many local and online  outlets, the media recognize that dominant themes of Occupy—income inequality and the need for good jobs— have become very popular themes. 

Just read Paul Krugman in the New York Times every few days, and he lays it out: almost all the wealth created in the United States over the past 30 years has gone to the top 10 percent, with even more going to the top 1 percent, and yet more going to the top one-tenth of one percent. What was once dismissed as the rhetoric of “class warfare” by the mainstream is, today, impossible to avoid.

I recently reread a report that I gave to the Delegate Assembly of the union of which I served as president from 1988 to 1994. The report was given in 1993, and the theme was income inequality, a theme that still explains in graphic and direct ways the impact of bad public policy and corporate leadership.

The Occupy movement and many other individuals and organizations are demanding change, and demanding new leadership to make that change. Much of the focus is on getting Congress to act, which makes sense. It is also true that trying to change the attitudes in Congress will take time, and that solutions coming from Washington may or may not solve inequity quickly or locally. Political change must come, and soon, with deep reforms that result in tens of millions of good jobs and the rebuilding of our economy based on those good jobs.

As this needed political change occurs, the government, business, unions and other major stakeholders will need models to point to success. It is clear that such transformation will occur in a globalized world full of competition. Rebuilding today’s economy will be a different experience from the last time the nation came out of a deep economic crisis in the 1930s.

New thinking

Public demand is rising for corporations to show responsibility to the communities that created them. As my good friend Tom Kochan, professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, has said, “power within corporations shifted from executives responsible for production, human resources and labor relations to finance executives, who serve as agents of increasingly demanding financial markets”.

U.S. corporations over the past 40 years have restructured themselves for short-term profit. Professor Kochan notes there is significant research to suggest that there is another way. It can be called a “high-road” strategy for business. This strategy values the workforce, trusts the employees’ knowledge to solve problems, compensates based on shared interests and works in partnerships.

Professor Kochan says “these companies are developing a social contract in which workers’ incomes, employment conditions and living standards advance in tandem with productivity they help to generate.” This is the kind of social contract that government policy is failing to support. I believe it is time for businesses and unions to create model social contracts that pave the way for new public policy. That policy can drive the nation back to the social contract which is its promise.

Groundbreaking accomplishments

When, as union members and leaders, we sometimes question the value of our partnership, we should remind ourselves that we have achieved and can continue to achieve outcomes that far outpace the conditions that most Americans have endured. While for most families wages have been stagnant, health insurance less affordable, and defined benefit pensions all but gone, we have seen a real wage gains and preserved of our benefits during 13 years of partnership.  We have taken a “high-road” approach based on the full engagement and development of our workforce.

Think about what that could mean in communities across the country: business and community leaders, along with unions, can develop such practices everywhere.

We can wait for someone else to fix the ills of the nation, or we can accelerate and deepen our high road partnership and export it to others.

Unions were responsible for creating  an earlier social contract in our nation 70 years ago. It was a very different time, and the struggle was mighty and long. Today, our world is very different. Unions can play a leading role in rebuilding the social contract by relying on their great traditions of social mission. We must organize the unorganized and fight for the basic rights for workers to be in unions. As we do that, our social mission should include showing the way to the high road.