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Professor "Dead Wrong" in Prediction About Labor Unions' FutureBy Msgr. George G. HigginsThe YardstickFebruary 14, 2000Leo Troy of Rutgers University, for as long as I can recall, has been saying that the American labor movement's future is behind it. Why? Because, in his view, we are living in an era of individualistic values when people prefer to and are expected to shift for themselves.I wrote in December on Troy's views, and a few weeks after that column was published he elaborated on this argument in a book titled "Beyond Unions and Collective Bargaining" (Mesharpe). Troy says he does not envision the disappearance of the organized labor system of collective bargaining but does foresee a future he calls the "twilight zone." By that he means that the dominance of individual bargaining over collective bargaining is "irreversible." Troy's book hardly was off the press when the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor released a detailed report indicating that union membership nationwide rose faster last year than any time in the past two decades. Troy, interviewed by the New York Times, reacted cautiously but with good grace to the BLS report: "My first reaction is it's definitely a surprise and a positive step for organized labor. Whether it represents a real turnaround we have to wait and see. What's the biggest surprise is it's the first increase in a long time in private-sector union membership." As I said in my earlier column, Troy is at heart an ideologue who strongly believes that workers are better off without union representation. I assume that if push came to shove, he would deny this is his position. He says in his new book that his viewpoint is not antagonistic to the organized system of collective bargaining, but I find that statement unconvincing. In several places his book says it is primarily the market that "protects" the individual worker in the nonunion sector and "negotiates" for him or her. Troy has great confidence in the beneficent workings of free competition as advocated by Adam Smith in "The Wealth of Nations." Under the individualistic model of labor-management relations that he strongly favors -- as opposed to collective bargaining -- the market "distributes income between employers and employees." The individualistic model, he adds, "swims with the currents of market forces." Starting with Pope Leo XIII's pioneering 1891 encyclical "On the Condition of Labor," Catholic social teaching has rejected the notion that wage justice can be left purely to the workings of the free market. In Pope Leo's words, "Let workers and employer ... make any bargain they like, and in particular agree freely about wages; nevertheless there underlies a requirement of natural justice higher and older than any bargain voluntarily struck." Every social encyclical since Pope Leo's pioneer document reaffirms his teaching on this point. Troy, as indicated above, puts great stock in statistics. "It's the
numbers, stupid," he says, paraphrasing a well-known political slogan of
recent years. But, strangely, he completely ignores available statistics
on how the free market has impacted low-wage workers in the service sector,
for example, and specifically, in some sectors of the health care industry.
Papal Social Encyclicals Other Catholic Social Teachings General Articles of Interest Catholic Worker Connection Msgr. George Higgins Home Page E-Mail: Fr. Sinclair Oubre
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