Good luck to labor

President Joe Biden likes to promote “union jobs” whenever he can, recognizing the tremendous contribution the union movement made in American history in the last century.

This century, it’s less clear cut, as union numbers were decimated in most industries over recent decades, but it’s still worth recognizing and pondering.

Today, some argue that with the emergence of artificial intelligence and robotics coming on, the role of human workers is actually somewhat questionable. Note that China is planning a large new hydroelectric dam — to be built using AI and 3D printing technology. Instead of printers applying a flimsy medium to a desktop surface, robotic machines will be laying concrete, supposedly. What could go wrong?

More likely than machines rendering us irrelevant, humans won’t be pushed out of work; we’ll just find other purposes for flesh hands and minds. But that doesn’t mean their efforts won’t be subject to attempted exploitation.

I was in a union once and even had to go on strike for a few days. The experience let me see both sides of the conflict that has in the past been inherent between big industry and its workers.

My experience was ugly, but modern union approaches can be better if management is open to cooperation, and workers are too. That requires both sides to avoid the temptation to just score in an argument to gain political points in board rooms or union halls. Real listening is required.

That happened at Coulee Medical Center recently when CEO Ramona Hicks sat down with CMC nurses to see what their feelings and needs are. Nurses are in short supply anyway, and the pandemic-related great resignation has pulled the point of criticality from 10 years in the future to just a couple, Hicks said.

The nurses asked and received some important changes, Hicks reported to her hospital district commissioners Monday, including, for example, overtime for an entire second shift when pulling a double, not just the last eight hours as has been the case.

“We need to keep all of the good staff that we have here,” she said. The change will also apply to other staff, not just nurses.

When leaders listen like that, workers don’t generally feel they need to pay union dues to guard against exploitation.

But not all the world is like that, fair and reasonable.

So, here’s to the labor movement, which is responsible for the eight-hour day and the 40-hour week that we now take for granted. It wasn’t always so.

Happy Labor Day.

Scott Hunter

editor and publisher