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Thinking about Labor Unions

This is my first post-Labor Day post, so we'll write about the subject that comes to mind. Desi Arnaz.



It is a fact, to be condemned or welcomed at your leisure, that labor unions represent a shrinking portion of the labor market pie. Despite (or because of?) the protection of union activity in the private sector, the role of unions there has been in decline for decades. In the 1950s one in every three private sector employees was a member of a union. By 2011, only 6.9%, roughly one out of every 14 were union members.

Here's a link for that 6.9% figure, in case fact checkers are reading. I think reporter Greenhouse rather buried his lede, though: that critical figure doesn't appear until the fifth paragraph.

Anyway: some conservatives talk about this decline almost as if it is karma. Unions are, in their view, inherently suspect operations, and they are shrinking because of their own cosmic badness.

I disagree. Further, I'd like to tell a story I have told before about the origin of the television show I Love Lucy. When a certain consultant working for CBS saw the pilot, his first reaction was: "Keep the redhead, ditch the Cuban."

When told they were a married couple and CBS had to take or leave them as a package, he said that they should stick with the in-home comedy, but cut way back on the nightclub scenes where Desi sang. Which was done. The contract was re-written to require that Desi would sing only when essential to the plot.

The married couple itself, in that story, functioned as a labor union, offering its services collectively, as a take-it-or-leave-it package. It was successful, not just in getting Desi Arnaz a job, but in producing a wildly successful product. CBS was hardly the loser in this negotiation, after all. It was win-win: CBS did rather well off the show, even though they had to keep that Cuban.

And, for the record, I think Desi did a fine job as Ricky. It is hard to imagine anyone else having pulled it off as well. And after the show became a huge hit, he figured out that he could sing whenever he damn well pleased!

Maybe the CBS consultant was worried about the public acceptance of some televised "miscegenation," as they called such things back then. But the execs were running a brand new industry, sending entertainment into people's living rooms not just through sounds but through pictures as well, and the industry had peculiarities they would have to figure out as they went along.

As I wrote in my recent book, Gambling with Borrowed Chips, after I told that story: "The people who were actually producing content for the new glowing box understood, as a rule, exactly what they were doing. Labor was way ahead of capital in this matter, and the best decision that management could possibly make in case after case was simply that of letting  the laborers do what they wanted, and putting it all on the air!"

That's an appropriate holiday note.

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