“Union boss” is a common epithet used by people who despise unions, seek to weaken unions, or are involved in a particular anti-union campaign. Despite my having observed many campaigns against the leadership of a particular union, and once having participated in such a campaign, I have not heard the term “union boss” used by union members who acknowledge the value of unions, no matter how bitterly antagonistic their relationship with the union leadership.

This suggests that “union boss” is a term of abuse and/or propaganda, not of analysis. My question here: are there circumstances in which the term is legitimately used?

A boss is someone who can fire or demote you, subject of course to legal and practical constraints. Bosses tell you what to do – if you don’t listen, you get fired. They hold power over you. You don’t elect them, though you may have the ability to walk away from them if the abuse gets to be too much, possibly at a substantial cost.

Union leaders are in most cases elected. If a union is functioning properly, the leaders don’t tell members what to do – members tell them what to do. They can’t get rid of you, but you can get rid of them. In short, they are elected officials, and therefore the servants of members, not their bosses. They are no more the bosses of unions than the President of the United States is the boss of the country.

Now, all of this is how it is supposed to work in the abstract. In reality, there are all kinds of constraints on bosses that may prevent them from firing you. For instance, you may belong to a union that has a just cause contract with the employer, requiring your boss to have a legitimate reason for firing you. Or you may be in a non-union workplace, but you’re such a productive and useful employee that while your boss can fire you in principle, she is constrained by the fact that she would lose money by doing so.

The reality is also that unions are not perfect democracies, just like our political system is not perfectly democratic. There are plenty of union leaders who are incompetent and corrupt, just like there are politicians who are incompetent and corrupt. Union leaders can subvert democratic processes, just like politicians can. Union leaders can try to act as though they are the bosses of the union, just like President Bush acts like he’s the boss of the country. But a key difference between a union leader and the President is that there are many more mechanisms of accountability in place to keep union leaders honest than there are to keep the President honest.

One is that people are free to opt out of their union, while one may not opt out of the legal regime of the country. In many states, individual workers cannot opt out of paying for the benefits that they receive from the union, in terms of better wages and working conditions. This is for the same reason that you can’t opt out of paying taxes, namely, that you’re “free riding” by taking the benefits of collective action without contributing to the costs. Workers who are *really* bothered by the union’s leaders can quit their job, just like if you *really* don’t like the president, you are free to leave the country.

If a majority of workers decide they don’t like the union’s leadership, they can petition to decertify the union. There is no analogous decertification process for Presidents, although there are automatic elections every four years.

Unions are typically guided by elected executive or steering committees, who are above the union president in the decision-making hierarchy. Typically, the highest decision-making body is the membership, which is asked to decide important questions, with the executive in charge of implementing the decision. The U.S. President, on the other hand, is the supreme executive authority. In theory, the Congress sets the agenda and the President implements it; in reality, the President wields a tremendous amount of independent power.

Perhaps most importantly, unions are subject to overall democratic and judicial oversight and regulation. In the U.S., unlike in most of the world, the fundamental rights of workers to unionize and bargain collectively are not recognized. Instead, they are subject to legislation. This provides another mechanism of accountability that is lacking in an institution like the Presidency. If unions become too corrupt, the public can step in and impose anti-corruption measures, as it did in the Landrum-Griffin Act.

So overall, characterizing union leaders as “bosses” is grossly inaccurate. There are, however, one circumstances in which it fits, and one in which it maybe, kinda, sorta fits.

With respect to the union’s staff under the direct control of the leadership, they are in a boss-worker relationship with the leaders. They can be fired or demoted by the leadership. This does not make the union leaders the bosses of the union, however, any more than the President is the boss of the nation because he can hire and fire White House staff.

The other situation, the one which kinda, sorta fits, is when a national union imposes a trustee on a local union. Trusteeships are permitted by the Landrum-Griffin Act in order to remedy corruption, mismanagement, or failure on the part of local leadership to run the union democratically. Trustees are imposed by the elected national leadership, not elected by the local, and they can themselves be highly undemocratic. When I was a union steward in UAW Local 2322, I participated in an effort to oppose imposition of a trusteeship on the local by the international. These days, they are highly controversial within the SEIU, with locals of the United Healthcare Workers West accusing the national SEIU of imposing trusteeships against the will of the members in order to control the locals.

That’s why when I hear someone say “union bosses,” I first check to see whether they’re talking about the relationship between union staff and the elected leadership, or about an imposed trusteeship. If they are not (and inevitably, they are not), I pretty much tune them out.

Postscript

I had been relatively disengaged from this blog for the last few weeks. This is not due to post-election having-nothing-to-talk-about, but rather due to me having to write several exams and one major paper. The paper is a linguistic analysis of a dispute between Justice Stevens and Justice Scalia in the District of Columbia v. Heller gun control case about the significance of the word “to”. I will post a link to it once I refine it a little bit and put it on the web, just in case someone is interested in seeing what such an analysis might look like.

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