Whose life is it anyway?

By William Scheuerman
AFT Vice President

I sometimes ponder the unpleasant idea of what a 21st-century American workplace would look like if unions didn’t exist. I have to tell you, it’s a pretty dismal picture. I say this because I know that unions, whatever their limitations, do good things for members. Serving and promoting the interests of its members is what a union is all about. But after watching a segment called “Whose Life Is It Anyway?” on TV’s “60 Minutes,” I’ve come to understand that the scenario for life in an increasingly nonunion world is even more dismal than most of us could imagine.

The “60 Minutes” segment focused on how the private habits of employees off the job are coming under the scrutiny of employers. Specifically, the boss of a nonunion insurance company in Michigan gave his workers 15 months to give up smoking. We’re not talking about smoking on the job, but smoking in general. Smokers, he reasoned, were health risks who drove up the cost of insurance. To keep costs down, the company administered random drug tests designed to identify and fire smokers. Several long-term workers were fired because they couldn’t kick the nicotine habit despite taking advantage of all the “quit smoking” programs their employer offered.

This infringement on our personal lives sounds terrible, doesn’t it? Some of us probably think it’s illegal. But guess what? In most states it’s perfectly legal for a private employer to fire people for actions unrelated to work. Sure, state and federal laws prohibit discriminatory treatment of people in protected classes. But smokers are not a protected class. Neither are those who enjoy junk food or dangerous hobbies such as skydiving and skiing. The list is almost endless. Companies have fired individuals for asking embarrassing questions of a political candidate, even though the candidate’s forum was not connected to the job. One person was even fired for drinking the wrong brand of beer in a local nightspot hours after he finished work.

Now, what’s my point?

The first point is simple. Corporate employers are intruding into our private lives. That’s why we need unions. In union shops, none of these abuses would have happened. First of all, they had nothing to do with the job, so management couldn’t act. More, what happens on the job is protected activity. Unions provide workers with job security in the form of due process. Once a worker’s probationary period ends, that union worker cannot be fired at the whim of the boss. Union workers are entitled to due process.

Unfortunately, union shops are becoming few and far between. Today, only about 8 percent of the private sector labor force is organized, making these abuses the rule rather than the exception. In fact, the decline of organized labor is bad for everyone. It makes the contractual and political gains achieved by labor look like privileges rather than rights. Because the “60 Minutes” segment was about healthcare, let’s take a closer look at healthcare issues.

Years ago, when organized labor was growing and negotiating for good health insurance, most Americans expected some form of coverage. As the labor movement and healthcare expanded, health insurance came to be viewed as a right. Now, as labor shrinks and healthcare coverage disappears with it, those unionists who still have good health plans are often viewed as a privileged elite who ought to be treated like everyone else. In short, they shouldn’t have costly healthcare coverage when most others don’t.

Sadly, we’re moving into an Orwellian era when corporate Big Brother dictates what we do in our private lives while undercutting what we used to view as fundamental rights. Big Brother has a corporate as well as a governmental face, and if we don’t rebuild the labor movement, Big Brother will get bigger and our private lives will disappear along with the many benefits negotiated by unions.