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Updated: October 4, 2022 @ 7:19 am
TOP: In this September 2020 photo, union employees strike outside of Silgan Containers. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said union membership is higher in public sector jobs like teaching, rather than in the private industry.
TOP: In this September 2020 photo, union employees strike outside of Silgan Containers. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said union membership is higher in public sector jobs like teaching, rather than in the private industry.
A St. Joseph resident would have no trouble driving through the city’s empty streets this Monday.
Mike Veale remembers it wasn’t always that way on Labor Day. Some streets used to be clogged for a parade that provided a salute to labor in a city that once called itself a union town.
“So this has been on my mind for quite a few years,” said Veale, the president of the Northwest Missouri Central Labor Council. “I always felt like our members use that time to go to the lake or go spend some time with their family or stuff like that.”
Veale said a Labor Day parade became a thing of the past in the early 1980s. It was a subtle change — no one really complained about getting one last chance to go to the lake or fire up the grill — but it saddens this long-time union leader to see how the parade’s demise possibly served to foreshadow big changes for the labor movement.
“This Labor Day, it just magnifies my passion for the labor movement and for the American worker out there and how we’ve been manipulated,” he said. “How the American worker is behind the eight ball every time. I mean, I hear stories every day of people that go and work their tails off and every time they go home, they’re farther behind.”
Declining membership
Union membership has fallen steadily as a percentage of the nation’s workforce. In 2021, 14 million American workers belonged to a labor union, a year-over-year decline of 241,000. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said 10.3% of wage and salary workers belonged to a labor union last year, down from 20.1% in 1983 when there were 17.7 million union members.
Comparable numbers are difficult to find in St. Joseph, where factory downsizing and closures in the 1990s and 2000s hit large unionized factories like Quaker Oats, Wire Rope Corporation of America and MeadWestvaco. Veale said the Northwest Missouri Central Labor Council, which includes unions for skilled trades and industrial workers, has remained steady with a membership of about 4,000.
Of the city’s 10 largest employers, five have some type of organized labor group, although some, like the Fraternal Order of Police and teachers unions, are not part of the Central Labor Council. Veale said one of the largest unions in town is the United Food and Commercial Workers, which represents bargaining units at Triumph Foods, Tyson Foods and Boehringer Ingelheim.
Brad Lau, the vice president of economic development for the St. Joseph Chamber of Commerce, said unionization does factor into the decisions that some companies make on where to locate or expand. He said a company that wants to avoid organized labor probably would bypass Missouri because it’s not a right-to-work state that bans compulsory union fees.
“If a company is dead set against a union, they probably wouldn’t look at Missouri,” he said.
He said other companies, when looking at St. Joseph, will ask about unions and hear that management enjoys a good relationship with organized labor at several companies. One example, he said, is a company called Cereal Ingredients, which is opening a $24 million facility in St. Joseph. It is not unionized.
“They asked the question,” he said. “Obviously it wasn’t a factor because they chose St. Joseph.”
Headwinds
and tailwinds
Despite a reduced national profile, unions head into Labor Day with some momentum. Missourians voted down right to work in the 2018 election, the FOP pressured the city into contract changes and a Gallup poll this month gave unions a 71% approval rating nationwide. That’s the highest level of public support in that poll since 1965.
But there are headwinds. Manufacturing companies are smaller and more technology-driven than the large factories that operated with low-skill labor decades ago. Change will continue. In one analysis, Morgan Stanley estimates that the conversion to electric vehicles will result in the elimination of 3,000 automotive manufacturing jobs, many of which are unionized positions. Because electric vehicles have fewer moving parts, they require fewer workers for assembly.
Lau said skills and training are becoming the key to good pay, benefits and job security — regardless of whether or not a company is unionized. Companies will pay to attract and keep those skilled workers.
“Companies recognize that they have to take care of employees,” he said, “especially with the labor shortages we have today.”
A union town?
Is St. Joseph still a union town? Kami Jones is a former union secretary who was on the front lines of a bitter strike at Silgan Containers in 2020. She believes organized labor does a lot of good in St. Joseph, even if the outcome of the strike at Silgan left a bad taste in her mouth.
“There are still strong unions in St. Joe,” said Jones, who no longer works at Silgan. “I think strong unions help the employees at other plants. There are some that treat their employees better because they don’t want to become unionized.”
Veale, who is now retired, has to think for a moment when asked about St. Joseph being a union town.
“I was really proud of that, you know, proud of being a blue-collar worker,” he said, “somebody that would go out there and strap their boots on every day and earn an honest living, and we’re not that anymore. We don’t want blue-collar jobs. We want white-collar jobs. We send our kids to college. And then we make college unaffordable.”
He said he gets calls regularly from people who say they would join a union if they could.
“Without those companies there we don’t have jobs,” he said. “We just want them to be good jobs.”
Greg Kozol can be reached at greg.kozol@newspressnow.com. Follow him on Twitter: @NPNowKozol.
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