The time has come once again* for me to muse on work while I sit in my home office, in the air conditioning, doing little heavy lifting. How much work that can be, my typing things up and reviewing emails and treating bank feed data coming in (because all that does need done despite the holiday), is an open question, and I am well aware that there are good-faith arguments to be had about what work is. (I’m also aware, thanks to an undergraduate education many might well argue makes me useless for actual work, that there’s a collection of poetry titled What Work Is. It’s been since undergrad that I read it, however; I don’t remember how well it addresses its titular topic. Perhaps another rereading is in order.) There are also a lot of bad-faith arguments had about it, dividing workers in fields from each other and inhibiting their abilities to organize to effect.

Although it is the case that I am currently management (technically; I don’t have a staff, working a largely seasonal business as I do for my day-job), I remain sympathetic to labor unions, having benefited from being in one (UAW Local 2110) and from growing up in then-current and formerly union households. I know well what a union contract can mean for a working person and for the family of the working person, and while I can readily acknowledge there are problems in unions as there are in any human organizations, I have also spent a long time working in at-will states without contractual protections, and I’d happily take the union problems over the other set.

(For reference, my day-job is a family business, and my parents are the owners. While it’s technically at-will employment, it would take a lot for me to walk away from my folks on this. The dynamics are different, and I acknowledge that my current situation is atypical; I do not expect to stand as a standard for anyone else’s experience. Just so it’s said.)

Given my union experience, I tend towards a broader view of labor, if only because it does allow more effective unionization. As noted above, I was a member of UAW Local 2110; I was not and never have been an automotive worker. Through some historical quirks, the entire working staff of a school at which I taught in New York City was represented by that union; everyone from the janitors and kitchen workers through administrative assistants and faculty up to the teaching heads of departments was part of a single collective bargaining unit. Only upper administration–deans, the provost, the president, and the like–stood outside of it. Accordingly, when it did happen that the contract needed renegotiating, it was a supremely unified effort at the school, and we did end up getting pretty decent deals for ourselves while I was on the payroll. Again, for me, it worked well; looking back, I could have and should have done more than I did with what I had at the time, but so much is true for a great many things in my life.

Yes, again, there are problems with the ways many unions are set up and operate. I’m not blind to them; I was on the receiving end of them, and more than once. (Seniority matters, time on task matters, but they are not the only things that do, especially in fields that do, in fact, evolve over time.) But there are, again, problems in any human systems. Self-interest and self-aggrandizement stain human experience, and peccadilloes and perfidies pervade it. I need not rattle off a litany of even this long weekend’s events to show so much. I’ll note, though, that the sometimes severe problems present in a great many systems do not dissuade a great many people from taking part in them; for many, the price of indulging such flaws is worth paying for what is received thereby. How broadly such a lesson might be applied…I suppose it is, for now, for others to say.

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* Oh, yes, it’s again. I mention the observance here, and I ruminate upon it here, here, here, here, here, and here. That the observance always falls on a Monday and I try to post each Monday makes it easy to mark the event.