Why the Union Can't Win

It's time for labor leaders to start thinking like business leaders.

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I've been thinking a lot about rank-and-file union members lately, and I have to say it's a shame how the guys at the top have let them down. Union leaders must be the only people on the planet who haven't figured out that if you want to get anywhere today, you have to think and act like a businessperson. You have to market yourself. You have to make the case why someone should purchase your services. If what you want are jobs for union members, you need to treat employers like potential customers, not like adversaries you're going to force into submission. In a competitive economy, nobody buys because they're forced to. They buy because they want to. The notion of threatening a customer shouldn't even enter your mind.

These thoughts are prompted, of course, by my recent run-in with Ironworkers Local 361. As I mentioned last month, the problems began last July while I was on vacation. Our subcontractors had been working on the warehouse we were building down the block from my office in Brooklyn. On the Friday before I was due to come home, I got a call from Mike Coons, my construction foreman, who told me some union reps had come by, demanding to talk to someone in charge. They said they would start picketing the next day unless I contacted them that afternoon. I'm always willing to talk, so I dialed the number they'd left. I got a recording: "You have reached Local 361. No one is here to answer your call. Our summer hours are Monday through Thursday, 10 to 4."

Sure enough, the picket line went up the next morning, along with the giant inflatable rat that the union hauls around from site to site. "You're picketing without even talking to the guy?" Mike asked the leader of the group. "That's not fair."

"We couldn't find anyone to talk to," he said.

When Mike called me, I told him to inform the union people that I'd be happy to meet with them on Monday as long as they didn't do anything foolish beforehand. On Monday they put up the picket line again. I told Mike, "I'm not meeting with them. They're picketing unfairly. We can meet when they stop picketing for three days." On Wednesday, they pulled the pickets. We set up a meeting for the following Monday.

As loyal as I was to Walt -- the nonunion subcontractor I wrote about last month -- I went into the meeting with an open mind. I am not antiunion. Several of the other subcontractors I use are unionized. I pay more for their services than I would pay a nonunion subcontractor, but they cost me less in the long run because they show me better ways to do things. Macro Enterprises Ltd., for instance, does the piles for our buildings. Jeff Goodliffe, one of the owners, looked at our plans for the new warehouse and said, "This design is wrong. Let me talk to your engineer." He wound up saving me well into six figures. So what if he charged me 10% more than a nonunion subcontractor would have? He was worth every penny.

Unfortunately, not all union subcontractors measure up. I'd hired one to put up the steel framework of the first warehouse I built, and his poor performance had cost me more than $1.2 million. But eight years had passed since then, and I realized that things might have changed, and that I might want to consider hiring a union subcontractor to do the steel work on future warehouses. I was even willing to hire a couple of union guys to help out on the one I was building -- as a gesture of goodwill. It turned out, however, that goodwill was not the order of the day.

The head of the local and the business manager showed up at the appointed hour. We met in my office, joined by Mike and my nephew Andrew, whom I introduced as the next generation of Brodsky builders. I got straight to the point. I knew that the union guys had called my union subcontractors. "So you realize I'm not against unions," I said, "but I had a problem with the union sub I hired to do this work before." I told them the story.

The Local 361 business manager, Richard O'Kane, said, "We have a list of other guys we can suggest."

"Okay," I said. "I'll give them a fair shot. I'll sit down with them and talk about the next building. I do one every 18 months."

"That isn't good enough," O'Kane said. "We want to finish the building you're doing now."

"It's 75% finished," I said. "Besides, I have a contract with a guy already. I shook his hand and told him he had the job. You want me to tell him that my word is no good?"

"You do what you got to do," he said. "We have to get the rest of this job."

"If you threaten me, I promise you that no member of your local will work here for the next 60 years."

"Are you trying to threaten me?" I asked. "Let me tell you what a threat is. I have 10 more years of building left, and Andrew here has 50 after that. If you want to threaten me, I promise you that no member of your local will work here for the next 60 years. You don't want to push me to that."

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