Posted on: Monday, September 2, 2002
Maturity, wisdom key in labor negotiations
As Hawai'i and the nation celebrate a well-deserved Labor Day weekend, it's a good time for all of us to reflect on the unsettled state of labor-management relations in many of our key industries.
Just a glance through last week's newspapers shows examples that will affect all of us in many obvious and not-so-obvious ways:
• An 11th-hour breakthrough averts a highly unpopular Major League Baseball strike 3 1/2 hours before it would have halted Friday's Cubs-Cardinals game and who knows how many more.#149; Hawai'i's largest construction union, the Carpenters, wins a new contract calling for a $5.75-an-hour increase over five years, plus new medical and retirement features.
• Young Laundry and Dry Cleaning and the Hawai'i Teamsters union are still in court over fallout from an unsettled 1998 strike in which 130 striking employees lost their jobs to replacement workers.
• Boeing Co.'s largest union tells its members to keep working even though their contract was just expired, averting a walkout despite Boeing's refusal to reopen negotiations.
• United Airlines, the nation's and Hawai'i's largest carrier, wants its unions to cut labor costs by $1.5 billion annually over the next six years. It says it needs wage and benefit rollbacks from all of its unions in order to qualify for a federal loan and to avoid the need to file for bankruptcy.
• Local 5 hotel workers authorize a strike, in the event that negotiations break down, against the Hilton Hawaiian Village and the four Sheraton Waikiki hotels.
It's important for all of us to be aware of the effect on the nation's and the state's economies of many of these developments. Certainly anything that substantially cuts the number of airline seats coming this way or closes hotels here will affect us all very quickly. Any union that's out on strike means just that many families that must drastically cut their local spending, from movies and Big Macs to possibly missed rent and mortgage payments.
These are examples of why strikes affect all of us, not just the affected workers and companies. Even in the case of Major League Baseball, many of us don't care whether millionaire athletes get a raise or not, but the economic ripple effect on people who make their living selling hot dogs and Louisville Slugger bats would have been substantial.
This means that workers and companies in negotiations must look beyond the narrow scope of their wages, benefits and profits and wisely consider the effects of work stoppages on their community, state and nation. And with that, we wish everyone a pleasant — and reflective — holiday.
