Unions have been in decline for decades. After developing throughout the 20th century as effective mechanisms to pressure corporate managers to improve working conditions, reduce hours, and increase pay, a series of world events, campaigns, and people worked together and succeeded in defanging and suffocating the union movement. I’m not going to spend any time on how this happened, if unions are or were good, or what the state of unions are today in this piece of writing (lots of authors have done all these things). I’m interested in a new concept for unions. A concept that doesn’t require workers to be a part of it in any given organization, doesn’t share the identity of members with anyone, and transcends both company and geographic boundaries. An alliance of people who are interested in having more leverage over the companies that are now considered people legally which might arguable have more wieldable power than most, if not all, governments.
The Leverage Alliance (TLA) acknowledges two fundamental points in negotiation theory: it’s easier to get the other side to listen and respond when you have control over something they care about (leverage) and it’s easier to get what you want when the other side doesn’t understand who or what you are. The first point is pretty widely accepted (and written about), so I won’t spend much time on that, besides to make the point that loyalty is dead in both directions in the employee/contractor – company relationship, and therefore intracompany loyalty is meaningless (and intracompany bargaining is almost impossible in a world where every job description matches with thousands of LinkedIn search results).
The second point is bound to be a bit more controversial, but it’s critical. Litigation, intimidation, and agreements between employers to exclude certain key employees from moving between them are tools that are common to most companies in their human resources strategies. The purpose of these HR strategies is to keep costs down and consistency up: retain the people the companies want to retain, remove the people they want to remove, and pay everyone as little as possible to get the retention and productivity outcomes required. Protections for people from government agencies and statutes are relevant as far as communications and methods are transparent. But the strategies HR departments and legal teams use are often tactically contracted out (and these people are very good at avoiding creating the wrong kind of paper trails that might show up in discovery). Not to mention issues of deep pockets – there will always be economies of legal scale for companies that will not exist for individuals who do not retain a blue chip law firm or call in the specialists whenever things get hairy and specific.
All this to say that it might not be a good idea to be “organized labor” and out in public, unless you work for one of the few organizations that still have union representation. So the TLA is a secret society of workers, citizens, and politicians who work together to create balance between companies and everyone else. And that’s all you need to know until you’re part of the TLA.
Roman Ryan 