#closed shop

[ck-familydiner]

C00lkidd wishes you a very merry winter season with some baked goods!

[motherfuckingcat]

[astrofinnie]

Holy smokes guys i found my first liminal space at the mall!!!!! This is so fricken epic!!!! :0

[keiteay]

Nothing sacred

[racefortheironthrone]

I was rereading some of your old union questions and I was wondering if there was some reason why hiring halls wasn't more common.

So I discuss hiring halls a bit here, but just to explain to new readers, a hiring hall is a particular mode of labor relations whereby the union takes over the power to hire and fire workers from management while agreeing to provide workers to a given job site upon request from a business that has a contract with the union. One way to think of it is that the union has essentially put the HR department under worker control.

The union then undertakes to match requests for a certain number of workers to the same number of union members (in the case of a closed shop) or dues-paying workers (in the case of an agency shop) who have applied to the hiring hall for work. In order to prevent corruption and favoritism, the union assigns or refers workers on the basis of some non-discriminatory rule. To quote from IATSE (the theater worker's union) Local #18's rules for referrals:

"Referrals are to be based upon such recognized factors as ability to perform specific services requested by said Employer, availability for employment at the time of such request, and seniority as defined by the length of service in the industry or for a specific employer."

Finally, the hiring hall also undertakes a responsibility that the labor that it's providing to employers is of high quality. At a minimum, this involves keeping detailed records on union members' "good conduct" on the job site. Most hiring halls tend to require, in addition to union membership and/or dues, that a worker has completed an apprenticeship or other form of licensing or certification process in a trade, and has a minimum amount of experience as a trainee. Finally, some hiring halls even attempted to regulate personal behavior standards when it came to alcohol, on the grounds that workers who are habitual alcoholics are likely to drink on the job, which compromises the quality of their labor.

Hiring halls tend to be confined to a fairly narrow set of industries - you see them in construction, longshoring and warehousing, maritime, theater, agriculture. So why aren't they more common?

Well, one major factor is that employers tend to be highly resistant to allowing unions to take over something that they consider to be a core role of management - and thus it's kind of the last thing they'd agree to in a union contract. Thus, the relative balance of power between labor and capital becomes pivotal: where employers are strong and unions are weak, you don't see hiring halls; but where employers are weak and unions are strong, you're more likely to see hiring halls.

Another factor is labor law - the hiring hall tended to be associated with closed shops, and a lot of countries ban closed shops. (The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 banned the closed shop but left hiring halls alone, so hiring halls had to shift to agency shops.) Moreover, historically the NLRB has been rather suspicious of hiring halls, in part because the NRLB had pioneered the model of union shops associated with the then-new CIO unions and wanted to steer unions towards that model rather than the hiring hall, which was associated with older craft unions. As a result, NRLB bureaucrats tended to discourage the formation of hiring halls when they made labor law decisions or conducted arbitration and mediation during collective bargaining.

A third factor is the union's capacity - as you can see from above, operating a hiring hall takes a lot of work (and financial resources to pay for that work). A lot of unions find that degree of extra effort to be more than they're willing or able to muster. The United Farm Workers, for example (and this is a topic that I'd welcome further asks about, because it's a fascinating story of the rise and fall of a social movement), ran into a good deal of difficulty trying to set up a system of hiring halls in the wake of their first breakthrough victory in the grape-growing industry in California in 1970.

As detailed in the excellent history From the Jaws of Victory by Matthew Garcia, Cesar Chavez was more interested in the UFW as a social movement than in doing the work to ensure that contracts were signed in a timely fashion, that hiring halls (which had to be set up on far-flung farms all over the state of California) were operational in time to handle the seasonal hiring rush in the fields, that they were adequately staffed by competent people (Cesar Chavez had a rooted ideological objection to paying union staffers more than a poverty wage), that they kept adequate records and matched workers to referrals efficiently, and that they were operating in a non-discriminatory and efficient manner. As a result, a lot of UFW hiring halls developed a reputation for being shady or slow and inefficient or favoring Mexican workers over Filipinos - which became something of a hindrance in maintaining existing membership and organizing new workers.

[herrherrmann]

03/2021

[dothob]

die bäckerei veit

dessau, 2021

[beckhausphoto]

(peeking into) a furniture workshop in Vienna