Union Approach to Health and Safety: - United Steelworkers

the members and the union ;
• there is no opportunity for the union to package ideas or proposals (to link together proposals
or suggestions that are good for the company with proposals that are good for the union);
• union members put forward contradictory ideas or suggestions, which can give management an
edge when it comes to formal bargaining over issues;
• divisions among bargaining unit members are exposed to management.
Participants in brainstorming are in fact specifically told not to evaluate the impacts of their
ideas before putting them in front of management, not to think about how the members and the union
might be affected. They are told to act as individuals and to set aside the whole concept of collective
voice.
Some of the points that are made in this document may seem like nitpicking or may seem to
overstate the dangers of these techniques. But there are a couple of things to remember: First,
individual techniques that may not, by themselves, seem to be a big deal, are rarely if ever used in
isolation, and when added together the techniques have a significant impact. Second, even the
strongest unionists can be moved (bit by bit) away from their traditional union values. In particular,
lessons learned and behaviors practiced in seminar rooms tucked away from the real world, where they
seem harmless, will often be carried back to the workplace without a re-evaluation of their impact on
the members and on the strength of the union.
In this document we will look at some of the techniques used in involvement programs and
evaluate the apparent lessons of the techniques (what they seem to be or are supposed to be teaching
us), as well as at the deeper and more subtle lessons - the tricks and traps. It is important to understand
that the facilitator or trainer using these techniques may not even recognize or understand these deeper
lessons. But protests from a facilitator of: "That's not what I meant to do!" don't change the impact of
these techniques on the union.
Our own members are even trained to use these techniques, and they use them without any
sense of how they might affect the union and the members. In fact, their intention is to insert a union
voice into the program. But remember, a union person using a technique with negative impacts on the
union can be even more dangerous than a management person using the same technique because our
members will tend to let their guard down with a union facilitator. They won’t be as cautious as they