Chapter 2
How and Why Unions Merge
Abstract An important distinction is made between union amalgamations (unions
merging with other unions) and union absorptions (unions mergering into other
unions). The pre and post-merger stages are described, along with the negotiation of
the merger agreement. A model of the union merger process is presented.
Underlying the unions’ motivation to merge are union attempts to reverse financial
hardship, adjust to technological change, broaden organizing jurisdictions, enhance
bargaining power, protect against organizing raids, react to employer mergers and
reorganization, and grow by “organizing unions” rather than workers.
Keywords Union amalgamation Union absorption Merger motivation Merger
barriers Union organizing Union finances Technological change Union
jurisdiction Bargaining power Raids
There are two ways for unions to merge: an amalgamation, in which two or more
unions join together to form a new union, and an absorption, in which a smaller union
(the absorbed union) becomes part of a larger union (the absorbing union) (Chaison
1986, 1996).1 As we might expect, amalgamations are far more complicated; they
create new unions with new names and constitutions (for example, see the amalgamation agreement of the two actors’ unions in Appendix B), while absorptions often
entail little change for either the absorbed or absorbing union as one union becomes a
In the world of corporate mergers, absorptions are called “acquisitions,” a term not relevant to
union mergers because unions cannot be acquired by other unions through the exchange of
financial assets or by the votes of stockholders (there are none). As membership organizations,
unions have clauses in their constitutions calling for merger approval through members’ votes or
balloting among elected convention delegates (Chaison 1986). Judges will reject a union merger
when workers are denied the ability to exercise their political rights to oppose the merger. For
reviews of the law of union mergers (or affiliations) and the rights of workers and due process, see
Carlisle (1979), O’Connell (1985) and Pauling et al. (2005).
In Great Britain, union absorptions are labeled as transfers of engagements because the assets
and obligations of the smaller absorbed unions are transferred over to the larger, absorbing union
(Chaison 1986; Undy 2008).
1
© The Author(s) 2016
G. Chaison, Labor Union Mergers, SpringerBriefs in Economics,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-31982-7_2
15
16
2 How and Why Unions Merge
MERGER
Motivation
to merge
greater than
the barriers
to merge
Merger
negotiations
Approval of
merger
agreement
by union
officers and
members
Governing
structures of
the merged
union
Merger
outcomes
Fig. 2.1 A model of the union merger process. Source Chaison (1986)
semi-autonomous district or local branch of the other. Amalgamations are typically
between two or more unions (some have even joined together as many as five
unions), but absorptions are always among two unions—the larger absorbing one and
the smaller absorbed union (Chaison 1986, 2004).2 The primacy of absorptions as a
merger form is apparent in Appendix A; from 1900 to 2010, there were roughly four
absorptions for every amalgamation (also see Table 5.1). I see union mergers
occurring in the two distinct stages—the pre- and post-merger stages—presented by
Fig. 2.1. The premerger stage is shaped by the countervailing forces of the motivation to merge and the barriers to merger. When the motivation to merge—the
so-called urge to merge—is greater than the barriers, union officers and staff will
move beyond merger overtures and enter into formal, publicized merger negotiations. Otherwise, merger overtures will stop (Adams 1984). Each pairing of unions
has unique motivation and barriers to merge, and these shape the negotiation of the
merger agreement and the campaign for merger approval.
The process for negotiating mergers is presented in Fig. 2.2. The idea of merging
unions is born and nurtured in informal talks between union officers. If the union
officers believe merging is not worth pursuing, informal talks will soon end, usually
without ever being publicized. But if the officers feel the idea of merger is worth
exploring, they will establish and staff merger negotiating committees. The committees will meet regularly, perhaps even forming subcommittees to discuss aspects
of a possible merger such as the integration of staff salaries and benefits, the
selection officers, the new unions’ constitution, and then report back to the merger
committee. If the merger committees are able to agree on a comprehensive merger
plan, it is then presented to the national membership for their approval through a
referendum or sent to a special merger convention for approval by delegates
2
The distinctions between the forms of mergers is evident in the merger agreements in Appendix B
(the amalgamation forming SAG–AFTRA) and in Appendix C (the absorption of the National
Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians into the Communications). Workers of
America. For example, the SAG–AFTRA amalgamation dealt in part with such issues as the
creation of the new officer positions, the name of the new union, and the role of the first joint
convention, while the absorption created a new industry sector within the larger Communications
Workers. For a review of the basic types of mergers, see Chaison (1986, p. 3).
2 How and Why Unions Merge
17
Initial informalcontact between union officers
Executive board or council agrees to establish merger negotiation committees
Approval of negotiated merger agreement by executive board councils
Approval of merger agreements by union members through delegate votes at
special merger conventions, national referendums, or local union referendums
Merger becomes effective
Fig. 2.2 Steps in negotiating and approving a merger. Source Chaison (1986)
(see Appendices B and C for amalgamation and absorption agreements, respectively). When documents are approved, the premerger amalgamating unions will
hold special conventions to dissolve themselves. If the merger is an absorption, the
smaller absorbed union will hold a dissolution convention and the absorbing union
may not hold any special convention at all, with its officers approving the merger on
their own (particularly when the absorbed union is very small relative to the
absorbing union).
The merger terms are presented to members or union convention delegates
chosen by members on a take-it-or-leave-it basis without an opportunity for
modification or rejection of specific clauses. During a merger campaign, members
or delegates must be persuaded that more is to be gained than lost by merger
(Chaison 1986; McClendon 1995). If union members are not made fully aware of
the nature of and need for the changes brought on by the merger, and are not
psychologically committed to the new union, they will reject the merger agreement
or instruct their delegates to do so.
18
2 How and Why Unions Merge
The degree of post-merger integration is a reflection of how much the motivation
exceeds the barriers—for example, very high motivation and/or very low barriers
creates a great deal of post-merger integration (at least one union will very much
want to merge and will agree to be dissolved), but when motivation barely exceeds
barriers there will be low integration (one union or both will merge only if granted
great autonomy and job security for officers and staff). Of course, when the barriers
to merger exceed motivation, there will be no merger.
In a later chapter, we will see that occasionally both amalgamations and
absorptions can have high degrees of integration with the near complete fusion of
union structures (e.g., singular governing committees, and union departments, and
even local union mergers).3 The merging unions become as one, and after a brief
transition period of a year or less, it is difficult to distinguish between the remnants
of either premerger unions. But at the other extreme of the integration continuum,
we have amalgamation into loosely federated structures–the premerger unions
continue their earlier identities and appear semi-autonomous, even to the point of
having their own constitutions and conventions.
Why Do Unions Merge?
Surviving membership decline and financial difficulty. In the previous chapter, we
saw how union membership and union density rates have fallen sharply in recent
decades. Union membership dues are the primary source of union income, so
declining membership and union financial hardship go hand in hand. Moreover,
unions rarely dissolve because by doing so they would be abandoning their legal
bargaining status and leaving workers without the protection of the collective
bargaining agreement.4
The link between merger types and declining membership is not always clear.
The only empirical study on the topic found that the membership of absorbed and
amalgamating unions often declined or was unchanged before merger but that of
absorbing union generally grew (Chaison 1981). Nevertheless, more than a third of
the absorbing and amalgamating unions actually grew prior to merger. It was
3
In a study of local union mergers, Chaison (1983) found that most merging national unions had a
few local union mergers but there were a few very active unions in his regard. Local union mergers
were often absorptions of small locals into larger ones. Although it was rare to find requirements
that locals below a certain size merge, the national union frequently had control over which of its
local merged with other locals. The dominant role of the national parent union in controlling,
approving or even forcing local mergers makes local mergers quite different in motivation than
national union mergers.
See Appendix B for the merger agreement for SAG–AFTRA under which a SAG locals and
AFTRA locals have to merge in specific geographic areas.
4
If the union that has signed a collective bargaining agreement no longer exists, employers will
claim that they no longer have to abide by that agreement’s terms (Chaison 1986). Also see Elson
(2008).
Why Do Unions Merge?
19
suggested that unions might merge when their officers, staff and members speculate
that the future be tougher than the past. In other words, many mergers might be
preemptive. Union officers and activists, realizing that mergers can take years to
negotiate and be approved, may have been initiating the merger when they only
suspect hard times may lie well ahead, rather than wait for major membership losses
and financial difficulty.5
Dealing with technological change. The need to deal with the impact of new
technologies is most often mentioned by union officers as a motivating force for
mergers because it threatens the employment of union members and the survival of
the union as worker representative. Union mergers cannot block or reverse technological change, whether it occurs as manufacturing by robots or recording
musicians’ performances on CDs, but mergers can help unions deal with it.
New work processes and new consumer goods can erode the boundaries of
traditional crafts whether they are the production of window glass or recorded
music. They create confusion about which union is appropriate for which workers.
They shrink the potential and actual membership of unions that bet their futures on
work process which later fade away. For example, new technologies eroded the
boundaries of highly specialized railway crafts and in 1969 prompted the
Transport-Communications Employees Union to be absorbed into the Brotherhood
of Railway and Airline Clerks. In the construction industry, technological change
compelled the United Welders to merge into the Operating Engineers, and the
Lathers to become part of the Carpenters in 1979. Technological change is usually
the force behind the erosion of union organizing territories—the union jurisdictions
to be discussed next.
Escaping narrow jurisdictions. As I suggested above, this factor is closely
related to technological change as a common reason for unions to consider their
merger options (Adams 1984; Chaison 1986). A union’s jurisdiction is a description
of its organizing territory in terms of industries or occupations (Chaison 1987).6
Jurisdictions are usually detailed in union constitutions and web pages. Some are
incredibly broad; for example, the jurisdiction of the Teamsters, a frequently
absorbing union, is: “… all workers including, without limitation, teamsters,
chauffeurs, warehousemen and helpers [and includes, for example] brewery and soft
drink workers, shipping room employees, healthcare employees, public employees
5
It might also be argued that union officers can negotiate terms more favorable to themselves (e.g.,
their continued employment and that of their union’s staff members) than would be possible when
their memberships and treasuries decline sharply and less can be brought to the merger bargaining
table (Chaison 1986).
Chaison (1981) also suggested that when a union is declining and its officers see other unions
growing (the case of the so-called lone decliners) the decline might be most meaningful and lead to
merger.
6
A union’s jurisdiction has also been defined as: “The authority claimed by a union to represent
certain groups of workers either in a specific type of work or occupation in a particular industry or
industries or in a certain geographic area” (Roberts 1971, p. 239).
20
2 How and Why Unions Merge
and industrial workers” (Teamsters 2014, p. 1) (emphasis added).7 Other jurisdictions might be fairly narrow; for example, the Airline Flight Attendants, a union
absorbed by the Communications Workers of American in 2003, once described its
jurisdiction as “…flight attendants of every type of carrier” (Airline Flight
Attendants-CWA 2015, p. 1).
There are important differences between how jurisdictions are described and
how they are exercised. Unions usually claim expansive jurisdictions with future
organizing in mind, even if they have only actually organized a small proportion of
the workers in that jurisdiction. Jurisdictions define the outer limits of where a
union can (or would like to) recruit members without interloping in the jurisdictions
of other unions. In a study of jurisdictions I concluded that; “Some unions claim
jurisdictions [in their constitutions] beyond their present abilities to organize so as
not to have these jurisdictions claimed by others and to warn that encroachments
could result in rivalry” (Chaison 1987, p. 4). When jurisdictional statements are
amended they are often post hoc rationalizations of union organizing that has
already taken place outside a union’s core jurisdiction (Chaison 1987).
Historically, many early unions in the United States had jurisdictions limited to
narrow occupations or crafts, for example types of actors, shoe makers, glass
workers, paper workers, and telegraphers (Chaison 1986). These unions were
overspecialized because their size and stability depended on the future growth of a
particular type of job or industry. When new production technologies changed those
jobs, the unions found themselves without much of a future.
It should also be recognized that some unions may merge with each other in
order to more fully exploit their jurisdictions and reduce the number of unions. For
example, in the 1990s there were mergers and schisms among unions of nurses, and
by 2005 it was claimed that there were too many unions representing nurses. Nurses
were in at least six different unions and these included both highly specialized
unions (professional associations engaged in bargaining) with narrow jurisdictions,
and broad-based unions, such as the Service Employees and the American
Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, with their broad jurisdictions (Moberg 2013).8
Increasing bargaining power. Greater bargaining power always seems to be at
or near the top of the list of the claimed benefits of merger. In merger campaigns,
union officers often loudly proclaim that mergers will increase bargaining power
through greater bargaining coverage in an industry, while also improving the ability
to strike by providing access to the bigger, combined strike funds. Some of these
claims might be exaggerated but in many ways mergers can actually turn unions
into stronger bargaining agents. For example, when the Amalgamated Clothing
Workers and the Textile Workers merged in 1976 they created a vertically
7
On its web page, the Teamsters’ broad jurisdiction is described in an 18 line-paragraph.
Unions that organize lesser-skilled healthcare workers in municipal hospitals have also tried to
merge to eventually form a single large health care union (Greenhouse 1999).
8
Why Do Unions Merge?
21
integrated union that could cover more of the operations of large corporations (from
textiles to clothing), and that had a greater strike fund. When the American
Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) merged with the Screen
Actors Guild (SAG) in 2012 to form SAG-AFTRA (see Appendix B for the
agreement to amalgamate the two unions) both unions claimed that greater bargaining power was a high priority and the merger would effectively solve the
problem of one union’s members crossing the picket lines of the other union. This,
they claim, will strengthen their hand in negotiations by raising their ability to strike
effectively.
Some merger claims can be hollow—for instance, no matter what unions say,
mergers will not protect employers and their employees from low-cost global
competition. While it is true that mergers may enable unions to have access to larger
strike funds, they will not prevent employers from moving their operations abroad
during a strike (Chaison 2014). And a merger may increase the expertise of staff on
a bargaining committee, but they will not guarantee that the union bargaining team
will be able to resist the employer’s demands for major concessions in bargaining
(Chaison 1986).
Merging for other reasons. Aside from those described above, there are some
other reasons for union mergers. First, unions merge to protect themselves from
organizing raids. (A raid is an attempt by a union to win the right to represent
workers already represented in collective bargaining by another union.) Raids
between affiliated unions are banned by union federations (associations of unions
like the AFL–CIO) that see raids as an internally disruptive and a wasteful “organizing of the already organized” and federation affiliates are protected against
raids by no-raid agreements (Chaison 1986). However, non-affiliates can be raided
by affiliates, prompting non-affiliates to merge into affiliates to be protected against
raids.
Union mergers have been used to counter the mergers, reorganization or
diversification of employers’ companies.9 For example, when an employer diversifies into a new industry, the union representing that employers’ workers in the
usual industry may merge with the union already representing workers in the new
industry.
Finally, some unions have merged by absorbing other unions because they found
that future growth and diversification can be achieved faster through mergers (i.e.,
organizing unions rather than organizing workers). When mergers are used as a
growth strategy, unions can gain instant members while also avoiding employer
opposition (why should employers resist when the workers are already represented
by a union?). The absorption of many small unions figures prominently in some
9
For a study the opposite relationship—how cross-border company mergers are affected by the
presence of powerful unions—see Pagel and Wey (2012).
For a review and comparison of the legal underpinnings of corporate mergers and union
mergers see Lande and Zerbe (1996)
22
2 How and Why Unions Merge
unions’ growth strategies.10 For example, Chaison (1986) showed how the Service
Employees,11 the Teamsters, and the United Food and Commercial Workers used
absorptions to grow, enticing merger candidates with high degrees of operating
autonomy and the continued employment of union officers and staff.
In this chapter, I have reviewed the ways that unions merge and the motivation
to merge. Before I discuss the barriers to mergers, I again emphasize the three key
aspects of union mergers. First, mergers can be either amalgamations or absorptions. Second, all mergers are negotiated settlements that must be campaigned for
by union officers. Accordingly, officers will negotiate merger terms which they feel
will be approved by the union’s members. Third, the strength of the urge to merge
is meaningless without considering the countervailing forces of the barriers to
merger. We must never measure the motivation to merge in isolation. As we already
noted, sometimes unions with a high motivation to merge will not merge, and
sometimes unions with lower motivation may merge. So much depends of the
relative importance of the barriers to merger (Chaison 1986, 2004). Next we look at
these barriers.
References
Adams LT (1984) Labor organization mergers 1979–1984: adapting to change. Mon Lab Rev
9:21–27
Airline Flight Attendants-CWA (2015) About AFA www.afacwa.org. Accessed 1 Dec 2015
Carlisle L (1979) Union mergers and the amendment certification procedure. Cathol Univ Law
Rev 28:587–604
Chaison G (1981) Union growth and union mergers. Ind Relat 20:98–108
Chaison G (1983) Local union mergers: frequency, forms and national union policy. J Lab Res
4:325–338
Chaison G (1986) When unions merge. Lexington Books, Lexington
Chaison G (1987) The recent expansion of union organizing jurisdictions. Working paper 87–101
Graduate School of Management, Clark University, Worcester, MA
Chaison G (1996) Union mergers in hard times: the view from five countries. Cornell University
Press, Ithaca
Chaison G (2004) Union mergers in the U.S. and abroad. J Lab Res 25:97–115. doi:10.1007/
512122-1006-9
Chaison G (2014) The unions’ response to globalization. Springer, New York
Elson BR (2008) Rules on withdrawing recognition from unions clarified. Lawcrawler www.
lawcrawler.findlaw.com. 26 March. Accessed 11 Nov 2014
Greenhouse S (1999) Growing health care union prepares to show its muscle. The New York
Times, www.nytimes.com 12 Sept. Accessed 12 Sept 1999
10
Sometimes, small unions will “shop around” for merger partners. Their officers solicit and then
scrutinize merger bids from several large unions, and accept the one that they think is best in terms
of officers’ salaries, staff job security and union autonomy (Chaison 1986).
11
For example, Moody (2001) reported that from 1980 through 1993, the Service Employees
absorbed about one hundred national, regional, and local unions with a combined membership of
about 180,000.
References
23
Lande RH, RO Zerbe (1996) Anti-consumer effects of union mergers: an antitrust solution. Duke
Law J 46: 2–38. www.lexisnexis.com. Accessed 28 Jan 2008 (November)
McClendon JA (1995) Member support for union mergers: an analysis of an affiliations
referendum. J Lab Res 16:9–23
Moberg D (2013) Are mergers the answer for fractious nurses unions? In These Times 20 Feb,
pp 1–5
Moody K (2001) When the sum is not greater than its parts: union mergers. New Lab Forum
10:42–47
O’Connell EJ (1985) Union affiliations and the rights of nonunion employees. Fordham Law Rev
53:1443–1459
Pagel B, Wey C (2012) Domestic and cross-border mergers in unionized oligopoly. Unpublished.
June. www.idei.fr. Accessed 18 Nov 2015
Pauling GL et al. (2005) Allied Mechanical Services, Inc.: If multiple unions merge without an
employee vote, should the successor union succeed to the bargaining rights of its predecessors?
Paper presented at the 33rd Annual Midwinter Meeting of the ABA Section of Labor and
Employment Law, Unpublished, Chicago Ill. 1 March 2005
Roberts HS (1971) Robert’s dictionary of industrial relations. Bureau of National Affairs,
Washington D.C. (Revised edition)
Teamsters (2014) Constitution. www.teamsters.org. Accessed 3 July 2014
Undy R (2008) Trade union merger strategies: purpose, process, and performance. Oxford
University Press, Oxford
http://www.springer.com/978-3-319-31980-3