OPINION:
“The future of work is remote.”
This thesis, which underpinned so many think pieces in 2020 and 2021, has aged like milk. Today, an estimated 90% of companies will require at least a partial return to the office in 2023. Some 40% (including my own company) require employees in the office at least four days per week, recognizing the substantial benefits of in-person collaboration.
That empirical reality hasn’t kept labor unions from offering false hope to current and potential members as a strategy to boost their attractiveness. “Unions are making remote work a contract issue,” a recent Washington Post headline read. Like most union campaigns, this one is full of empty promises — and a healthy dose of hypocrisy.
Consider the Communications Workers of America. The union, founded to represent telephone workers in the 20th century, has tried to be relevant in the 21st by promising enhanced remote work benefits for employees in the tech and gaming space. But when it came to CWA members at AT&T, who work in call centers, the union failed to deliver.
After the company summoned call center employees to come back last fall, the union demanded a long-term extension from the company — but got only six months. As a result, employees will return to the office at the end of March, with many already required to report to work in person.
Sometimes the “boss” calling employees back to the office is the union itself. The Service Employees International Union engaged in “return to work” fights with its own employees, who are represented by their own unions. Despite their protests, members of the employee unions representing SEIU staff were forced to return to their offices in November 2021.
The SEIU isn’t the only one playing hardball. The Washington-Baltimore News Guild, for example, filed a complaint with the federal government against the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations in June 2021. Why? Because the union refused to allow its employees to continue working remotely.
The AFL-CIO’s policy required vaccinated employees to return to the office unless they got an approved exemption due to their particular vulnerabilities to COVID-19. Union employees were outraged. They asserted that the AFL-CIO “failed and refused to bargain in good faith” and ignored “their own workers’ rights to negotiate.”
If that sounds familiar, it’s because unions typically lob the same accusations against targeted employers.
It’s not uncommon for unions to overpromise and underdeliver when it comes time to negotiate a contract. Unions have every incentive to promise the moon to workers during the organizing process because they are under no legal obligation to keep their word. In reality, it usually takes a new union well over a year just to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement. In the process, many of these promises can fall by the wayside.
When it comes to remote work, unions have even less incentive to follow through. A remote workforce can be toxic for the 20th-century union business model, which relies heavily on activating groups of employees who share a common workplace. Trying to organize workers over Zoom just doesn’t have the same effect.
With Labor Department numbers showing union membership on the decline, unions can’t afford to lose any more organizing opportunities. That means we’ll continue to hear promises of remote work, even if the promises aren’t remotely true.
• Mike Saltsman is an owner and partner at Berman and Co.
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