Bring Back the Foremen

We've come a long way, we working people. In olden times, all we could hope for as recompense for our labour was room and board, and ideally not too many lashes from the foremen. The maximum amount of working hours was set by our physical endurance, if at all. A labour strike to get a better deal took the form of an uprising, whose defeat usually ranged from painful to fatal.

Over the centuries things improved a lot. We eventually not only got one day a week off, but the working hours were reduced somewhat and, in time, some monetary compensation came along.

Today, in modern economies at least, you not only get a salary to cover your basic needs, but also medical and unemployment insurance, a contribution towards your pension, paid holidays and even the possibility of saving some of your income. And, if you think you're still getting a raw deal, you can go on strike to make your employer realise how much you are really worth.

But what happens if, in this age of high specialisation, some workers take notice of the critical role that their particular specialisation plays for the smooth operation of the company and decide to leverage it to gain maximum advantage? This is what is happening in Germany now.

For weeks on end, the country has been lurching from one crippling strike to another, most noticeably in the transport sector. This week the train drivers, next the airplane pilots, then back to the train drivers, back to the pilots and so on, interspersed with air traffic controllers or even those guys driving the "follow-me" vehicles that lead aircraft to their parking positions once they land. All of them share one feature: they are few in numbers but perform a function that, when absent, paralyses the entire show.

Correction: they share two features. The second one is inflated ambition coupled with blatant disregard for the blokes who, in the end, provide their sustenance: us, the customers.

Take the locomotive drivers. Their recent wave of strikes is not as much to do with their own salaries or working conditions as with an internal power struggle with another railroad union, in an effort to force their employer to accept them as sole representatives of workers affiliated with the competing union.

In the case of airline pilots, it is about their salaries and working conditions. Not that they are going hungry. At up to some third of a million dollars per year for experienced captains and an entry salary of some 90,000 dollars for newbies, they certainly are in the upper quintiles. Still, ten percent more wouldn't hurt, they feel, and want to press their point by leaving the planes on the ground.

But that is not all. They also want to continue being able to go into early retirement, at 55 years of age, at a substantial portion of their latest salary. I'd like that myself, actually.

This all goes to show that the hard-earned power to strike to improve the workers' lot is being taken by the so-called splinter unions to extremes that are hard to justify with a straight face.

Changing the law regarding the power of such tiny unions would require amending the constitution. No small feat, that. Maybe we can shame the serial strikers into a bit more decorum instead?

That, or bring back the foremen.