Who said this: labor or management?

The following statement may be self-evident to business people; it often does not appear to be understood by union leaders or their membership:

“[P]roductivity is an important part of good wages and good benefits . . . If a guy can’t make a profit or bid successfully for a contract, they can’t pay you because they’re going to fail.”

So to whom is this wisdom attributable? What smart business person?

Actually, as you may have suspected, it is attributable not to a management representative, but to a unionist — Bob Kelley, a well-known local labor leader in the St. Louis area who will retire Dec. 31.

The quote is from the following article by Philip Dine in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “Retirement ends an era”

Kelley. . . has been the leader – and the face – of the labor movement in the St. Louis area for three decades. During that period, as labor has declined nationally, unions in St. Louis have retained much of their economic, political and numeric strength.

While several factors have helped unions in St. Louis buck the national trend, the tone Kelley has helped set ranks high among them. . . Since the mid-1970s, Kelley has been president of the 210,000-member St. Louis Labor Council – the AFL-CIO’s umbrella group for unions in the area. Early on, he made a key decision: He would seek, when possible, to cooperate with employers, not confront them.

By and large, local employers came to see unions as partners, and the labor movement in St. Louis has avoided the frontal assaults other cities have seen.And here’s another great quote from this story, by Terry Nelson, executive secretary-treasurer of the Carpenters’ District Council of Greater St. Louis:

I hate to admit this publicly, but I will – labor’s wrong about 50 percent of the time, management’s wrong about 50 percent of the time,” Nelson said. “The idea is to get them into the room and talk it out. This isn’t a one-way street, and Bob understood that. Read more

Would that all union leaders had the gumption and basic insight of these guys!

Best wishes on retirement, Bob!