c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.)

UNDATED _ The other day I asked a venture capitalist I know if he and his fellow venture capitalists were going to form a union. He frowned thoughtfully and then said,”Whom would we organize against? We don’t have the HMO’s and the insurance companies to fight!” I figured if doctors were organizing, the venture capitalists might be the final bulwark of rugged individualism in the country.

My friend was right, however. No one is oppressing the venture capitalists. Nonetheless, the move of the American Medical Association into unionism is a sign of the times. Health maintenance organizations are, and insurance companies are almost, as bad as gunmakers and tobacco companies _ they are innocent of serious ethical concerns. Doctors are well advised to organize against them.

They would be even better advised to lobby Congress for a voucher system for medical care. Under such a system, companies would provide their employees with vouchers for whatever money the company has hitherto put into health insurance and tell to find their own care provider. The care providers would then have to make their money by pleasing clients and not by squeezing them out of adequate medical care.

Does the prospective unionization of the medical profession represent a sea change in the attitude of Americans toward unions?

Liberalism of the era before the 1960s placed unions high on their agenda of good things. Post-60s liberalism, upper middle class in its origins and membership, has condemned unions.

It may talk about the”working class,”but it means”minorities.”White”hard-hats”are beneath the contempt of baby-boomer liberals. They don’t seem to have noticed that unions _ both industrial unions like the steel workers and white-collar unions like the teachers _ have done more for minority workers and for women than all the affirmative action programs in the country.

A couple of decades ago I had an argument with some high-tech workers for IBM. The computer marketplace was going to become competitive, I argued. IBM would find itself threatened from all sides. It would ignore the competition for awhile, then it would seek leverage by cutting its workforce. Only collective bargaining could stop them.

They laughed at me. No one would ever catch IBM, they argued. Moreover, it was a good company to work for. Who needed a union when the salaries and benefits were so wonderful at IBM?

I wonder what they think now.

IBM, like many other companies, has worked a perfectly legal swindle on the employees’ pensions called”cash balance”which, in effect, deprives older employees of much of the pension money they thought they had accrued. There’s nothing they can do about it. The pension plan with which they were hired was a nonbinding promise, not a legal contract. By changing the provisions of the promise, the”cash balance”plans may deprive workers of pay they thought they had received but they can’t go to court over the new plan.

General Electric, for example, wouldn’t dare try something like that with its unionized workers. The pension plans are backed up by contractual provisions and by the power to strike. Company greed cannot take the benefits away from them.

However legal the”cash balance”plans may be, I think they are, in the strict sense of Roman Catholic social theory, a crime _ defrauding the laborer of wages _ which cries to heaven for vengeance. However, given they have no unions to worry about, IBM managers feel they can easily ignore the possibility of divine vengeance.

One wonders why companies choose these tactics in a time of the greatest economic boon in American history. The answer seems to be that it improves their profit picture and pleases the stock market. Or, more bluntly, greed: We can never make enough money.

Unions, whatever their flaws, are necessary today for the same reason they were necessary in the first half of the century: They protect the individual worker _ now even the medical doctor _ against the untrammeled greed of both the large, and the small, corporation. Once, unions were especially necessary in times of recession and depression. Now, it turns out, they are necessary also in times of prosperity.

I can’t imagine computer engineers and programmers organizing like the doctors have done. It took only a half century for the medical profession to see the benefits of collective bargaining. How long, I wonder, will it take the computer profession to reach the same conclusion.

DEA END GREELEY