Author: Amy Whyte

With union membership dwindling nationally and the U.S. workforce increasingly shifting away from traditionally unionized industries like mining and manufacturing to a predominantly service-oriented economy, it’s easy to assume that young workers have little interest in joining a union.

In fact, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that in 2014 just under 11 percent of  workers ages 25 to 34 were represented by unions — down from nearly 15 percent 20 years ago.

“There’s sort of an assumption out there that younger people aren’t as interested in unions as older people because they were brought up in a time where unions aren’t very strong and because they tend to work in different environments than the historic union worker,” said Philip Dine, author of “State of the Unions.”

But the recent vote this summer to unionize by the editorial staff of Gawker Media — the new media company that publishes Deadspin, Gizmodo, Jezebel and Lifehacker — tells a different story. This is an editorial staff that skews young; most employees are in their 20s or 30s.

“It reflects a shift in demographics,” said labor professor Robert Bruno of the University of Illinois News Bureau. “The writers who voted to organize are highly educated young professionals. It really points to a new direction for the labor movement as well as the movement itself adapting to new workplaces and the new way in which we work.”

Gawker Media, for its part, said that it was choosing to organize because it believes “every workplace could use a union.”

And this positive attitude toward unionization is shared by many young workers, according to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center. According to a survey conducted in March, 55 percent of young adults ages 18 to 29 view unions favorably compared with 29 percent who hold unfavorable views.

“Our generation was taught that you go to college, graduate with a degree, and then get a great job,” said Molly Meyer, author of “It’s My Company Too!” “That’s no longer the case — our generation is swimming in student loan debt, now, instead. Somehow, somewhere, in the eyes of businesses and in the eyes of college institutions, the value of a college education doesn’t match up from a dollar perspective. Perhaps our lean toward unionization is a way to remedy that discrepancy on one end.”

Dine agrees that younger workers are more drawn to unions as a result of the economy they came of age in.

“We got through the worst recession in 80 years, and that’s sort of what they grew up in or what they faced at an earlier working age,” Dine said. “Baby boomers sort of always knew things would get better, but it’s not like that anymore. Young workers now realize they should look for help, that they need some solidarity with each other.”

Additionally, Dine said the evolving work habits of millennials — tendencies to jump from one job to another, freelance or work from home — make them more open to unionizing.

“That’s such an insecure environment,” Dine said. “There’s not much security there when they’re traded off as freelancers, they don’t necessarily get benefits when they’re working part time.”

But if younger workers are so interested in organizing, why aren’t more of them in unions? Dine attributes this to the difficulty of organizing, particularly in jobs and industries that aren’t traditionally unionized.

“The kind of jobs they’re in, while those jobs in my view make them more prone to want to join unions, they also make it harder to join a union,” Dine said. “If you’re working at home, how do you join a union? What union do you join?”

While Dine says the AFL-CIO, the umbrella federation for U.S. unions, has begun trying to make organizing more accessible to the next generation of workers, including scheduling college visits to introduce the concept of unionizing to incoming workers, there is still work to be done to make unions easier to form and join.

“There’s been a lag between efforts to familiarize young people with unions and actually setting up structure to make that easier,” Dine said.

Additionally, Dine said, there needs to be labor law reform to make it easier for workers to form or join a union.

“We have a very complicated set of labor laws,” he said. “They have to jump through hoops to have elections, and meanwhile employers have the ability to put a lot of pressure on workers to not form a union.”

But while there may be barriers to unionization, Dine has no doubt that younger workers will find a way to organize, and that unions will continue to play an important role in the U.S. economic landscape.

“A certain idealism is returning to young people,” Dine said. “Unions have been key in the history of this country to building the middle class. But recently the middle class is shrinking, the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer … and we can’t survive as a powerful country like that. Younger people realize this and want to unionize, not just for themselves but for the country as a whole.”

DILBERT © 1995 Scott Adams. Used by permission of UNIVERSAL UCLICK. All rights reserved.

“We’re taking away your individual cubicles,” Dilbert’s boss explains in a 1995 edition of the workplace comic. “In the new system, you’ll sign up for whatever cube is open that day.”

The cartoon was mocking office “hoteling,” a practice that allows employees to reserve workspace on a need-to-use basis. But though Scott Adams made fun of the concept in 1995, in 2015 hoteling is increasingly being adopted as a method of cutting costs and improving collaboration among workers.

Typically employed by consultancies and other firms whose employees often travel or work from remote locations, hoteling enables companies to drop the square footage of their office space without shrinking their workforce: Instead of each employee being allotted a desk, workspace is shared among staff, cutting down on real estate requirements.

“You’ve got reduced costs of real estate per employee, so you’re able to make more efficient use of your space,” said Ben Johnston, the marketing director for RMG Networks.

RMG Networks, a communications technology provider based in Dallas, offers software that can be used to streamline the hoteling process by making it easy for employees to check in and reserve rooms. Johnston said having some form of digital reservation system is key to making hoteling work.

“At the minimum, most companies that are employing hoteling will have some sort of reservation system, whether that’s Microsoft Outlook or other systems like that,” Johnston said. “In a lot of cases it’s from an interactive touch screen in the foyer or the reception area where employees can come in and swipe a badge or scan an ID to check into the system, see what’s available, reserve the room and get to work.”

Though hoteling has been around for some time — Crain’s Chicago Business reported on IBM’s switch to a desk reservation system in 1994 — the trend has recently picked up steam. “Big Four” accounting firms Deloitte and EY, formerly Ernst & Young, are among companies that have adopted office hoteling in the past year. Instead of assigned desks, companies like American Express Co. are offering employees storage lockers to hold their files and supplies. Rather than being tethered to landlines, employees at GlaxoSmithKline carry laptops equipped with Internet phones.

Even the federal government has gotten in on the trend with the U.S. General Services Administration using hoteling as part of its efforts to reduce federal office space and increase efficiency and collaboration. Charles Hardy, the GSA’s chief workplace officer, said the hoteling model has enabled it to assign 3,400 people to its headquarters, a building that previously only housed 2,200.

“There’s this balance between people who are coming into the office and people who are either at home or at a client site,” Hardy said. “Seats are being used probably around 45 to 50 percent of the time, and if you create a hoteling environment that increases your ability to actually manage the capacity level you have in a building at any given day.”

The extent to which cutting back on real estate actually succeeds in cutting costs is up for debate: A 2013 study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office was unable to determine the “accuracy and validity” of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s estimated cost savings from hoteling and other efforts to reduce its space needs over the past decade.

The same study found that hoteling “may not be appropriate” for everyone, such as employees who work with classified documents.

Additionally, some workers find the hoteling environment counterproductive. Allison Arieff, a New York Times architecture columnist, wrote a commentary for CityLab, part of The Atlantic Monthly Group, that said: “I worked in an open plan environment where everyone sat at ‘kitchen tables’ (with someone at either side of you, across from you, behind you) and many of us were ‘hoteling’ (where you check in to a different desk each day, when and if one is actually available). To be honest, it seemed as if no one ever got anything done.”

Kris Dunn, the chief human resources officer at Kinetix who also writes a column for Workforce, also questions the benefits of hoteling.

“There are a lot of employees who value a sense of place, of belonging and of ownership of space,” Dunn wrote in an email. “Hoteling is a great way to save on real estate costs and accommodate remote workers visiting, but when it impacts employees who spend 50 percent or more of their time in the office, it usually becomes a burden.”

However, proponents of the hoteling system laud its ability to provide flexibility and enhance collaboration among staff.

“You get happier workers in some cases,” Johnston said. “It breaks up the monotony.”

At the GSA, where 80 percent of desks are unassigned, hoteling gives workers the option of different types of workspaces, ensuring that people can find a work environment that accommodates whatever type of job they’re doing that day.

“If I’m coming into the office one day and I need to do heads-down work, there’s a location for that where I can get away from folks and do heads-down work,” Hardy said. “If I’m coming in and we’re brainstorming or doing teamwork, there’s a place where collaboration can occur.”

While hoteling may be better-suited to some companies than others — for example, Johnston said the model works best for larger firms with employees who travel often — Hardy said any company can adopt hoteling as long as it chooses the appropriate degree of implementation. Where one office might function perfectly well with 80 percent of its desks unassigned, another firm might work better with only 20 percent unassigned.

“It’s certainly a great strategy,” Hardy said. “We’re paying for our chairs and our workstations and our offices, and you want to maximize their actual use. I think hoteling allows us to get a better utilization of the assets we’re putting in place.”

Of course, room service is not included.

Amy Whyte is a Workforce editorial intern. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Workforce on Twitter at @workforcenews.