I’m not sure what to make of a local job loss amounting to over one hundred people, of which a local politician reports that there are no bumping rights. (That is, the right of more senior workers to take the jobs of lower-level associates whose positions are not otherwise subject to termination.)
Bumping rights don’t help those lowest on an organizational chart — they hurt them, to the advantage of high-placed workers. The higher-level workers, rather than compete in the marketplace with their stronger skills, drop down and displace those more vulnerable, with lower skills, who will have a harder time making a go of it. Bumping rights are a way to insulate high-level workers from having to return to the job market, at the expense of lower-level workers. Worse, these rights-of-displacement are an incentive to lower productivity, as higher-level workers know that as long as the business endures, they’ll have a chair reserved for themselves, and be able to push someone else out.
Nor, by the way, would unionization have assured any of these workers a job, and especially not low-level workers in conditions of bumping rights.
See, Compulsory Unionism and the Free Rider Doctrine:
A widely accepted standard of wage equity is that an individual?s hourly earnings be tied to his productivity…. Super-seniority for union officials; wage rates based on seniority diverging from measured productivity; the determination of job assignment, job-bumping rights, job security, and assignment to overtime all by seniority; compressed wage differentials negotiated by the union; and union resistance to job evaluation all tend to sever the link between effort and reward.
In any event, mitigation of the effects of job loss isn’t the root problem; job loss, and job creation, themselves, are Whitewater’s problems.