Release the Goats!

Some years ago I brought you the story of a team of goats that were being used to clear some brush from a hillside in Los Angeles – and how labor officials were protesting because the goats replaced a crew of twenty or thirty human employees with a single goatherd. At the time, I noted that the use of goats, as opposed to gasoline-powered agricultural equipment, was not only cheaper and more effective but also reduced air pollution and noise pollution, not to mention the production of naturally-occurring fertilizer. It came as no surprise to anyone, however, that none of the humans involved (except possibly the goatherd) were willing to put the environment ahead of their financial benefit…

Now the same story has come to Michigan, only this time there’s a university and an actual union grievance involved. According to a story in the Battle Creek Enquirer, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) is claiming that Western Michigan University failed to notify them that it was planning to bring in goats to deal with brush clearing, and that this represents a violation of the union’s agreement with the school. Why, exactly, anybody would want the assignment of clearing a poison ivy-infested woodlot in the middle of a Michigan summer is beyond me; it seems more likely that the union would be protesting against having to do this work, or at the very least, complaining about the working conditions. None of this appears to bother the goats, though…

Now, we should probably acknowledge that, this time at least, there probably is something to the “slippery slope” argument being raised by the union leadership. Even if none of their members want this particular job, the fact that the University has apparently brought in non-union labor to perform a task that would normally fall under the union’s jurisdiction isn’t really something they can afford to let pass unchallenged. As I’ve noted in a number of other posts, every time you fail to defend a contract or an intellectual property it becomes geometrically harder to do so the next time, until you are unable to defend it at all. And while the goats themselves aren’t really laborers in the usual sense, the same can’t be said about the company that is providing them…

What is less clear this time is how to resolve the issue. Currently, the goats are ahead of schedule and will probably finish eating all of the offending brush before the grievance can be resolved through channels, and it is difficult to see how putting the goatherds out of work would benefit the union personnel in the first place. Under the circumstances it might just be better to let them finish the job, especially given that WMU is a public university, and the higher cost of using humans on the brush removal detail would be paid for out of our state income taxes. On the other hand, it might be possible for the University to acquire its own herd of goats, at which the official goatherds (if not the goats themselves) would become members of AFSCME…

I think the main takeaway from this story is the way changing times can impact us in unexpected ways. Goats grazing on a hillside are hardly a new technological advance, but the use of environmentally-friendly methods and renewable resources in everyday tasks is. At least, it seems unlikely that the use of goats eliminating union jobs was an issue when WMU and AFSCME first signed their labor agreement. It’s enough to make you wonder what other bronze-age innovations may complicated labor relations, or business in general, as we go forward…