Unions had a really lousy year in 2012. Governor Scott Walker was retained in office despite an all-out union effort to have him recalled. Indiana and Michigan (!) became right-to-work states.
And now the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports in its annual survey that union membership fell by 400,000 last year, despite an increase of 2.4 million in the total number of jobs. Today, only 11.3 percent of the labor force is unionized, the least since 1916, when the rate was 11.2 percent. But that understates the decline because in 1916 only private-sector workers were unionized. Today, just 6.6 percent of the private workforce is unionized. In 1953, about one-third of American workers were union members. It was 25 percent as recently as the 1980s.
Perhaps the most interesting statistic in the BLS report is union membership broken down by age. Of workers 55-64 years of age, 14.9 percent are union members. For those 16-24, a mere 4.2 percent are unionized. That, to put it mildly, does not bode well for the future of the union movement.
The basic reason for this now-60-year-long decline, of course, is that unions are economic dinosaurs. They arose in the late 19th century at the same time as unprecedentedly large industrial and transportation corporations came into being. The corporations had enormous economic and political power and the unorganized workers had virtually none. Unions helped to redress the balance.
With the Wagner Act of 1935, which put the power of the federal government behind the union movement, the golden age of unions began. It didn’t last long. Greatly increased educational opportunities after World War II and the digital revolution that began around 1970 have eroded the number of workers who need unions to bargain for them and the number of jobs available to unskilled and semi-skilled workers.
But the laws governing corporate-union relations had their last major overhaul in 1947 with the Taft-Hartley Act in a completely different economic universe. The unions’ power with the Democratic Party (they are the No. 1 funder of the party and its candidates) has prevented any modernization, giving them disproportionate political clout. But even that is fading. The unions were unable to get “card check,” which would have ended secret elections in union organizing drives, through Congress when the Democrats had a lock on both houses of Congress in the first two years of the Obama administration.
So while unions, like dinosaurs, are still very powerful, like dinosaurs, they are going extinct.
I think the next front should be to revoke the PLA (if I've got the right acronym) that effectively mandates that contractors on government construction projects have to pay union wages rather than market wages
Unions are failing not primarily because workers don't need them–workers kept 1 hr under full time so they don't get benefits (before during or after Obamacare) or compelled to work as independent contractors on and on or uncompensated overtime could use unions in the abstract. But the unions we actually have didn't adjust to the labor maket, either through organizing and recruitment or evolving a union model for what a union would be doing in the distributed work place. Concentrating on government workers left them relying on a strategy of growing government and not much else.
The unions used to be about helping the workers get and maintain a reasonable living standard, that is not true over the last decade. nThey have chosen to be a political organization that provides almost no support for the worker only demands that they assume a agenda that is not favorable to the worker only to the union management. They demand that the worker support the unions no matter how foolish or harmful the union management decisions are, and obey without question the dictates from the elitist in the organization or in politics.
"provides almost no support for the worker" n nOnly pay raises, pensions, benefits, paid sick leave and maternity/paternity leave, a grievance procedure, etc. And if the worker does not approve of the union's political position, he or she can become an "agency fee" member, and the cost of union political efforts are deducted from the dues.
HIllelA. they stopped organizing outside of the public sector. They lost track of how to deal with a fluid market filled with part-time and contract labor easily exchanged for competitive labor within the United States or outside. 6.6 percent of the private workforce. That's dire. The substitution of concentrating in public markets or private markets dependent on a government regulation or acquisition (like the aerospace industry) plus general support of entitlements wasn't enough. In the early 80's in my line of work I still ran into people who had family who were union members in other shops. Then technology changed. Typesetting morphed into PC design and composition and so called liberal employers like the Washington Post calculatedly busted their printers and typesetting unions. Now, still working in related fields, i haven't even run into rumors of a union. When this old pooch hears the line "I never got hired by a poor person" the response is "great, the rich can give me their money, I'll hire them and they can lick my shoes". But the unions are guilds now.
HillelA, that's just a correlation, not proof of causality. For those who believe in global warning it parallels the warming of the earth. It parallels the development of television from black and white to HDTV. Could be that the decline of unions *and* income disparity are symptoms of more fundamental changes in the labor market nationally and internationally. Also the unions got lazy and what started out as a labor union movement declined into a protectionist guild movement to jack up the wages of protected classes of labor.
The digital revolution began with the January 1975 edition of Popular Electronics.