Organized labor lost 10% of its members in the private sector last year, the largest decline in more than 25 years.
I meant to blog this the day I read it but somehow I forgot to; here is one source. I haven't seen it receive much discussion in the econ blogosphere. For one thing, it's a sign that the union wage premium isn't so stable.
Can’t say I am sorry to hear that. Perhaps they will reach the tipping point where membership is so low they will lose political relevance, but that may be wishful thinking. If only public-sector unions would suffer the same fate.
Oh, to live in a pre-union world again.
The only thing that will save unions is if they spend more on lobbying to increase “job protections” for nonunion workers. Or mandates to use union workers. Oh, wait:
http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/index.php
Now that the Supreme Court has lifted the lid on spending won’t we see more spending in political campaigns by unions?
wow, the amount of denial that neoliberal economists live in is impressive
Those were the glory days – weren’t they songar? And we’re already there in the private sector! Thats why the private sector is just rocking right now.
But before we get too far, the private sector unions have been pretty much obliterated already. It isn’t like this 10% loss is going to be a death blow – the private sector unions were already dead in most of the country. Public Sector unions is a different story.
When the U.S. steel industry shed its employees, it was the end of the private sector unions. I would imagine that Northwest Indiana alone has lost 70,000 union members in the last 35 years. I bet many people who live in the U.S. have no friends that belong to a private sector union.
We’ve made an industrial policy decision in this country to let other countries like Japan and China compete with our workers, while letting them deny access to their markets. We should be selling huge amounts of stuff to Japan – but their markets are so tightly controlled that we cannot get int.
It has worked – we’re losing jobs in manufacturing.
How many jobs did the private sector itself lose last year? Maybe 10%?
Doesn’t that explain things then? If employers shrunk by 10% the union membership will too?
This article was in the NYT a few days ago: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/23/business/23labor.html
Basically says what’s being said in the comments, that there are more unionized workers in the public sector than the private. I think this is more due to the UAW and AFL/CIO losing members than the different teachers, police and muni employees joining, but I also think with all the budget woes, that public sector unions won’t be as influential as the private sector ones.
Conservatives typically overplay the power of unions in the economy.
What’s new.
Now that organized labor is as weak as it was in 1930, the economy must be unchained from the burden of labor unions and job creation must be at record levels!
And let’s remember the theft from the people of taxes is the lowest in six decades, down 25% from the tax thieving Clinton depression years. (over 20% of GDP stolen by Clinton down to less than 15% of GDP stolen by taxes, lower than both Bush and Reagan’s tax thievery – remember Reagan increased tax payroll thievery in April 1983 massively by increasing the taxes and entitlements)
“Now that organized labor is as weak as it was in 1930, the economy must be unchained from the burden of labor unions and job creation must be at record levels!”
What an utterly dishonest statement. But your implication is wrong in any case, job creation today is still at a better level than it was when unions started gaining traction in the ’30s. And a decade ago job creation was doing fine and dandy despite the fact that unions were nearly as weak as they are today.
I’m inclined to think if job creation sucks compared to the previous decade, it has little to do with the weakening of the unions.
I think labor unions will make a comeback when management over reaches.
The entire Toyota dominance, for example, is a result of unions and the strategy to side-step them. It’s kind of a big deal.
Well, union membership in Japan, even with its decline, is still higher in Japan; the rates in the US and Japan were about the same in the 70s. And I don’t think you can argue Japan’s economy has improved as union membership has fallen significantly since the late 80s.
And which nations’ employment suffered least and are recovering from this global recession faster?
OECD 2000 data for union membership:
Rank Countries Amount
# 1 Sweden: 82%
= 2 Denmark: 76%
= 2 Finland: 76%
# 4 Norway: 57%
# 5 Belgium: 53%
# 6 Ireland: 45%
# 7 Austria: 37%
# 8 Italy: 35%
# 9 Canada: 30%
# 10 United Kingdom: 29%
# 11 Germany: 26%
= 12 Australia: 25%
= 12 Netherlands: 25%
= 14 Switzerland: 22%
= 14 New Zealand: 22%
= 14 Japan: 22%
# 17 United States: 13%
# 18 France: 9%
Unions per se aren’t the driving force, but they reflect an attitude about what is important in society, people or capital.
By the way, the answer to your question: China.
Unions are good for keeping the spics out. I get tired of all those good for nothin foreigners coming in an stealin our jobs. I hope Obama/Bush/Clinton and the rest of my heroes keep bombing the brown skins.
Unions are good for keeping the spics out. I get tired of all those good for nothin foreigners coming in an stealin our jobs. I hope Obama/Bush/Clinton and the rest of my heroes keep bombing the brown skins.
Yeah!
“But we’ll (meaning people who actually work) be much worse without them.”
Does the existence of unions in America somehow benefit the 87% of us who do not belong to one? If not, why would we be much worse without them? You sound like you support unions. Explain to me why I would want to organize with my fellow Associate Attorneys at my law firm. What benefit would collective bargaining get me, since if my firm started to treat me poorly, I can jump ship to any one of the dozens of firms in my area?
I work in the pension industry and can see union membership declining even further. Pensions are going to be demanding even more contributions from members due to the massive investment losses. Most of the time these contributions go just for funding purposes and not to improve the members’ benefit amounts. Doesn’t take long for a union member to figure out they could be getting a lot more on their own without the union’s cut, even if there are death and disability benefits.
so, what forms of collective action are permissible under a libertarian regime?
They won’t be decreasing in numbers for long if they keep up their new membership recruitment programs:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703478704574612341241120838.html
“What part of “Unions per se aren’t the driving force” argues that unions are the driving force for either growth, unemployment, whatever?”
Implication: unions have had some (but not the dominant force) impact in recovery, just look at this list of countries!
My point is that you haven’t even established a correlation, let alone causation. I have to imagine you were trying to imply some sort of causation, otherwise what was the point of bringing it up.
“My main point is that for decades all I have been hearing is the union bosses have been cause job losses, high unemployment, slow economic growth, preventing growth in wages, driving jobs overseas, and every other economic and social woe.
So, with labor unions now down to levels of the ideal economy of 1932, why are all the woes caused by the union bosses the worst since 1932. I don’t think it has anything to do with unions, other than the ideas that lead to opposition to unions also leads to the poor economic conditions seen in 1932 and today.”
Logic FAIL. Assuming unions really do cause all those problems (maybe, maybe not, I honestly can’t say for certain), that doesn’t mean unions are the exclusive cause of such problems. The fact that today we’re in a recession frankly has little to do with unionization and everything to do with a bubble + terrible bank investments + collapsing NGDP. Trying to tie unionization is dishonest.
For example, I would say the economic conditions in the 90s were quite good for the U.S. Yet union participation was also at record lows then too. And things might suck today, but they’re certainly way better than the 30′s, 40′s, 50′s, 60′s, 70′s, 80′s, and I could make an argument that we’re still better off than the 90′s. And yet all you see is falling union participation. So, once again, you’ve failed at establishing any correlation.
Ever wonder why computer programmers, lawyers and doctors hardly ever pine to unionize?
I know that software people have had various times when union organizing was considered, but then the economy picked up. Microsoft was a place where the movement was particularly strong; rather than a specific union, what did happen was a class action lawsuit against Microsoft which did result in a favorable settlement for labor.
Doctors and lawyers already have their guilds, the guild being the basis of all unions. These guilds are highly involved in the political process, taking great pains to protect their professions from things that would reduce their collective incomes.
Now I ask you, if your kids told you they were planning a future in the high human capital fields which don’t need unions because the pay is based on merit of:
- farm migrate worker
- nursing home aid
- janitor
- fast food worker
- delivery worker
- truck driver
- airport security screener (DeMint is adamant they not be unionized because they are so highly professional and equally highly paid, I’m sure.)
would you say “great choice, you will earn just what you deserve!”
“I know that software people have had various times when union organizing was considered, but then the economy picked up.”
In other words, they rarely ever want to. Again, this is because the “capital” is mostly in the hands of the employee, rather than in the employer.
“Doctors and lawyers already have their guilds, the guild being the basis of all unions.”
wtf. I’m a lawyer, and yes I belong to the California Bar Association. But the CBA never attempts to bargain with law firms on attorney wages and conditions; that would be quite laughable. They might theoretically lobby for policies that keep us lawyers raking in the cash (hah, but they don’t, we have plenty of other groups to do that for us), but that has nothing to do with how the surplus is divided between employer and employee, which is what collective bargaining comes down to. That’s just like saying the UAW is superfluous because the Big 3 can lobby for favors from the government. Except, the purpose of UAW’s existence is for workers to gain some of the surplus of those governmental favors. Otherwise, so you union supporters argue, the Big 3 would simply keep all the profits.
“your kids told you they were planning a future in the high human capital fields”
Uh, none of those fields are high human capital except with the possibility of nurses. I don’t really understand your point.
mulp, I don’t particularly like guilds, but your equivocation of guilds to unions is ridiculous and makes me wonder if you know anything about labor law at all or the whole point of organization. Please, if you’re going to defend union proliferation, at least try to understand what they do.
Unions are always concentrated among unskilled workers. They are the only ones that think job security will accompany above market wages. But they only make the companies noncompetitive.
“We still make tons of stuff. The US is the world’s largest exporter.”
I’m surprised that nobody challenged this. A google search brought up the CIA world factbook ranking of exporters and the US comes in 4th (3rd if you disagree with the EU having its own ranking).
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2078rank.html
d4winds,
Actually the bigger problem is not necessarily value added compensation issues, but work rules and specifically wagner act related incentives. There’s a reason the unions are dying, they are victims of their own policies and US gov’t law.
I work in a union dominated industry (airlines)and its interesting the trade offs that the pilots made between work rules (specifically productivity related ones) and wage cuts (they opted for wage cuts).
I’ve read a lot of very negative stories about the domestic auto unions and job banks, etc, and one the things that happened prior to the GM/Chrysler takeover by the gov’t was some lessening of the work rules in the union contracts. I think this, and Ford’s bet the company cash strategy has helped them survive.
In my own industry, Southwest has the highest paid pilots on average, but they are also some of the most productive and that has allowed Southwest to keep labor union costs relatively low compared to capacity.
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