Labor unions look to rebound as membership declines
Associated Press
On the title track to his 1980 album “The River,” Bruce Springsteen sings about reaching 19 and getting “a union card and a wedding coat.”
Not too many 19-year-olds are getting wedding coats now, as Americans tie the knot at older ages.
And not too many of those 19-year-olds are getting union cards.
It was once a rite of passage for legions of mostly young men. You would finish high school, then report to the automobile assembly line, coal mine, or steel mill, and get the union card that would make you a member of the United Autoworkers, the United Mineworkers, or United Steelworkers. But the decline in manufacturing that started in the 1970s led to a much-dissected decline in union membership that advocates say has inflicted harm on American workers across the board.
But the last few years have also seen some small signs of a revival for organized labor, as employees in lines of work as diverse as college instruction, fast food and nursing have tried – and in some cases succeeded – in unionizing.
Organized labor has some additional reasons to celebrate this Labor Day weekend as they have scored some noteworthy successes over the last year. The United Autoworkers won major concessions from General Motors, Ford and Stellantis last year following a strike, and the Teamsters also won concessions from UPS that averted a strike. During the autoworkers’ strike, President Biden joined them on the picket line, a first for a sitting president.
Still, at the same time, union membership in the United States hit an all-time low last year, a development that 54% of adults say has been bad for the country, according to the Pew Research Center.
“There’s a lot of positivity around unions, but it doesn’t seem to be affecting membership numbers,” according to Marc Sanko, an assistant professor of history at PennWest University who teaches a course on American labor history.
The origins of unions date back to the 1700s as the Industrial Revolution swept across Europe. In the 1950s, while much of the rest of the world was still recovering from World War II and American manufacturing was at its pinnacle, 35% of the American workforce belonged to unions. By the end of the 1970s, more than 20 million Americans were carrying the union cards that Springsteen sang about.
The decades since, however, have seen a precipitous decline in union membership, with just 10% of American workers belonging to one, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Other industrialized nations have seen declines in the ranks of union members, but it has not been as pronounced as it is here. Our neighbor to the north, Canada, has seen union membership fall from about 35% in the 1980s to about 30% today, and in Britain it has tumbled by more than 10% since the 1990s, with 22% of the labor force now in unions.
Among the reasons for organized labor’s downturn in the United States, the decline of manufacturing stands out. As jobs were eliminated or sent overseas, the number of workers in the unions that represented those industries fell correspondingly. Unions also came under heavy political attack in the 1950s during that decade’s Red Scare. By the 1970s, a perception of bloat and corruption surrounded organized labor – to many, unions seemed to be run exclusively by tough-talking, bullying “bosses” like Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamsters leader who went to prison for bribery, jury tampering and other offenses before vanishing in Detroit in 1975 in what many believe was a killing carried out by mobsters.
In this region, the murder of United Mineworkers reformer Jock Yablonksi in his Clarksville home on the last day of 1969 by associates of union president Tony Boyle put a harsh spotlight on union corruption.
This image has carried through popular culture – when Homer Simpson
becomes a union leader in a 1990s episode of “The Simpsons,” for example, he notes that, as a result, he will “make lifelong connections to the world of organized crime.”
One portion of the workforce that has outsized union representation is the public sector. Teachers, police, firefighters, bus drivers and other workers are represented by unions in many parts of the country. All told, 33% of public sector employees are in unions, compared to 6% of the workforce in the private sector. Pennsylvania has one of the highest rates of union membership in the public sector in the country, and while advocates say belonging to a union yields better wage and pension benefits, as well as better working conditions, critics of public sector unions say they drain the wallets of taxpayers because they are not subject to the demands of the marketplace.
Frank Gamrat, executive director of the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy, maintains the public sector unions wield “an inordinate amount of power in our region,” and have held it back economically.
He also points out that when teachers and other school personnel go on strike, “they can shut down an entire school district and cripple a community.”
He advocates Pennsylvania adopt the right-to-work laws that are on the books in other states, particularly in the South. In right-to-work states, employees in the public sector are not required to pay union dues. Opponents say right-to-work laws damage unions by hampering their ability to organize and bargain, and they reduce the amount of money in union coffers.
As to what the future holds for organized labor, Sanko sees it developing on two tracks in the United States, with unionization efforts happening among educated professionals who work in areas such as nursing or as teaching assistants at colleges and universities, and among employees in the service sector.
Sanko also notes that, after the gains they made because of last year’s strike, the United Autoworkers is now targeting Volkswagen and Mitsubishi plants in the union-hostile South for unionization drives.
“That’s the great white whale,” Sanko said. “But it’s going to get a lot of resistance.”