Union Membership, Despite the Democrats’ Strenuous Efforts, Is Waning

It hardly qualifies as news anymore, but according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, union membership declined between 2024 and 2023, dropping to 9.9 percent from 10 percent of wage and salary employees. Some 32 percent of public employees are union members compared to only 5.9 percent of private-sector laborers, down from 6 percent in 2023.This means 49 percent of all union members work for the government and, even more striking, 32 percent belong to the two national teachers unions. As National Review’s Dominic Pino pointed out, the national press is chock full of hopeful stories about union organizing drives and strikes — he cited 214 in 2024 — but the longtime trend line away from private-sector unions has not turned around despite the considerable efforts of Democratic politicians.This is despite a certain amount of nostalgia in liberal and conservative quarters for the days when union representation of private-sector employees was considered the norm. Union membership as a percentage of employees peaked at 33.5 percent in 1954, when almost no public employees belonged to unions.That’s more than five times the percentage of private-sector union membership today. It’s even more striking because few union members lived in the South, so the union share in the North was up to 40 percent.What accounts for this major change in American life? It starts with how unions were formed. Craft and building unions have roots going back more than a century, when many served the function of medieval guilds — maintaining quality standards and stamping out the competition. They often had a discernible ethnic character, with membership open to sons, brothers, nephews, and cousins of current members.The big jump — a tripling — in union membership came suddenly from 1937 to 1947 after the passage of the New Deal’s Wagner Act. Industrial laborers weren’t the worst-off employees in the 1930s Depression. They feared that “time and motion study” managers would speed up the assembly lines, and, with 20 percent unemployment, they knew they could be easily replaced if they walked out.In early 1937, auto and steel union organizers staged illegal sit-ins in the giant factories that fueled American economic growth from the 1890s to the 1920s. After Democratic governors refused to enforce court orders to clear out, auto and steel executives caved in and accepted the industrial unions as bargaining agents.When the big factories switched to wartime production, industrial labor leaders, such as the young Walter Reuther, cooperated to prevent strikes as laborers churned out astonishing numbers of planes in Henry Ford’s Willow Run plant in Michigan and boats in Henry J. Kaiser’s Richmond shipyards in California.In the postwar years, Reuther negotiated with General Motors’ Charles E. Wilson on the 1950 Treaty of Detroit — a five-year no-strike contract with cost-of-living increases, health care benefits, and defined-benefit pensions.In what has been referred to as “America’s midcentury moment,” it became widely known that the only enlightened way to manage enormous centralized factory operations, vulnerable always to violence, was to cooperate with union leaders. Their increasingly choreographed negotiations dominated national news — I still remember the names of the United Steelworkers and the chief steel management negotiator in the 1959 steel strike sessions — and set the pattern for wage and benefit packages in smaller companies.Alas, as so often happens in human affairs, success bred failure. American auto and steel companies failed to respond effectively to unexpected foreign competition, and 1970s contracts promising early retirement and open-ended pre-Medicare retiree health care insurance pushed Detroit’s Big Three and Big Steel toward bankruptcy.Foreign-based auto companies building new plants avoided Michigan and Ohio counties with elected judges who would not enjoin wildcat strikes and chose sites in states with right-to-work laws banning compulsory union membership. New manufacturing techniques promoting cooperation and laborer autonomy produced better-quality products than the Wagner Act unionism’s adversarial foreman-versus-shop-steward bargaining and thousands of pages of work rules.As inventive employers moved from labor-intensive to increasingly automated manufacturing and as a growing economy moved from manufacturing to services, rapid-growth firms such as Walmart and Amazon depended on thousands of geographically dispersed locations rather than a few enormous factories, while high-tech assembly work migrated to Communist China.Unions were also victims of their own good intentions. Federal and state minimum wage, work safety, and pension legislation made union protections seem unnecessary. Human resource departments, created in response to government regulations and court decisions, handled matters unions used to.There has also been a decline in the quality of union leadership. Reuther and his immediate successors were men of broad outlook and high integrity. In contrast, two recent United Auto Workers presidents were convicted of embezzlement, and the current UAW leader, Shawn Fain, endorsed President Trump’s April 2 tariffs and then expressed embarrassment after automaker Stellantis laid off employees because of them.Similarly, the Washington Examiner’s Salena Zito said National Steelworkers leaders who supported Cleveland-Cliffs’ acquisition of U.S. Steel are finding themselves out of step with local union leaders who favored its acquisition by Nippon Steel, which promised to keep its Monongahela Valley plant open. It’s unclear whether today’s union leaders understand their members’ short-term interests.Or consider the record of the two teachers unions, which today pocket the dues of one-third of American union members. Their major achievement in the past decade was shutting down schools in states and cities controlled by their Democratic allies, not just for six weeks to stop the spread of Covid but for two years or more after it was clear that schoolchildren didn’t contract or transmit the virus at significant rates.The result has been a sharp lowering of test scores, especially among Black and disadvantaged students. It may have been the greatest destruction of learning in U.S. history.In contrast, the greatest improvement in National Assessment of Educational Progress test scores in recent years came in the two non-teacher union-dominated states, Mississippi and Louisiana, which have the nation’s highest Black percentages. Their scores have jumped to the middle rank of states from the bottom and, adjusted for racial composition, now rank highest in the nation, ahead of even high-income suburb-dominated Massachusetts.Democrats inevitably insert provisions encouraging private-sector unionization in their big legislation, including Obamacare and the Biden stimulus. Provisions that “Abundance” authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson pointed out include increased costs and delayed completion of public works. Yet these haven’t pushed the union numbers up. It seems that however well suited labor unions were during the “midcentury moment,” they’re not well suited to our current service-dominated decentralized economy.Creators.com

Union Membership, Despite the Democrats’ Strenuous Efforts, Is Waning

More from the New York Sun

‘Ulster American’ Is a Bawdy Send Up of Progressive Pieties — and an Irreverent Inquiry Into Irishness

Republican Congressman Calls for Tucker Carlson To Be Prosecuted for ‘Treason’ for Pre-War Contact With Iranians

More from the New York Sun

‘Ulster American’ Is a Bawdy Send Up of Progressive Pieties — and an Irreverent Inquiry Into Irishness

Republican Congressman Calls for Tucker Carlson To Be Prosecuted for ‘Treason’ for Pre-War Contact With Iranians

American Socialists To Join New Cuba Aid Flotilla Despite Hints of Negotiations Aimed at Ousting Communist Leadership

Trump’s Pared-Back Tariffs Return to Trade Court Under New Legal Rationale

North Korean Leader’s Daughter, 13, Shows Up at Missile-Firing Exercise Looking All the More Like His Heir Apparent

Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Unfaithful Hollywood Adaptation

Will Hollywood Bite Its Tongue at the Oscars?

Reuters Claims To Have Unmasked Banksy After Extensive Investigation