Who's Sticking to the Union? ANDREW HACKER New York Review, February 18, 1999 (Complete article is at http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/index.html) --From the Ashes of the Old: American Labor and America's Future by Stanley Aronowitz 246 pages, $25.00 (hardcover) published by Houghton Mifflin --Combating the Resurgence of Organized Labor: A Modern Guide to Union Prevention by Alfred T. DeMaria, 544 pages, $125.00 (paperback), published by Communications Training Institute --The Unions and the Democrats: An Enduring Alliance by Taylor E. Dark, 233 pages, $37.50, published by Cornell University Press --Graduate Student Unionization Controversy at Yale University by the Yale University Office of Public Affairs and www.yale.edu/opa/gradschool/gradschool.html The statistics are striking. At the end of 1997, when the most recent complete count was made, 14.1 percent of employed Americans belonged to unions, the lowest proportion since 1936. At the close of World War II, when membership was at its height, 35.3 percent of working men and women carried union cards. Currently, 41.9 percent of union members are in the public sector, up from 25.8 percent twenty years ago. During this period, also, the number of women rose from 22.7 percent to 39.4 percent of total membership rolls. Moreover, 55.7 percent of union members have attended college, almost exactly the ratio for the workforce as a whole. Among the most strongly organized occupations are firefighters (71.6 percent), flight attendants (69.4 percent), and high school teachers (56.1 percent). Only 28.6 percent of coal miners now belong to unions, and only 19.5 percent of truck drivers. The teamsters union, with the son of Jimmy Hoffa as its new president, currently has 1.4 million members, down from 2.3 million when his father was its head. (Nor is there much likelihood that these losses will be reversed, as Hoffa's support comes largely from local satraps who have shown little interest in mounting organizing drives.) During the last two decades, the wage advantage for unionized workers with private jobs has fallen by 44.1 percent, although in the public sector it has moved up 9.5 percent.1 The reasons for the fall in membership have been much discussed. One cause, clearly, has been the decline of manufacturing in America and the transfer of much manufacturing work abroad. Because of labor-saving innovations, moreover, fewer people are needed to make steel or assemble cars. As a result, 16.1 percent of US workers now work in factories, down from 22.8 percent twenty years ago. There are also fewer people on corporate payrolls, which in the past were more likely to sign industrywide contracts. In the latest available count, the 800 largest US firms employed 17.0 percent of the overall workforce, against 25.7 percent twenty years earlier. Many of these companies now have much of their work done abroad or farm it out to relatively small domestic suppliers. Nike does not make a single sneaker in the United States; many publishers are sending typesetting overseas; insurance companies are having paperwork processed abroad. At home, corporate jobs are frequently assigned to temporary workers, who are often classed as "independent contractors," and are not easily reached in union organizing campaigns. Indeed, there are fewer long-term jobs, something union seniority could once guarantee. Last year, among men aged forty to forty-five, only 39.1 percent had worked ten or more years for their current employer, compared with 51.1 percent in 1983. "Back to the Future" could have been an alternate title of Stanley Aronowitz's plea for a revitalized labor movement. The famous labor leaders of the 1930s-Walter Reuther of the auto workers, John L. Lewis of the miners, Harry Bridges of the longshoremen-haunt his pages. (How many of today's union heads can we name?) So do the heady days of sit-down strikes and face-offs with National Guardsmen. Hence, too, Aronowitz's epigraph, from the old anthem: "Solidarity forever, for the union makes us strong!" Reviving the labor movement won't be easy. Only one in seven workers now belongs to unions, and in the private sector it is one in ten. True, the AFL-CIO signed up 400,000 new members in 1997, ranging from hotel workers in Las Vegas and janitors in Denver to nurses in San Diego. Yet during the same year, unions lost 200,000 members, because locals were decertified or (more likely) plants and companies closed or moved away. Given the size of today's workforce, unions would have to find 15 million new members to return to their 1945 high.2 1 Most of these figures and those in the tables accompanying this review are from Barry T. Hirsch and David A. Macpherson, Union Membership and Earnings Data Book (Bureau of National Affairs, 1998)… Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
