> Since you are talking about union member affinity for the Republican party, how about considering the fact that a growing percentage of present day union members are actually government employees. I am willing to bet that they skew significantly more Democratic than the union members working in the private sector, and that explains why the percentage of union members voting Democratic has grown. And what are the implications of that reality for Left theory?
In the USA, agriculture and related industries have the lowest unionization rate - 1.6 percent. Unionisation as such is lowest in North Carolina and South Carolina. According to the Bureau of labor Statistics, nearly 4 in 10 US government workers are union members, compared with less than 1 in 10 workers in private-sector industries. Of the 1.7 million wage and salary workers represented by a union on their main job, while not being union members themselves, about half were employed in government. Ten percent of unionised workers are parttime workers. In 2003, 12.9 percent of wage and salary workers were union members, down from 13.3 percent in 2002. Union membership rates were higher for men (14.3 percent) than for women (11.4 percent). Blacks were more likely to be union members (16.5 percent) than were whites (12.5 percent), Asians (11.4 percent), or Hispanics (10.7 percent). Union membership rates were highest among workers 45 to 54 years old. Full-time workers were more than twice as likely as part-time workers to be union members. Full-time wage and salary workers who are union members have median usual weekly earnings of $760, compared with a median of $599 for wage and salary workers who are not represented by unions. In 2003, workers in the public sector had a union membership rate more than four times that of private-sector employees, 37.2 percent compared with 8.2 percent. The unionization rate for government workers has held steady since 1983. The rate for private industry workers has fallen by about half over the same time period. Within government, local government workers had the highest union membership rate, 42.6 percent. This group includes the heavily unionized occupations of teachers, police officers, and fire fighters. Nearly two-fifths of workers in education, training, and library occupations and in protective service occupations were union members in 2003. Protective service occupations include fire fighters and police officers. Among major private industries, transportation and utilities had the highest union membership rate, at 26.2 percent. Construction (16.0 percent), information industries (13.6 percent), and manufacturing (13.5 percent) also had higher-than-average rates. Among occupational groups, education, training, and library occupations (37.7 percent) and protective service workers (36.1 percent) had the highest unionization rates in 2003. Natural resources, construction, and maintenance workers and production, transportation, and material moving occupations also had higher-than-average union membership rates at 19.2 percent and 18.7 per-cent, respectively. Among the major occupational groups, sales and office occupations had the lowest unionization rate--8.2 percent. The number of union members is highest in California (2.4 million), New York (1.9 million), and Illinois (1.0 million). The states with the highest union membership rates are .New York (24.6 percent), Hawaii (23.8 percent), Alaska (22.3 percent), and Michigan (21.9 percent). Texas had only about one-fourth as many union members as New York, despite having 1.2 million more wage and salary employees. Faced with the imperative of cutting government spending, a Democratic government could run into some tough opposition. On the other hand, unionised government employees could influence Democratic expenditure reducing ideas. Jurriaan
