http://www.unions.org/home/union/news/?title=The%20%3Cb%3EUnion%20News%3C/b%3E.:%20Managing%20American%20Decline&id=http://theunionnews.blogspot.com/2010/02/managing-american-decline.htmlBy Alec MacGillis
Sunday, February 21, 2010
The anniversary of the $787 billion economic stimulus act came and went last week with unemployment still holding stubbornly close to 10 percent. The Democrats' universal health-care legislation lies in limbo on Capitol Hill. Where in all of this are the unions -- the historic guardians of the Democrats' economic agenda? Sidelined, sort of.
Labor's top legislative priority, the Employee Free Choice Act, is languishing. Craig Becker, the union lawyer nominated by President Obama to a five-year term on the National Labor Relations Board, hasn't made it to his post. This month, he failed to win enough votes to prevent a filibuster on his nomination, and the president declined to make a recess appointment.
Becker's travails drew a brief flurry of attention to the issue of labor law reform. It might be tempting to dismiss this fraught realm with the old joke about academia -- that the politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low. But this would be wrong, as is so much that is said and written across the political spectrum about organized labor.
1. Organized labor is in inexorable decline.
Not exactly. Organized labor isn't so much shrinking as shifting. The proportion of private-sector workers who are union members continues to drop, to 7.2 percent last year from 7.6 percent in 2008. But this decline was offset by the ongoing growth of public-sector unions -- 37.4 percent of public employees are now represented by unions. Today, there are more public employees in unions (7.9 million) than private-sector ones (7.4 million).
Even within the private sector, organized labor's decline isn't irreversible. Much of it is a result of larger economic forces such as the shrinkage of union-dominated manufacturing industries and the expansion of more transient, service and professional jobs where the workers are more difficult to organize.
But there are growing sectors in which unions are making inroads -- low-wage jobs in retail and in health care or elder care, for example. And they would be signing up more workers if the regulatory climate were more favorable. As manufacturing-heavy as the economy was in the early 20th century, it was only when President Franklin Roosevelt pushed through the pro-union reforms of the New Deal that membership surged, tripling from 12 percent of the workforce in 1930 to 36 percent in 1945.
FULL story at link.
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