Posts tagged union density
What role will unions play in the 2024 presidential election? A visual guide
October 28, 2024 // Nearly a quarter of the workforce belonged to a union 40 years ago. Now that number is just over 10%. Though worker stoppages have kept up, labor union rates have steadily declined for decades. From 1983 to 2022, union membership fell by half, from 20.1% to 10.1%. "Union density reached a high of over 30% in the post-World War II decades in the 1950s and 1960s," said Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Labor Center.
Op-Ed: Painting the Targets
September 24, 2024 // I next went looking for data about union density—the percentage of employees in an industry who are union members—in New York and California. For New York City, Hofstra University’s Center for the Study of Labor and Democracy put together this report showing industries that have seen declines in union membership. About half of the industries line up with those listed on the independent-contractor complaint form:
Can Distributed Organizing Unionize Millions?
September 17, 2024 // Together with similarly bottom-up union campaigns like Starbucks Workers United (SBWU) and the reformed UAW’s organizing across Southern automakers, EWOC has demonstrated the viability of a new strategy of seeding unionization efforts, rather than passively waiting for workers to reach out (“hot-shopping”) or exclusively organizing pre-chosen workplaces (“strategic targeting”). Along these lines, Svoboda describes EWOC’s proactive efforts to provide organizing tools to as many workers as possible as “planting seeds of worker power.”
The Accidental Success of the NLRA: How a Law about Unions Achieved Its Goals by Giving Us Fewer Unions
August 30, 2024 // The Wagner Act was passed to promote labor peace. It aimed to keep commerce flowing by promoting collective bargaining, and thus unionism. Taft-Hartley reversed one part of that policy: it helped make unionism, and thus collective bargaining, less common. But by doing so, it finally achieved labor law’s original goal. The labor market today is more peaceful than at any time in the last century. And that peace owes in large part to the relative scarcity of unions. That lesson is worth keeping in mind in contemporary debates. Today, voices on both sides of the aisle laud the benefits of unionism. They speak of unions as vehicles of workplace democracy—a productive way for workers to express their collective discontent. But unions have not always funneled discontent through peaceful channels: when given too much power, they have disrupted the avenues of commerce.
The Growing Distance Between Unions and Union Workers
April 5, 2024 // In theory, a thriving labor movement aims at deploying such coup-style strategies after winning the favor of the workers that spearhead its success. But this is the direct opposite of what’s happening today. Rather than being buoyed by the wave of employees flooding its ranks, the labor movement is instead hemorrhaging members and attempting to forge ahead by pushing against the current of worker sentiment. Unions’ numbers are dwindling. Grassroots tactics are withering. The workers of the world just aren’t uniting the way that unions would like. The solution, for today’s unions, is to invert their playbook, putting corporate and regulatory capture ahead of the will of the worker. Instead of galvanizing worker sentiment to move policy and manage proxies, major unions have taken to exploiting regulations in order to drag employees along from the comfort of the director’s chair. But by winning a seat on the Starbucks board, each of the SOC’s nominees would have had to confront an ugly choice: Make decisions that favor union density at the expense of worker autonomy and shareholder value; or own up to the damage that coercive organizing tactics have done to the corporation’s and employees’ interests. They were smart to withdraw their bid.
Commentary Big Labor’s Decline and Left Turn: Membership Decline
March 23, 2024 //
Commentary: Unions are coming not just for the few, but for everyone
December 6, 2023 // This week brought wonderful news on that front. The United Auto Workers (UAW), fresh off a historic, victorious strike against the Big Three automakers, announced plans to unionize not just one, not two, but more than a dozen of the remaining non-union auto companies in the US. Tesla, Toyota, Honda, Volkswagen – essentially all of them. After the attractive contracts won in the strikes brought a flood of interest from workers across the country, the union has decided to seize the moment. The UAW is aiming to be exactly where a strong union needs to be: everywhere. Is this plan bold? Yes. Will it be difficult? Yes. Are they in for years-long fights against enormous multinational corporations backed by hostile state governments? Yes. But the great insight that the UAW is showing here is this: the fact that facing down an existential threat will be hard doesn’t matter. If the auto workers’ union is not capable of organizing foreign companies’ auto plants in hostile southern states, its power will die; and if it is not capable of organizing workers at rich and growing and staunchly anti-union companies like Tesla, its power will die. So the choices are to do those things, or die. Despite the difficulty of the task, the choice, when presented like that, is very easy.
Here’s why the US labor movement is so popular but union membership is dwindling.
September 6, 2023 // Labor laws in the US make it more difficult for employees to form unions: Around 27 states have passed "Right to Work" laws, making it more difficult for workers to unionize. These laws provide union representation to nonunion members in union workplaces– without requiring the payment of union dues. It also gives workers the option to join a union or opt out. Workplace sectors that were traditionally union strongholds, now make up less of the workforce, such as manufacturing, transportation, and construction.
British Columbia Just Gave Us More Proof: Card Check Helps Union Efforts
April 11, 2023 // Making it easier to join a union through a “card check” model is therefore a central plank in many labor-law reform agendas. It’s a key proposal in the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, as it was in the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) of 2009. This “single step” process allows workers to more easily form unions when a majority have signed cards. Without the additional requirement of a mandatory vote, employers have less time to intimidate workers and squash organizing drives. At one time, card check was common in many Canadian provinces, but right-wing provincial governments had largely put an end to it by the late 1990s.
‘Workers are winning’: Colorado law hailed as important victory for public sector workers
June 13, 2022 // The bill, although a compromise from a previously proposed bill that would have granted the right to strike to about 250,000 public sector workers throughout Colorado, was hailed as one of the most significant expansions of collective bargaining rights for public sector workers in recent years. It goes into effect next year. “All across the nation, workers are fighting tooth and nail to get a seat at the table, and they’re winning. We see it in Starbucks coffee shops. We see it in cultural institutions, and now we’re seeing it in Colorado, where county workers will have the freedom to negotiate to improve their lives and strengthen the public services they provide,” said the AFSCME president, Lee Saunders, in response to the bill’s passage. Brittany Williams, El Paso county, Colorado, Jared Polis, Collective Bargaining for Counties bill, Lee Saunders, AFL-CIO, AFSCME Local 1335,